PARIS & LOVE
INTRODUCTION
When Patrice Higonnet was invited to teach at the College de France, a venerable Parisian institution whose free lectures are attended by everyone from street people to the haut monde, he decided to do something daring – instruct Parisians about their own city.
“It was a death-defying act,” he says, “to teach the history of Paris in Paris.”
Higonnet, the Robert Walton Goelet Professor of French History, knew that a straightforward, sequential history of the city would not have interested his diverse but sophisticated audience. Such an approach would have been old hat. Instead, Higonnet decided to lecture on the myth of Paris.
Higonnet’s thesis is that between the mid-18th century to the mid-20th, Paris gave birth to a series of myths – fabulous and exalted ideas about itself that were embraced by people all over the world.
These myths changed almost decade by decade: Paris as capital of the modern self gave way to Paris, capital of revolution. Later, as the misery of the lower classes came into public consciousness, Paris emerged as the capital of crime. In rapid succession, it also became the capital of science and the capital of alienation. Finally, there was the myth of Paris as capital of pleasure, the “Gay Paree” of the fin-de-siècle period.
So successful were Higonnet’s lectures that he decided to turn them into a book. It was a formidable undertaking. He estimates that he read about 500 volumes on his subject, a mere sampling of the 10,000 or so that have been written about Paris since 1323 when the first book about the French capital appeared.
“This book wore me out. I’ve never worked so hard, even as an assistant professor at Harvard.”
Besides working in the library, he conducted a considerable amount of research on the broad avenues and narrow alleyways of the city itself. Often in the company of his daughter, he would travel to the end of one of the Metro lines and then walk back, exploring out-of-the-way neighborhoods rarely discussed in the tourist guides.
At nearly 500 pages, with 50 pages of illustrations, the book, “Paris, Capital of the World” (Harvard University Press, 2002), does ample justice to Higonnet’s extensive research. Though filled with obscure facts and quotations from a wide selection of writers including Diderot, Rousseau, Voltaire, Balzac, Baudelaire, Hugo, Zola, Henry James, Walter Benjamin, André Breton, and James Baldwin, the book is highly readable and entertaining, the translation by Arthur Goldhammer preserving much of the wit and playfulness of the French text.
“I wrote it to please,” Higonnet says.
Born in France, Higonnet moved here in the late 1940s when his father, the co-inventor of the photo-typesetting process, was invited to work in the United States. Higonnet attended Harvard, earning a bachelor’s degree in 1958 and a doctorate in 1964. He has been a member of the History Department since 1964.
Examining how the image and reputation of Paris evolved, Higonnet constructs “a history not of factual events but of the way the city has been perceived, conceived, and dreamed.”
He makes a distinction between myths and what he calls phantasmagoria. A true myth, he believes, is inclusive. For example, in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, when Paris was seen as the capital of revolution, radicals around the world looked toward the city as an inspiring example of freedom from aristocratic control.
“Revolution was seen as a path to salvation, and Paris showed you how to do it,” Higonnet says. “Radicalism didn’t die, but it ceased to have this demonstrative quality.”
Phantasmagoria, which has more in common with modern advertising, is a kind of illusion or self-delusion. For Higonnet, 1900 was the moment when Paris began to lose its true mythic character and instead began to self-consciously market its own image.
Today, Paris is still the capital of world nostalgia, its one remaining myth. It is also a kind of touchstone of style and sophistication.
“If you are a cultivated person, you’ve been to Paris,” Higonnet says.
While Paris can no longer claim mythic status, it is still a beautiful and vibrant urban center, Higonnet believes, and may still contain important clues to what it means – in its broadest sense – to be a European.
“A European,” he writes in the book’s last chapter, “is anyone for whom Paris might now or in the future hold a key to some form of self-understanding.”
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2002/09/ah-paris-the-world-capital-of-nostalgia/
RESEARCH 1 (HARVARD: THE SCIENCE BEHIND LUST, ATTRACTION & COMPANIONSHIP)
The Look of Love
Love’s many splendors begin with empathy and attachment
When second grader Jacqueline Olds arrived home from school one afternoon in 1955, she found the atmosphere charged with excitement. Her parents pointed to a headline on the front page of the Montreal Star: “McGill opens vast new research field with brain ‘pleasure area’ discovery.”
Olds, now an HMS associate clinical professor of psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital, had only vague notions back then of what her father, James Olds, then a postdoctoral researcher at McGill University, did during the day, yet she knew it had something to do with the brains of rats.
