At the moment, I'm finishing up a fantastic Tim O'Brien book called Going After Cacciato. It begins in Vietnam, and ends in Paris, France.

There's nothing I will remember better than my time spent in that French city. Studying in a house on the Left Bank with an interior architect named Erik, who's grandfather helped develop camouflage in World War I, I was surrounded by language and culture. I was encapsulated in a different world.

There's a building on the north eastern edge of the 15th arrondissement called Tour Montparnasse. The locals joke to the tourists that it's the box that the Eiffel Tower came in. In reality, it's an eye sore. The office building comes jutting out of the beautiful baroque architecture like the monolith in Kubrick's Space Odyssey. It has a mall extremely close by filled with stuff nobody needs but everybody wants. There are guards with guns patrolling the perimeter. I have to be honest, the whole four and a half months I studied there, I disliked the thing as much as the Parisians do...

Jusqu'à ce que je suis allé au sommet avec mes amis.

It was raining as the elevator rose. The clouds broke when we reached the top. Peering out of the windows, tons of rainbows sprouted out of the ground only to fall back down miles later. One ended right below us in the Cimetière du Montparnasse Then we found the steps guiding us to the platform atop this massive black vertical light switch of iron and glass.

Wind howled and rain still trickled from the heavy gray clouds above us. The sun showed itself in bits. Lightning even struck the poll behind us, but there was the city, flat like a record. It was astonishing to experience, as there is no where else in the city that offers such a view of itself. It may be voted the second ugliest skyscraper in the world, but I had the chance to catch this photo of the 7th arrondissement...



Jack

photo by: Jack