Arts & Manners

The Taj Mahal by moonlight is one of the stalest cliches in tourism. Yet certain sights do, or should, impose special visiting hours. Assuredly, you should time your first view of the Grand Canyon for sunrise, when the shadows make a sudden, league-long leap, then slowly shorten, like a broad jumper in reverse. Go to the Colosseum on a summer noon, when the heat and glare will help repeople it with the roaring, bloodthirsty mob of its heydays. The Tower of London demands an evening of “death-dumb, autumn dripping gloom,” when spectres of heedless queens and headless heroes, and little princes long, long dead, swirl from the fog and melt into it again. Most exigent of all is the Arc de Triomphe, which has not only its finest season, day and hour, but a finest moment. To grasp it, you must station yourself by the obelisk in the Place de la Concorde, just before sunset on a fifth of May, and look westward. Presently the declining sun will perfectly fill the Arch, in a tribute—no less impressive for being fortuitous—to the demigod who commissioned it and who died on May 5, 1821.

Apropos of death and Paris, the pilgrimage I repeat most often there is to Père Lachaise cemetery. It is one of my favorite haunts (if you will forgive the word). I find its attractions as various as its tenants and as endless as their sleep. I have wandered miles of its quiet allees, at all seasons and all times of day; and I have come to believe that the best combination is a sunny morning in April. The spring rains will have washed the sooty stones; the resident pigeons will be flaunting their livelier iris; and the trees will be freshly green, especially the weeping willow that Alfred de Musset begged for in his poem “Lucie”:

JB

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J. Bryan III

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The Taj Mahal by moonlight is one of the stalest cliches in tourism. Yet certain sights do, or should, impose special visiting hours. Assuredly, you should time your first view of the Grand Canyon for sunrise, when the shadows make a sudden, league-long leap, then slowly shorten, like a broad jumper in reverse. Go to the Colosseum on a summer noon, when the heat and glare will help repeople it with the roaring, bloodthirsty mob of its heydays. The Tower of London demands an evening of “death-dumb, autumn dripping gloom,” when spectres of heedless queens and headless heroes, and little princes long, long dead, swirl from the fog and melt into it again. Most exigent of all is the Arc de Triomphe, which has not only its finest season, day and hour, but a finest moment. To grasp it, you must station yourself by the obelisk in the Place de la Concorde, just before sunset on a fifth of May, and look westward. Presently the declining sun will perfectly fill the Arch, in a tribute—no less impressive for being fortuitous—to the demigod who commissioned it and who died on May 5, 1821.

Apropos of death and Paris, the pilgrimage I repeat most often there is to Père Lachaise cemetery. It is one of my favorite haunts (if you will forgive the word). I find its attractions as various as its tenants and as endless as their sleep. I have wandered miles of its quiet allees, at all seasons and all times of day; and I have come to believe that the best combination is a sunny morning in April. The spring rains will have washed the sooty stones; the resident pigeons will be flaunting their livelier iris; and the trees will be freshly green, especially the weeping willow that Alfred de Musset begged for in his poem “Lucie”: