Summer 2024 Everybeat Academic Editor's letter

Dear friend,

Last night, we gathered to watch the Opening Ceremony of the Olympics 2024 in Paris. You can imagine the family, three generations, squeezed on the sofa in a Simpsons-like manner. Then, everybody started having their own opinion on the Opening.

Rain in Paris. We found it romantic. We did not know how many actually wet people found it romantic along us. The Olympic teams floating on the Seine River were cheerful and wonderful. So much water! Everybody was soaking wet. Sweden team seemed to be the best prepared—to the rain it is, dressed in the bold yellow raincoats; we rooted for them. The rain lined air in the lights of projectors. Cameras are blurred and unfocused with waterdrops on lenses; everything is glittery and messy, so raw and alive!

Later, we read a critique that cancan dancers on the Seine bank did not high kick their legs synchronically enough. Is it a point of cancan? Depends on your priorities: to critique, to appreciate, to synchronize. Still, all that historical violence and modern genders, all that throwing pages of classical French books in the air—either too irrelevant or too exciting books, perhaps, but enough to motivate you to go and live your own life. Romances sans paroles by Paul Verlaine, On ne badine pas avec l’amour by Alfred de Musset, Passion Simple by Annie Ernaux...

My small daughter got scared of the view of beheaded Marie-Antoinette. Is it because I, her mother, got averted by trivializing a murder rather than it was her own innocent terror? Nevertheless, she was paying attention. Then, why people on the catwalk were walking with such straight faces? If you think about it, it is quite bizarre in general, to catwalk. It is not a dance. It is, well, walking with angry faces, according to a toddler.

Our older generation was curious about countries called Nauru and Palau. Remember, we were all crammed on that uncomfortable blue sofa that turns any entertainment into a restless but engaging experience. Do read the history of these countries. They are countries-islands, but Nauru is one island that looks like a CT scan of the brain on a satellite image, while the Republic of Palau is an archipelago of more than 200 islands, beautiful like Heaven.

Le Monder reported that organizers of the Opening Ceremony tried to “turn the snow globe upside down.” I think it is nice to be able to do such things, you know, provoke liveliness, steer thoughts and feelings, make everybody have lengthy conversations (starting with “I’ve never understood why people like Olympics, but...”), rub this pleasant opinionated spot, unite everybody in engaging arguing, and still—be beautiful and complicated, and bring all the blizzard in the globe to the one glittery singing heart, Hymn to Love. Celine Dion was like a brilliant raindrop herself, one with the city, with the night and with rain, one with the beautiful pain of living.

* * *

Lately, I read a lot about la Belle Epoque. I read the autobiographies of the prominent westerners of the ’60s (I got interested in the 1960s). So, you might think, what does the ’60s have to do with the time of Titanic? You see, they all—those who wrote autobiographies in the ’60s—were nostalgic about their childhood, and so they would write about the world before the catastrophe of World War I. It was their happy time.

La Belle Epoque is a couple of decades before World War I. Think of painters like Paul Gauguin, Henri Matisse, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and writers like Marcel Proust. Café, cabarets, operas, elaborate coiffure with wavy exotic hats adored by a bird of paradise feathers. A lot of feathers and pearls. A lot of hats. Mary horses. Art Nouveau, of course. Somehow, it managed to make technology look glamorous and leafy. It was a time of divided European states ruled by endless royalty, an aristocracy that mingled together, more or less, and knew nothing more but itself. They were exclusively rich and self-confident.

Once you start reading about things like la Belle Epoque, you start noticing its relevance, echo, and influence everywhere around. Eiffel Tower, built for the World’s Fair in 1889, Paris Metro, Moulin Rouge. Poetry of Paul Verlaine, who wrote to Rimbaud (translated by Gertrude Hall):

It weeps in my heart

As it rains on the town.

What is this dull smart

Possessing my heart?

(...)

'Tis sure the worst woe

To know not wherefore

My heart suffers so

Without joy or woe.

If you weren’t sure earlier what is meant by “the beautiful pain of living”—here it is.

For Paul Verlaine, it did not end well. Meanwhile, in British Empire, Oscar Wilde, after two years of imprisonment for being queer, was facing starvation. He wrote to the bookseller Leonard Smithers, “I would sooner have fifty unnatural vices than one unnatural virtue. It is unnatural virtue that makes the world, for those who suffer, such a premature Hell.”

La Belle Epoque had beautiful dressing in and out, but it came to an end terribly. On July 28, 1914, exactly 110 years to the day, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia, and WWI started. Pride, colonialism, mistrust, ambitions, and perhaps hundreds of other factors contributed. It was very brutal and not worth it.

Dear friend, I do not remember talking that much about the Opening Ceremony of the Olympics. It is still a full-bloom summer, and we have a month ahead to catch up on its beautiful wild summer sloppiness and ease of getting out of the house. There is water and heat everywhere, there are watermelons and sunflowers. We can still read one or two books and learn something. Let’s create something beautiful, for example, a beautiful time.

Summer 2024