Paris, 2001

There is a large window in the back of the classroom at Fénelon Sainte-Marie which frames the top of a tree and a fourth floor limestone apartment. If you approach it closely, you will see a cathedral further down the road and the cars quickly scattering beyond it; open it during late summer, and you will feel the entering heat and all the aromas and distractions that drifted endlessly through the city and into our classroom.

It was in late summer during 2001 that I first looked through the large window. One hundred years prior, I was told, the school had taught the daughters of the Catholic aristocracy, and while this has changed, it still bore the beautiful and faded marks of its extravagance, and had large, elaborate mirrors on the walls of each room, though they were speckled with age. The building contained within its walls the essential fabric of human past. If you focused carefully, I always thought, you could hear their voices and footsteps; young faces and smiles still ghosted through the halls.

Later that afternoon, I had returned to apartment and heard the sound of a television. I approached to see who was home—

Pause.

There I saw Catherine, my host mother, standing upright and overwhelmed, embracing M, her daughter, and P-A, her son, as three thousand lives were ended.

Here is a snapshot of time. There was the fourth story window; there were the girls at Fénelon; now, there are these three individuals with their arms around each other.

There is an infinity of these images that constitutes every moment of our lives; they abound massively--wherever you look, life is happening, it is fleeting, overlooked. Each of us exists in a much greater context, serving a far more momentous purpose: in a way, I was bound to Catherine, I was bound to those whose fatal ends I witnessed. In a sense, I was bound to those girls from a century prior, in a world constantly awash of life and death, with little separation between the two. I had never seen things this way before.

September twelfth was sunny, as the previous day had been. When the bell rang, I got up from my desk and turned towards the window and saw a girl standing alone at the small balcony, staring down at the crowd below. I called out to her in broken French, asking her name. She turned to me and, in English, answered with a puzzled look on her face, saying that her name was Kate, that she was an American, and wasn’t I was well?

Kate and I descended to the sidewalk; at the corner of rue Monceau and rue du Général-Foy, there was roadwork continuing, and a new, pristine asphalt street trailed behind the large machines. Kate frowned when she saw that pavement that had replaced the cobblestones, perhaps the same stones those girls once walked on. These stones, snapshots of time and memories, were buried deep beneath the new road.

Whatever depth we imagine in our greatest treasures, it is only a shadow, an echo: its true beauty is lost and invariably missed.