Paris, France remembered

It will be nearly a year soon that I visited Paris for the first time. I had a dream this morning that was very strange. For some reason I was in Paris and we were planning to go to the Eiffel Tower. This dream is just that a dream as it was with my mother. It went from strange to stranger still, as eventually we ended up in some building looking through windows down onto some inner garden way. In the process I had my computer stolen, some other things taken, and as I was very concerned about all my data, how I would get it all replaced, wanted all these things returned to me, I woke up, thinking this is a dream, your computer is here, nothing is lost, and came back to reality.

The reality is that if I never get another chance at least I made the most of this one time I had the chance and went to see the place that I had been studying for some ten years or so and finally put to rest all my questions about whether my memories were valid or not. I had known before I went that they would have to be,but there is nothing like seeing it in a vision, and seeing it in person for real after 300 years have passed.

One thing I can never overemphasize is that when one has had the experiences that I have had, one believes totally and completely in the same way that one believes that one can sit at a computer, write this down, and someone somewhere in the world can read it with ease if one has a computer and the link to this site.

In truth, seeing pictues on television sets is as unlikely to believe as seeing visions of the past in memory sessions when one is in a state of sleep. Both work. How? Frankly, I could not explain either. They just do.

At first, when I saw the Eiffel Tower I did see it the way people who first saw it, as ugly and monstrous. It does grow on one. But at first, it is not beautiful at all. It is almost grotesquely ugly. It is a true ugly duckling if ever there is one. It is oddly shaped. It is made out of girders that are unattractive, but gradually, as one sees it day after day it begins to somehow or other become almost attractive until finally when seen after dark all lit up, it becomes even a beautiful sight to behold.

I ended up liking it a lot. It is huge. It is gangly. It is awkward. It is anything but pretty. But its constancy does make you find it appealing. And there are moments when it is beautiful.