Chapter 4: The Eiffel Tower

Chapter 3 was boring - there was too much pish-posh pseudo-academic speech in it.

I marvel at Sebald's ability to write beautifully, sentimentally, despite the high theory steeped into every penned word.

xxx
La Tour Eiffel.

Meaning?

The Eiffel Tower.

Meaning?

A tower built by Gustave Eiffel.

Meaning?

Unknown.

The Eiffel Tower is Paris’ everything and nothing, a beacon of light in the darkness that ultimately leads nowhere. She seems Paris’ pretty bauble – a glittering jewel in the night, an iron spire to the heavens by day. She has no other function than to stand tall and straight and cast-iron pretty among the Parisian clouds.


But without the Tower, what is Paris? The Tower marks Paris, watches Paris, caresses Paris. Without her, the city has no soul. The Parisian panorama is not real without her iron skeleton pressed against the sky. Poets, painters, and artists – all have made, are making, and will make works praising her metal sinews. Lovers cling to her rigid bones as the world shifts in romantic tumult beneath their feet. Entire livings are made through the sale of Tower paraphernalia – the gristle-faced men who hawk miniature replicas of the Tower around Montmartre and St. Michel, the dark-eyed women who sell scarves stamped with the Tower’s image in their shops. To some, she is more than an idea. The simulacrum has become more real than reality.

The Tower is sign, signifier, signified – she answers to no one but herself. It is precisely because she has no meaning that she has come to mean so much. Her emptiness has been filled with the invisible weight of history; time immemorial is held in the hollows of her frame, the iron net of her bones. She is a keeper of the past and, from her heavenly vantage point, a seer of the future. Shadows of memory and nostalgia for the future turn her into a symbol for progress and the capacity to change.

The first time I saw the Eiffel Tower, the city was wet and slick and getting over the rain. She emerged from the mists like the Lady of the Lake: ethereal, ephemeral, splendid. Her swan neck cloaked in the cotton of fog, her legs proud and firmly planted in the ground, she was every inch more majestic than I could have imagined. Only by gazing upon her did I finally feel that, yes, I had arrived in Paris. Here was the tower of dreams, the structure captured time and time again in watercolors, cartoons, film.


Climbing the steps of the Tower sent a shiver through the warm animal of my body. I was a small, nondescript creature making my way through the most intimate parts of her frame. The thrill of the voyeur. My hands touched everything, my flesh sharing in the secrets of history and time and air that had passed through her bones. My eyes reveled in the sight from underneath her iron petticoat. She was an exhibitionist in the truest form. Lavishing in her interior, I realized that, for the first time in Paris, I could put my camera away and drink in the sights without a care in the world. My body no longer had to move like a lateral viewfinder; with all eyes on the Tower, the world had left its defenses down.


At the top of the Tower, I looked down at the Grand Palais, the Arc de Triomphe, the Seine.

At the top of the Tower, I breathed deep and free.