Into this world, have the 12 dollar coffee which is probably 13 what with the Euro and the exchange rate, make it a $2013 café au lait including the ticket, the hotel, the taxi to the plane, but who’s counting? And have it at the Louvre, sipped under the arcades of the Richelieu wing of the old fortress and Sun King palace only lately a museum, sip it at the charming café run by the Costes, Café Marly, on the side of the ancient edifice overstuffed with one of the world’s great art collections – a collection so large that it’s painful to enter, to be assaulted and forced to choose, a collection like a mugging and what you’ve lost is your self-respect, you surrender willingly, ashamed, it’s too much, all this beauty and pity, the history and the story of the history, I can’t win.
Which is why I recommend staying above ground at the Louvre—unless you have three days and a really good guide, in which case, by all means—by which I mean I recommend skipping the old Mona Lisa and having an au lait here where you can watch the crowds and think about the glass pyramid like an iceberg rising, implying, and argue 15 years later about whether it was a good decision or not, this strange modern glass pyramid plopped in the center of old masters. (What is old? What is mastered?) Though if it’s any good it cannot be mastered and definitely that’s why we keep coming back, which is another topic altogether. (Latest argument, just yesterday over tea, that there should have been just the one large pyramid, not the four other little guys scattered around. Fine.) Have the au lait, see them to and fro, know the art beneath you, the iceberg of it, in wait, unknowable, and around and, hell, have another au lait, another rectangle of frosty white sugar and breathing deep, deeply inhaling the air, the world, the hurry of it, the reasons they’re desperate. And then if you must, if you really must descend the escalator and buy and ticket and wamble your way to the da Vinci passed by dozens of da-Vinci-bound others, Americans especially asking directions to the da Vinci, and to a few other greatest hits, then getting to the da Vinci and accidentally delighting in the Virgin of the Rocks where the crowds are not so dense, at least you will be well fortified and no, you won’t regret it.
Either way you’re good.
ab chaos iter: you get educated by traveling 