New York — A good friend, who had been sick but was in remission, dies suddenly. It strikes close to home. He’s my age, and spent a lifetime teaching American Studies in California as I did in New York. I can’t get his death out of my head. But somehow it begins to merge with the terror attacks in Paris that occurred at the same time.
Paris may be a city I know only as a tourist/voyeur and through the countless films I have viewed with delight over the years. I may not have the same visceral feeling and passion for Paris that I do for London, but its murderous violation disturbs me deeply. For me Paris means writers like Camus, Sartre, and Gide that I grew up reading, and New Wave directors like Truffaut, Rohmer, Varda and Godard, whose films I taught repeatedly over the years. It’s also Montparnasse’s cafes, bistros, patisseries, and boulangeries that we dipped into on our brief visits — that always exhilarated us with their urbanity.
These names and images keep on returning to me as I watch hours of CNN and MSNBC news coverage detailing the horror that struck on a tragic Friday night when people — many of them young — were out taking pleasure in the night city’s public space and life. I have a bad feeling that Paris’ joy, spontaneity and ease will have trouble being preserved in the near future.
A day or two later I stop at the Washington Square Arch, to look at the wall of flowers and bouquets placed underneath. There were also posters, letters, drawings that convey the solidarity between the two cities. One read “Je suit humain” (I am human).” The arch itself was lit in the colors of the French flag for two nights.
It’s inevitable that other acts of violence and carnage will follow the Paris terror attack, and fear will intensify in Western cities. So, feelings of anxiety are understandable, and clearly must be taken into account when governments mount a response to terror. But fear alone should never be the basis of policy. It leads to the kind of hysteria that reflexively advocates sending U.S. troops to fight, or creating draconian refugee policies, which turn the country into an insulated fortress rather than a refuge. Obama clearly erred on the side of wishful thinking about ISIS, but I still prefer his restraint and reflectiveness to bellicose bombast.
But I don’t spend every waking moment thinking despairing thoughts. One can’t emotionally survive in that state. So one radiant day, on my way to pick up my wife, I walk across Central Park near the Reservoir. I stop and watch the gulls skittering across the cobalt blue water, and see the gleaming grand towers on Central Park West, like the Beresford and the Eldorado, looming over the trees. I feel this is what a great city is all about– if only the world and my own psyche would allow me to spend most of my time rejoicing in these experiences.
