Rain and la BN

March and April were considerably warmer and more springy than May has been, oddly. Today, it appeared to be a hot day as I trudged off to the Bibliothèque Nationale (which is one of the most magical places in Pareee I think…it’s like an ultra-modern pyramid or castle with its four glass towers, and the secret and velvety lush garden down in the center of the building. (So many people have complained about this building, Adam Gopnik among them, but I am a staunch supporter)). I spent all afternoon in the hushed womb of the library, reading the letters of Abélard and Héloïse until my microfilm arrived. Then I took up said microfilm to the microfilm “loges” on the second floor. Everywhere one goes in this library, there’s always a necessary confrontation with massive stainless steel doors protecting and imposing seamless entry. One has to tug quite hard sometimes just to get the doors open. And when one is also juggling one’s computer, cardboard squares of microfilms and other books, this is not as easy as it would seem. The microfilm loges are well-appointed and worth the circuitous passage to find them. You are perched in these boxes, with wooden slats blocking out the quiet, well-mannered light from the readers and their individual lamps below, with the gentle whirr of microfilm in the background. I felt slightly like I was in the Doges’ Palace and kept thinking I heard the swish of whispers and garments pass by. As I hunched in the darkness over the lit up microfilm screen, I saw the whitish flutter of a moth approach, drawn toward the small patch of light over which I was filtering black and white pages of a high-brow literary journal from 1948. He must have been swept in from the garden jungle indoors and now he was condemned to wander the immense halls of the BN’s rez-du-jardin, searching out private points of light.

By early evening, the hot day had stacked into a tremendous thunderstorm that seemed to dump water down onto the carpet of ferns from a long way off from my viewpoint, where I remained tucked under layers of earth and glass and stainless steel in the library. To wait out the storm, I had a coffee from the bibli's vending machine. Yet when I got home, the window of the garret had blown open and there was water everywhere. May has been odd like this, with huge gusts of wind and storms coming out of nowhere. To document the earlier traces of spring, here are some pictures from le Jardin des plantes, which is just down the Seine from the BN, including an amazing Cedar tree, planted in the 19th century, with a root brought from a cedar tree in Lebanon.