Love is a waterfall

The 19^th district of Paris, where I’m currently living, is a bustling, chaotic, low-rent part of the city. Once a proletarian neighbourhood where newly-arrived country folk rented rooms while trying to find work as porters, dressmakers, or maids, it’s now a magnet for immigrants from Africa, the Middle East and as far away as China. The streets are grubby, the accommodation cramped and basic, there’s graffiti on the walls and garbage blowing in the wind; it’s a world away from the ultra-affluent quartiers around the Eiffel Tower and the Champs-Elysées which most tourists associate with “the city of light”.

Even so, it’s difficult for us today to imagine the squalor and misery of Eastern Paris 150 years ago: the barefoot children running and sleeping in the streets, whole families sharing one dingy room, lives framed and enclosed by a few dark, dirty and dangerous streets – unable to imagine or afford any form of recreation much beyond stupefying themselves with rotgut booze.

Much of Paris, even right in the centre, was similar when Georges-Eugène Haussmann was commissioned by Napoleon III to reconceive and reconstruct Paris as a modern city worthy of its glorious name. An important part of Haussmann’s plan was to provide the working classes with access to fresh air and the beauty of nature – hence the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont.

Built on the site of an abandoned quarry, the Parc is an extraordinary achievement of artificial landscaping, full of steep hills, mountain-like trails, hills and promontories, the highest of which is surmounted by a pagoda. There’s a large lake, where carp and tench swim and where herons and cormorants come to fish – and, most exotic of all, a 100-foot-high artificial waterfall, where clean, clear water flows over black rocks and into the lake. It’s as popular today as it must have been in the days of Baron Haussmann; small children chase each other up and down the hills, lovers embrace each other on shady benches, purposeful joggers plod around the tracks, and groups of friends spread picnic cloths on the grass and pass Sunday afternoons laughing and chatting over wine, cheese and pâté.

The Parc des Buttes-Chaumont is immaculately maintained by the city council, the flower-beds regularly weeded, the collections of exotic trees and shrubs carefully labelled and nurtured, and the tracks and paths swept twice a day – and, a nice 21st-century touch, free wi-fi is available throughout the park for people who want to bring their novels in progress or their Facebook accounts into its green shade.

What stupendous acts of love such places are, and the glories of the world’s great cities. Not built as the private property of a king, an emperor or a nobleman, nor to enrich some greedy great corporation, but simply to enable the people, starved of green and of contact with the countryside to breathe clean air and to rise their eyes to the beauty and simplicity of nature – and their maintenance today is an ongoing act of love which we all too easily take for granted. It often seems today that whatever’s free is somehow diminished in value thereby; shopping malls mean a lot more to a lot of people than municipal parks, while the natural world is fragmented and atomized into suburban gardens and country clubs.

Yet in parks we city-dwellers not only touch the eternal splendour of the natural world without effort or travel, but we also do so at no cost, and together. They remind us of what we share, as citizens, as people, and as living creatures upon the Earth – living lessons in history, civics, and ecology.

Sub specie aeternatis (through the eyes of Eternity)

In a world where finance and economics override all other forms of intellectual activity, and where speculation is what people do on Wall Street, the name of Greece is linked in most people’s minds with words like “debt” and “crisis”. As for “austerity”, that today refers not to a restrained and dignified philosophy, but to brutal cuts in public expenditure aimed at appeasing the same bankers whose lending caused the debt crisis in the first place.

