One day in the early ’90s, my father came home with a used, champagne-toned Mercedes-Benz 300D four-door sedan. I was 9 or 10 and didn’t know anything about cars. But I was drawn to the luster of the diesel-powered slab of metal, the way the perforated leather smelled as it enveloped me, and how the wood grain on the dashboard and door panels made me feel as if I was involved in something far grander than merely commuting.
In his Surrealist Manifesto of 1924, André Breton wrote, “The marvelous is always beautiful, anything marvelous is beautiful, in fact only the marvelous is beautiful.” That line came to mind when I stood before Mother Nature, a giant canvas depicting a killer whale lifting a naked man into the air, eye level with a flock of gulls. The image was a highlight of “The Bathers,” Chase Hall’s standout debut at the David Kordansky Gallery in Chelsea this fall.
Last September in Paris, I attended a screening of the Netflix feature Athena, about an apocalyptic insurrection following the videotaped killing of a teenager of North African descent by a group of men dressed as police. The unrest begins within an isolated French hyperghetto and blooms into a nationwide civil war, a dismal progression that no longer seems entirely far-fetched.
It took me a moment to register the sound of scattered hissing at the Tocqueville Conversations—a two-day “taboo-free discussion” among public intellectuals about the crisis of Western democracies. More than 100 of us had gathered in a large tent set up beneath the window of Alexis de Tocqueville’s study, on the grounds of the 16th-century Château de Tocqueville, in coastal Normandy. I couldn’t remember hearing an audience react like this in such a forum.
My first true Christmas in France, 12 years ago, almost didn’t happen. The day before flying to meet my fiancée in Paris, I’d gone to a Walgreens near my parents’ house in central New Jersey to get a flu shot. Though I trust the science, and had been assured this was impossible, within 24 hours of getting jabbed I was convulsing on my mother’s couch with one of the severest fevers and respiratory infections I had ever experienced.
On October 14, the mutilated body of a blond-haired 12-year-old named Lola was found folded up in a plastic suitcase in the courtyard of her family’s housing project in Paris’s 19th arrondissement. The official cause of Lola’s death was asphyxiation, but investigators also found signs of torture, including cuts on her neck and face, and the numbers 1 and 0 scrawled, inexplicably, on the soles of her feet. She may have been sexually abused.
In a rematch of the 2017 election, France will decide tomorrow between the erstwhile centrist disrupter Emmanuel Macron and the far-right fixture Marine Le Pen. Although this contest once seemed inevitable, the emergence last fall of the wild-card extreme-right media personage Éric Zemmour—whose campaign outflanked Le Pen’s and threatened to cannibalize it—meant that Le Pen had to struggle just to remain this cycle’s challenger.