The elder Olds had just published a paper in the Journal of Comparative and Physiological Psychology describing how the rat brain was suffused with desire when a particular region of it was electronically stimulated. The rat would do whatever it could to relive the cerebral voltage regardless of cost, like a jilted lover seeking intimacy anew, or a gambler circling back to the roulette wheel. James Olds’s discovery of the brain’s “pleasure center” has held up for more than half a century, and no scientific discussion on the phenomenon of human love can avoid it.
Most of us, even those disciplined to interpret the world through the lens of evidence–based science, can’t help but imagine love as a ghost in the machine. St. Paul’s famous meditation on the patience and kindess of love, recited in a seemingly nonstop wedding loop, personifies love as an entity embodying what we crave most in others. Love as a spiritual value has so permeated Western culture that even a science–drenched modern fable like the film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind couldn’t help but bust it out of its neurophysiologic sheathing.
But the scientific evidence is unmistakable: Whatever this thing called love is, we humans need it. Deep attachments to others—and the pleasure–center stimulation those links cause—are as vital to our bodies and minds as food and sleep. Their absence carries catastrophic risk to our health and well–being.
I Feel Your Pain
While many drugs, including antibiotics and certain chemotherapies, gradually lose effectiveness over time, one treatment has manifested a steady rise in potency during the past few decades: the placebo.
Much to the vexation of pharmaceutical companies trying to get antidepressants and pain medications approved for use, clinical trials conducted over the years have revealed the increasing power of the placebo effect. Our efforts to understand that trend throws light on the healing power of doctor/patient connectedness.
Carl Marci ’97, an HMS assistant professor of psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital, began paying attention to the placebo effect in the early 1990s, while still a medical student. During a course on alternative therapies, he was struck by the amount of time these practitioners of homeopathy, Reiki, and acupuncture spent with their patients.
“Data showed that, with the exception of intense psychotherapy, people were spending far more time each year with alternative practitioners than they were with other health care providers,” says Marci. “That got me thinking about the relationship.” He began to suspect that the success of these providers had less to do with their therapeutic approach than it did with the time they invested in their patients. He has since spent most of his professional life studying the doctor/patient relationship, using empathy as his framework.
What is empathy, and why does it matter? The term, coined by a contemporary of Freud, goes back to the German word meaning “feeling into.” The English novelist Ian McEwan once wrote, “Imagining what it is like to be someone other than yourself is at the core of our humanity. It is the essence of compassion, and it is the beginning of morality.”
A slightly more scientific paraphrase might describe empathy as the ability of the brain to accurately mirror the emotions it perceives in another. Marci’s contribution to this field is the discovery that most empathy occurs at an unconscious level, evidence that our brains are hardwired for it.
Several years ago Marci conducted a study in which he sought to quantify empathy. Taking 20 patient/therapist pairs, he and colleagues measured the rate at which skin conducted electrical impulses in these subjects, as determined through their sweat production during sessions.
“Skin sweat marks arousal coming from the brain’s emotion center, and it accurately measures the depth of emotional response,” says Marci. “It can’t indicate what you’re feeling, but it indicates the depth and the curve, the trajectory, of your emotion.”
Marci found that at the moments when the rate of electrical conductivity on the skin of patients and therapists synchronized into matched lines of peaks and gullies, the patients reported feeling most understood. (Interestingly, conductivity was most disjointed precisely at those moments in which the therapists monopolized the conversation.)
Since the mid–1990s, when a group of Italian researchers first proposed the idea of “mirror neurons,” researchers have come to grasp that our brains contain dedicated neuronal networks that reflect the world around us. These networks, which reside primarily in the prefrontal cortex—the corner office of cerebral executive function—imitate motions and emotions in a neurobiological monkey see, monkey do. When you witness someone waving, the very part of your brain that activates arm motion and wrist action lights up, even if you jam your hands into your pockets. And despite your efforts to keep your visage impassive, the neurons that animate faces to form beaming smiles flare the nanosecond you glimpse a Cheshire grin. “Our brains are so wired for empathy,” Marci says, “that there’s zero lag time.”
As far as the placebo effect goes, Marci suggests that one explanation for its steady rise is the increasing complexity of clinical trials. The tighter the regulations, the more interactions patients have with a team of providers. The deeper human interaction that presumably results may help explain the increase in the placebo effect.
