Que des instants

I'm back on my home turf, getting ready to go back to my home home turf.

After Verona, my Dad and I took an incredible train ride through the Swiss Alps to Paris, spent a couple days there, and then returned to Montpellier for the final days of his visit. I think it was my fifth time in Paris, and I enjoyed showing my Dad around the city. One thing that we did there that I'd never done before was to hear the organ at St. Eustache. We actually weren't even trying to go to St. Eustache, but I got turned around and as we were looking at the map to get our bearings, we heard the organ start up inside the cathedral. I feel like most people associate church organ-playing with boredom. If those people heard the organ at St. Eustache, they would poop their pants. The prelude to the service was one of the most stirring, captivating, and frightening things I've ever heard. A thunderous noise that I cannot even imagine contained within two staves. We saw some great things in Paris -- the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, even Les Champs Elysées covered with, as we later found out, 800,000 people -- but none was as memorable as that minute and a half of transcendent music.

My father returned safely to the US on Wednesday, and now I'm really down to it. This morning I had the femme de ménage (cleaning lady) check out my room to make sure it was sufficiently clean. We ended up talking politics for a little while, which was essentially the first conversation we've had all semester. It's funny how transitions are never as tidy as we imagine them. Whereas I'd maybe expect to have a nice gradual decrescendo as I left Montpellier, saying my goodbyes and finding closure with the many people I've met here this semester, it still seems to me that I'm continuing to make connections and build relationships. Last night some people went to Le Massai, the African restaurant, again, and for the first time since January I hung out with a couple acquaintances I met very early on. That's not proper departure etiquette; it would probably make more sense to simply avoid meeting people or builing new relationships in the very last paragraphs of a chapter. Generally speaking it's bad form for an author to introduce a new character at the end of a story. Yet people have a tendency to act as if life were no book, or perhaps a book with no conclusion. We don't typically meet someone with the end of that relationship in mind. Rather, we build relationships as if there will be no end at all. You might call that an illusion, but I'd call it our aptitude for, our sense of something eternal. I titled this post "Que des instants" -- "Only Moments" remaining -- and it's true that there is only a matter of moments remaining for me in Montpellier. Heck, there is only a matter of moments remaining for our time on Earth. Yet -- illusion or affinity -- we live them presently, eternally. I'm returning to the US on Monday knowing that I lived Montpellier presently. It's a good feeling.