Notre Dame

We are certainly in Paris now. Notre Dame, the hotel de Ville and the Íle de Cité provide our destinations this morning. The weather is perfect and Paris is beautiful. I asked our guide about the location of the University of Paris. She told me that the original campus for the University was on the south bank of the Seine River literally a stone’s throw from here. I am getting an impression that I once sensed in New York, specifically, that many of the ideas that formed the world in which I grew up originated in an area of less than one square mile in each of just a few cities: London, Paris, New York, and Vienna. Hegel lived just a short train ride away from them in Nuremberg. Gershwin and Ravel knew each other. Freud met his friends at his neighborhood coffee shop in Vienna. Chopin, George Sand, and Victor Hugo all lived within a couple of blocks of the Place Vendome in Paris. Dickens and George Bernard Shaw lived within a half mile of each other in London. Ideologically speaking, it is a very small world.Read more