Which leads us back to the brain’s pleasure center, or reward center. Empathy triggers dopamine and serotonin, neurochemicals associated with the reward center’s conjoined twin, the brain’s emotion center. If, as the scientific literature indicates, mere laughter stimulates the reward center, how much more stimulating would be the act of immersing yourself in the world of another?
From an evolutionary perspective, this makes perfect sense. “Human babies have the most postnatal neuronal growth of any species,” says Marci. “Without empathy, there is no attachment, and attachment is essential for survival.”
Good Chemistry
What happens when empathy is absent? While Marci’s model is the doctor/patient relationship, Karlen Lyons–Ruth, an HMS associate professor of psychology at Cambridge Health Alliance, studies the physiological effects of human interactions in a relationship far more primordial: the one between mothers and infants.
Within the field of developmental psychology, Lyons–Ruth is a leading expert on attachment, with a particular focus on attachment gone wrong. “In a sense,” she says, “I’m most interested in what happens when love goes awry.”
Empathy and mirroring of the infant’s states by the parent is a powerful regulator of normal development, says Lyons–Ruth. The biomarker she uses to measure the quality of a mother–infant relationship is cortisol. This steroid hormone has a number of functions, such as increasing blood sugar and helping the body metabolize fats and carbohydrates. It is also released in response to stress to help the body mobilize to meet a challenge. Yet too much cortisol can lead to health problems.
Combat soldiers in particular are likely to experience long periods of extreme stress. Such prolonged stress keeps the hormone jacked up, but the human organism’s capacity to tolerate such a powerful chemical is limited, so an emergency system clicks in and dams the hormone’s flow. This check can result in an individual who goes through life with a blunted stress response system and attenuated emotional engagement.
Normal cortisol levels and stress responses are essential for healthy attachment, says Lyons–Ruth. When a mother’s cortisol levels are normal, she acts as an external regulator by being attuned to her baby’s fear and discomfort and acting to relieve these negative states. As a result, the baby experiences minimal stress. But when a mother’s cortisol response is blunted, her ability to act as an attuned external regulator for the infant may fail.
“We still have much work to do to understand this model of attachment,” says Lyons–Ruth. “But our research has shown that mothers whose interactions with their infants are the most disrupted have the lowest cortisol levels.” She and her colleague Bjarne Holmes have also observed that the infants of low–cortisol mothers present with low cortisol levels as well. When low–cortisol infants are stressed, though, their cortisol levels fly off the charts. “These babies lack the ability to modulate their stress responses,” Lyons–Ruth says. Because antisocial children and adults also show blunted cortisol responses, low cortisol levels among mothers with very young infants set off alarm bells about these babies’ future development.
Infants reared in orphanages may be most at risk for blunted stress responses and associated disturbances in their ability to form deep emotional bonds. As Megan Gunnar and her colleagues at the University of Minnesota have shown, many children adopted from orphanages show abnormally low hormone levels similar to those of combat veterans and antisocial adults. But instead of acting antisocial, some of these children exhibit what Lyons–Ruth calls indiscriminate friendliness. They lack the “stranger danger” instinct that is recognized as a healthy component of early development. Indiscriminate behavior often persists throughout childhood, even after adoption into healthy and stable homes.
“The work that Charley Zeanah has done at Tulane is pointing to a possible critical period for the formation of attachment bonds,” says Lyons–Ruth. “Despite good care later, unless responsive care is provided before the end of toddlerhood, blunted cortisol and attachment problems can persist.”
Lonely Hearts Club
Richard Schwartz has the distinction of being both an HMS associate clinical professor of psychiatry at McLean Hospital and the husband of Jacqueline Olds, the psychiatrist whose father discovered the brain’s reward center. Together Schwartz and Olds have carved out a niche as experts in the study not only of love and marriage, but of loneliness as well.
They had already written one book on loneliness when a University of Chicago survey found, in 2004, that 24.7 percent of respondents had not spoken to anyone over the prior six months on issues that were important to them. Most striking was that nearly two decades earlier, only 10 percent of respondents taking the survey had reported this circumstance. This finding spurred Schwartz and Olds to tackle a second book on the subject, The Lonely American. Their thesis is straightforward: The United States is suffering from a loneliness epidemic, and the feeling is leading to physical and mental stress. “To put it simply,” says Schwartz, “loneliness is bad for you.”
