Office Bound

I took a taxi to work today. I love the ride and rarely read en route because it's so beautiful, regardless of the weather. The city enriches even my blackest moods. I took these pictures out of the taxi window. I always admire the equestrian statue of George Washington.


I love the French flag, so classic, so basic. It wasn't the first tricolor flag, but it's my favorite. The apartment building, like most of Paris, is typical of the style decreed in the 1860s by the urban planner Georges-Eugène Haussmann. It's thanks to him that Paris has the uniform Beaux Arts look that it does today.


The route to the office runs along the river, past long rows of trees whose tops are pruned into neat boxes. Through the trees on the far side of the river you can see the Palais Bourbon, where the National Assembly sits. Napoleon put the neoclassical facade on the building to echo that of the church, La Madeleine, down Rue Royale on the other side of the Place de la Concorde.


Place de la Concorde always awes me. The obelisk came from the Amon temple in Luxor, Egypt. We passed the temple when we were there. Odd to think of the obelisk here enduring the weather so far from the hot land in which it was carved more than 3,000 years ago. The obelisk sits on the site where the guillotine stood during the French Revolution and is where Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, among many others, lost their heads.

This is one of the two fountains that flank the obelisk. They are magnificent when they are on, but sometimes they are splashing, sometimes they are dry. I've never figured out whether there's any logic to it.

This, at last, is the view from my desk, looking across Rue Scribe to the storied Grand Hotel. When people come to see me, I meet them in the hotel bar because my office is too messy. Two drinks and little dishes of olives, almonds and Japanese rice crackers cost 13 euros. The bartender knows me now.

This is my desk. The framed pictures on the wall were drawn by True (the rainbow) and Sky (the Earth, with an arrow pointing to China). Behind me is a flyer from the Vlaams Belang, Belgium's far-right Flemish political party, showing the steeple of Antwerp's cathedral next to a towering minaret. The flyer is there as a curiosity, not as a political statement.

I do a lot of sitting here and waste an enormous amount of time. I sometimes think it's a wonder that I manage to make a living at all.