The fall seems phony, unmerited, prolonged to herald a deeper and more frightful winter maybe. As the European project trembles around us, and as the continent’s seams squeak with the tension of its debt and excesses and staleness, we sit here in the decks of cafés attending to a summery close of day drinking bière blanche and minding where to dine tonight.
The world has died already so many times. The Europeans felt it after each catastrophic twentieth-century war or famine or the crumbling of civilization as Rome was breached. Still they persist in building the stone cities with their lace-like decoration, bridges decorated with ornate lamps, and elegant streets the recall the quiet will to remember their mastery of that was worth mastering.
And Europe shall abide. But not before the croaking, gasping, puking out the remains of its overindulgent feast. They lived well, … but who will pay the debt, and who will pay for the greying continent, and the livelihood of so many people “spoiled” by the decency of a welfare state or supra-state that was willed to being by five hundred years of protest, dialogue, war, and compromise. Has the fruit of progress become rotten, somehow corrupted by the very fact that the project itself was unsustainable, like life?
I have always admired the political will to keep define Europe and to instantiate it. But with Greece on the cusp of default, with its cohesion strained, with its innovation stunted by regulations, with a complacent populace and a culture of entitlement, is will enough to tie the show together in the end.
In the end, it’s a blip. In the end, spring creeps up and offers her hand. But until then, I brace myself. I toss my scarf over my shoulder and look out over the deepening purple over the Seine river and enjoy what I can of this prolonged, unreal autumn in suspension.
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