And there’s plenty of evidence to support this notion. In 1988, University of Michigan sociologist James House published a seminal review article in Science that detailed a link between loneliness and premature death. Even when circumstances such as accidents were factored out, socially isolated individuals were twice as likely to die within a ten–year period as were non–isolated people.
Maintaining contact with others seems to be hardwired into our biology, such that our bodies become stressed when these connections are threatened. Loneliness, in short, is a form of low–level chronic stress.
“When you’re disconnected, your immune system goes to hell,” Schwartz observes, citing another landmark study, this one published in Genome Biology in 2007 by Steve Cole of the University of California at Los Angeles. In this study, researchers found that chronic loneliness alters the expression of a network of genes associated with inflammation. “If we know that loneliness affects our immune response,” Schwartz says, “it’s not surprising that it would happen at the level of DNA expression.”
As therapists, Schwartz and Olds constantly encounter patients who suffer from chronic loneliness, yet most are hesitant to label it as such. As diagnoses go, depression and anxiety are less embarrassing. But it’s hard to overestimate the psychic pain that loneliness can cause. Think of the nibbling feelings you had as a child (or an adult!) when you suspected you were being purposely left out. Then try to imagine the pain of ostracism or, taken to extremes, the outright torture of solitary confinement.
“Few higher mammals are solitary,” observes Schwartz. “Humans are relatively helpless as individuals in the natural world. Part of what makes us so powerful is that we’ve banded together in small groups. And part of the pain of loneliness is the recognition that without other people we simply can’t survive.”
Nor surprisingly, loneliness and substance abuse often go hand in hand. “Many drugs, particularly stimulants, trigger the dopaminergic reward center,” Olds says. “But we now know that social connectedness and the feeling of being loved also activate that same reward center. If you lack the relationships needed to stimulate that part of your brain, you’ll likely find it in a drug.”
Blanche DuBois’s legendary line in A Streetcar Named Desire, “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers,” is evolutionarily and neurologically true. Empathy and attachment are at the core of human relatedness, and a small section of our prefrontal cortex drives us to find it one way or another. Without it, we’re lost.
“Attachment to others,” says Olds, “is the original reward.”
RESEARCH 2 (SEATTLE: THE POWER OF LOVE ACCORDING TO DANTE)
One of the greatest writers about love, in any language, is the medieval Italian
poet and philosopher Dante Alighieri. You might not associate Dante with love, since in the English-speaking world he’s most famous for the phantasmagoric vision of hell in his Inferno, the first of his three-part Divine Comedy. But love is absolutely fundamental to Dante’s artistic output. Nowhere is this clearer than in his first published work, Vita nuova, which dates to about 1295.
Vita nuova translates to “new life,” and through prose and poems Dante describes his relationship with the love of his life, Beatrice. These two first met in Florence when they were nine years old, and then again when they were 18. The early poems in Vita nuova show Dante as a young man besotted with Beatrice’s beauty, love-sick like a hormonal teenager. As in any pop-culture romance, his infatuation has its ups and downs. He’s devastated when Beatrice refuses to greet him in the street. He even has a dream in which Love appears to him personified, and feeds Dante’s heart to Beatrice.
Strange as that dream may sound, you have to read it (and the whole work) allegorically. This is because Vita nuova is a product of medieval culture; Dante cloaks his meaning in a complex layer of symbolism. That symbolism points to how Dante’s love for Beatrice takes on a much deeper meaning as the years go on. As the work progresses, we see that Dante as an older man has constructed it to show that he’s actually on a journey, looking back on how his love evolved.
We can see the evolution in one of the work’s most famous sonnets — this indeed is one of the most famous poems in the Italian language. Known by its opening line of “Tanto gentile e tanto onesta pare,” you can read it below in a translation by the nineteenth-century English artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti. His translation is a bit old fashioned, but I think it’s prettier than some of the more contemporary free verse versions.
My lady looks so gentle and so pure
When yielding salutation by the way,
That the tongue trembles and has nought to say,
And
the eyes, which fain would see, may not endure.
And still, amid the praise she hears secure,
She walks with humbleness for her array;
Seeming a creature sent from Heaven to stay
On
earth, and show a miracle made sure.
She is so pleasant in the eyes of men
That through the sight the inmost heart doth gain
A
sweetness which needs proof to know it by:
And from between her lips there seems to move
A soothing essence that is full of love,
Saying forever to the spirit, “Sigh!”