Personally, when I hear Greece mentioned, I like to think of Monemvasia, as it was when I discovered it by accident, over 30 years ago. Hitch-hiking and bussing around Greece with a girl-friend, we were dropped from a beat-up old Peugeot into the small and nondescript modern town on the mainland, from where a narrow causeway leads to a jumble of 3- to 400-year-old stone houses clinging to the side of a huge flat-topped rock. Some are piled on top of each other, some half-ruined and others half-restored, some painted in primary colors and others left in an “austere” gray which is still dazzling in that almost-white Peloponnesian sun. It’s a chaos of shape and form which seems to grow out of the ancient rock and is infinitely soothing to the eye and the soul – unlike, say, the jumble of industrial buildings, apartment blocks, warehouses and freeways that surrounds modern cities.
And then, as we wandered around those narrow streets, picking ripe figs to eat, we came across a path leading up to the top of the rock and to a third and even earlier incarnation of Monemvasia. This was the Byzantine castle, abandoned in the Middle Ages and with little left standing but this ruined church (where the devout from the town below still came to pray and to leave offerings of a few hard-earned drachmas), looking out over endless vistas of clear blue sea and uninhabited rocky coastline, seemingly perched on the edge of the world’s end.

Even at that young age, I was deeply moved by Monemvasia and its message of eternity – the seemingly vast gap between the Byzantium of 1000 years ago and the late 20th century compressed to a 20-minute hike, and all around the stillness of rocks, sea and sky; the changing and the unchanging set in the starkest possible contrast against each other. And there was an additional poignancy for me, traveling with a girl I was madly in love with but whom I feared (rightly) that I would lose once we got back to England – to see so clearly laid out before me that disjunction of people’s fleeting passions and ambitions with what little remains behind when they’ve gone.

Somehow, young as I was, Monemvasia helped me to see that the transitory nature of our hopes and desires doesn’t diminish their value, in fact that’s what gives them their value – but that, like stone walls, they quickly crumble and fade away, leaving only the rocks and the sea and the wind whistling through the empty sky. And the time it takes for this to happen, whether it’s a few years, a few hundred years or even a few thousand years, is a mere blink of the eye of eternity.

Greece, maybe more than any other country, allows us to glimpse the world through those eyes that aren’t ours, but which we can borrow for a moment to acquire some much-needed distance from the tiny concerns which tie us down from day to day. Lifting our eyes to the skies, we remember for a moment who we really are and where we really come from.

A low-information diet?

There are lots of good reasons for paying as little attention as possible to news and news media. Tim Ferriss, in his “Four Hour Working Week”, recommends a “low information diet”, not only to avoid time-wasting distractions but as a way of asserting the primacy of your own agenda and world-view. Many writers on self-help and personal development put forward a similar argument – that we should focus our attention on our own goals and the changes we can make around us.

The stories in the media are doubly disempowering, this argument runs: firstly they redirect our concern and attention to distant tragedies which we can do nothing about, and secondly they control the discourse by determining what we should be thinking and talking about, and what we shouldn’t. (For instance: Louisiana oil spill and European debt crisis yes, ongoing tragedies in Darfur and Congo, no.) And from there it’s only a small step towards sharing in the conventional wisdom on the topics in view: Obama isn’t doing enough to stop the oil; European countries need to become more competitive and to enhance economic growth. Then you can waste huge amounts of time in internet forums clashing with people who don’t share the same “wisdom” as you – as if either your opinions or theirs made any difference, or challenged the power of governments or corporations in any way whatsoever.

Most creative artists and other highly productive people spend little or no time surfing the media – they’re too full of their own goals and agendas to give headspace to anything else. Shouldn’t we all be emulating them, becoming more effective and productive in the process, and cut these intellectual and spiritual parasites out of our lives?

Largely speaking, yes we should – but there’s a fault in the argument that these tragedies have nothing to do with us, or that we can’t do anything about them. Of course, we can’t directly stop the oil spill (even if we’re the CEO of BP, apparently), but it’s a direct consequence of our oil-focused economies and our general failure to act as caring and responsible stewards of the planet which we go on casually wounding.

Perhaps it’s a duty to feel above all – to feel our connectedness with all humanity and all life, and then to act accordingly. Not in internet forums or saloon-bar discussions, but out there in the world, in our own world, wherever we can make a difference.

A low-information diet yes, but not a no-information diet. To be aware of what’s happening, and then to find our own original and authentic response to it – that’s the way to use the media, and not to be used by them.