Relay: For No Reason
“All of the sadness of the city came suddenly with the first cold rains of winter.”
So wrote Hemingway in “A Moveable Feast,” the writer’s recollections of life in 1920s Paris among fellow expatriates and the “Lost Generation” that survived the First World War.
Upended, lately, by assorted turmoil including the insomnia that has afflicted me on and off since college, I awoke, disoriented, in the evening, a few Fridays ago, to the news from Paris.
Had it really come to this? Young adults slaughtered at, of all places, a rock ’n’ roll concert, that boisterous, communal expression of youthful exuberance, of freedom? It had.
I thought of lazy, early summer days in that city, 13 lucky years ago and midway on a long journey home from India. Fresh from the choking filth and chaos of Delhi, I wandered near-empty streets in the predawn silence, was languorous in the sunny afternoon at the Jardin du Luxembourg, and in the evening savored pints of beer on the cobblestone streets at Montmartre.
Seven years on and just after another Indian excursion random impressions endure of a few days in Lyon and then Paris, five or six of us on a boozy, blissful junket. On the last night, a few of us seeking out and staying late at a subterranean jazz club. In the morning, a lone exploration through narrow, winding streets to a photographic exhibit of the Rolling Stones’ 1971 exile to Cap Ferrat in Nice. In the taxi line outside the Gare de Lyon, an elderly woman stood, patient and radiant in a classically chic blue dress. And everywhere flowers and shady terraces and conversation and wine.
I thought of a night and a day in Mumbai, two years after another nihilistic band of nobodies, on the eve of another Thanksgiving in America, had gunned down random human beings in the hours before their own violent demise. To the slayer comes a slayer.
How hideously apt, and aptly hideous, that the philistines assaulted laissez-faire concertgoers — and many others — in the city of both light and art. Fitting, too, that the clash of present and primitive took place where the United Nations Conference on Climate Change would, barely two weeks later, set a course for the future.
On Monday, according to The Times, President Obama said that the conference represented “an important turning point in world history,” and that he believed, “in the words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., that there is such a thing as being too late.”
While at least 170 countries have announced a plan for future fossil-fuel emissions, The Times reported, India’s leader, Narendra Modi, said that his country plans to double its use of coal by 2019 and triple its 2005 carbon emissions by 2030. (On Monday, the U.S. embassy in New Delhi recorded air pollution levels “well into ‘hazardous’ territory,” Reuters reported.)
Syria’s civil war, which has drawn and further radicalized French and other European nationals, may have been sparked, in part, by climate change, according to a report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The “worst drought in the instrumental record,” the report stated, caused “widespread crop failure and a mass migration of farming families to urban centers.” The water shortage, said National Geographic, drove up food prices, sickened children, and forced 1.5 million into Syria’s crowded cities, “just as that country was exploding with immigrants from the Iraq war.”
A movable feast or a future of famine? Free expression or mass extinction?
“You expected to be sad in the fall,” Hemingway wrote. “Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the trees and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintry light. But you knew there would always be the spring, as you knew the river would flow again after it was frozen.”
But, he added, “When the cold rains kept on and killed the spring, it was as though a young person had died for no reason.”
“This isn’t political,” Josh Homme, a co-founder of Eagles of Death Metal, the ironically named band that was performing when the slayers came to Paris, told Vice magazine. “We’re going to recruit people to be part of life, to be citizens of the earth,” Mr. Homme, who was not with the band that night, said of their future plans. “We have a chance to come together.”
Christopher Walsh is a reporter for The Star.