Source: Dante Alighieri, Vita nuova, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, translator,
1899. Available at Project Gutenberg.
(…)
When I used to teach Dante in my medieval European history class at Seattle
University, I’d ask students what they thought of this poem. I particularly
wanted to know from the women students, “Would you like it if a man described
you this way?” A lot of them thought it was kind of creepy, or would object to
being put on a pedestal as Dante does to Beatrice. What might make it seem even
creepier is that though Dante wrote all these poems to Beatrice, they never
married. In fact, they barely ever spoke, since (spoiler alert!) the historical
Beatrice died when she was only 24.
So Dante’s love for Beatrice was never requited in any traditional sense; they met only twice in their lives, and he married another woman. But it wasn’t unusual in medieval love lyrics to pine for a lady from afar, and poets typically exalted their beloved with lofty language. Dante’s artistic genius is that he changes both what it means to love from afar, and how the beloved is exalted. Look at how he describes Beatrice in the poem: “seeming a creature sent from Heaven,” “a miracle made sure.” Beatrice is so humble, gentle, and pure, that when people merely look at her, they feel a sweetness that makes them sigh. She’s not just a hottie: she’s a blessing to everyone who encounters her.
My students often thought it was kind of a cop-out that Dante and Beatrice never smooched. To Dante, though, it didn’t matter that his love for Beatrice remained unconsummated. Why? Because merely the act of loving her was enough. Loving someone was its own justification.
How could this be? It connects to how Dante’s understanding of his love for Beatrice evolved. By the end of Vita nuova, Dante has come to understand that his youthful love was superficial. Instead, he realizes that his love for her is his most direct experience of the divine nature of love. Beatrice, after all, was “sent from Heaven,” a gift from god. By loving her — even if it’s from afar — Dante is himself purified, brought to a new spiritual existence, brought closer to god. This is one reason why the work is titled Vita nuova: Dante’s love of Beatrice grants him a new life.
The medieval love poets who preceded Dante typically didn’t make these religious connections to love. And though Dante’s ideas are wrapped up in Christian theology, you don’t have to be a Christian to find them beautiful. His account of love as transcendent and transformative is relevant even if you’re an atheist. He sees love as the highest power in human life. For Dante, Beatrice was the object, the symbol, and the channel for this power, even if they never so much as held hands. In fact, in the final part of the Divine Comedy, Dante writes of Beatrice again. She leads him into heaven, where he has a vision about the centrality of love to all of existence. The very last line (spoiler alert again!) of that monumental poem is: “L’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle” / “Love, that moves the sun and the other stars.”
This is a vision of love as the power that drives the entire universe. No poet has ever expressed it more profoundly, or more beautifully, than Dante.
https://www.guide-collective.com/gc-magazine/power-of-love-according-to-dante
RESEARCH 3 (THE BIBLE: CORINTHIANS 13)
13 If I speak in the tongues[a] of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. 2 If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. 3 If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast,[b] but do not have love, I gain nothing.
4 Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. 5 It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. 6 Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. 7 It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.
8 Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. 9 For we know in part and we prophesy in part, 10 but when completeness comes, what is in part disappears. 11 When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me. 12 For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.
13 And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1%20Corinthians%2013&version=NIV
Summarise the text about „Paris as the Capital of Nostalgia“ (INTRODUCTION).
Report on the world famous sights (PART I-IV) and if you have ever been to Paris also on your personal impressions and experiences. You can add more information with regard to other cultural monuments.
Will you try to answer the question „What is Love“? Can all 3 parts in RESEARCH be of some help?
Why is Paris an outstanding city, also called „The City of Love“ or „The City of Light“?
Can you explain the title of the book of a well known German Journalist Ulrich Wickert „Und Gott schuf Paris“ („And God created Paris“) ?
Among other universities also Harvard proposes Summer Programmes for their students in Paris:
https://summer.harvard.edu/study-abroad/paris-france/#courses
What are the advantages of such an education journey?
Is love a concept, a feeling, an idea, a spiritual value or a combination of all?
The purpose of this project is not to explain what love is about.
It rather intends to trigger a reflection on its cultural affiliation, i.e. its specific nature in the Western world.
And why in connection with Paris?
Because Paris, indeed, is a city with a unique and overwhelming atmosphere and plays in this project the role of a vehicle for more thought on the characteristics of the civilisation we have the privilege to live in.
(* The part concerning Notre Dame does not include the information about the devastating fire in 2019, as it would not contribute to the overall idea of the project focusing on cultural monuments as such and on ever lasting values they represent.)
