My Turn: My Paris, your Paris, will prevail

I first went to Paris as a college junior living in a pension not far from the Luxembourg Gardens in what was once Hemingway’s neighborhood -- or as the French say, arondissement. Twice a week our tennis shoes squeaked on the floors as we took art history classes at the Louvre.

We bought cheap art books in the Latin Quarter, went to the five-franc cinema near the Eiffel Tower and sat in the student section at the Opera in seats so high you could also most touch the Marc Chagall painting on the ceiling.

Memories of the city where I came of age at age 20 flood back in the aftermath of the Paris evil. Such a contrast to the monuments, movies and museums that moved me with powerful lessons — just like staring for hours did at Monet’s giant water lilies murals. You get lost in his hues.

In 1975, it was the people who touched me most: The women who cooked our meals, including my first taste of horse, the maid who spoke no English cleaning our flat nine flights of stairs up where the pigeons lived, and the wonderful ladies at the patisserie who fed my college stomach with the most amazing chocolate eclairs.

Vacation photos: The Paris I remember

My parents sent me there to learn French. It didn’t work. I went with the BYU Study Abroad program whose female students did learn the language well, and I relied on them. My careful teachers and TAs taught me my first lessons about culture shock.

That did stick in ways the French verbs never could. I learned lessons then of tolerance and differences that began to color my soul even as I became hypnotized in the deep-blue stained glass at Notre Dame and later, after a half-day train ride to something even more spiritually powerful at the Chartre Cathedral.

Now I learn this is where one of the terrorists had lived (and plotted?) his evil in the shadow of this giant church – a symbol of true peace.

How could a killer come from this cathedral city where craftsmen took a lifetime to carve in stone above doorways their beliefs and shape glass that radiated lessons through the centuries? Yes, I know there is a stark difference between France’s historical religion and new immigrants hell-bent on their own fierce interpretation of Islam. But what an odd town for someone to commit to murder.

I join the world in global shock from the Nov. 13 attack in Paris. Charlie Hebdo was a tragic news story — now, this was a personal story. This was my Paris where evil crouched the streets and disrupted a cafe conversation between lovers or gunfire caught the eyes and ears of friends laughing with friends while head-banging to American metal music.

Those strangers dead, injured, hurting are my friends, too, although I never knew any personally.

Scores killed in Paris attacks:

Parisians are such kind people, so friendly and full of life, speaking words of wonder in accents so enviable. A sharp contrast to American author Ernest Hemingway’s sparse observational sentences and gravelly voice. What would the old man who knew much of war reporting and post traumatic stress (his wounds from Italy during WW I) say now of Paris?

He described his “lost generation” of friends from F. Scott Fitzgerald, Picasso and Gertrude Stein, and I discovered them again with my generation in the mid '70s only to share them with my ASU students on seven trips to Paris for the Cronkite School in the first decade of this century.

Now, we have a new lost generation of radicalized Islamic youth, and who will teach them? Where are the writers, the poets, the painters to help them heal from anger, angst and distrust of the establishment that doesn’t result in blood pools on pavement?

Love heals hurt, and our city — our global gathering place for those of like-minded hearts — will find a way to heal. It must. It will. And in the healing it will also find a way to connect and communicate across the cultural shock of Islam and the West. How will they be taught lessons of tolerance and peace so embedded in the pages of their Holy Quran? Who will teach them?

My most powerful lesson in this city — and the memories are as varied as the hues of the paintings on apartment walls , museum halls and Seine river stalls - is a Van Morrison concert at the Olympia music venue over a decade ago.

It could have been the Bataclan or a place just like that where tourists confronted terrorism. Yet on that magic night in June 2004 sitting next to my wife and daughter on one side and a wonderful French man — a stranger but new friend who shared my love of healing blues and soul — the music by the Irish rock band Van Morrison hung across the barricades.

The truthful observations Hemingway penned about Paris, the songs Van sang that night about enlightenment and the words we all sing as fans of the musical "Les Miserables" give us hope as high as the flag little Gavroche might hoist.

In the musical when the smoke clears there is left in the aftermath of the child’s death on the barricade the flag — liberty — the freedom! No Delacroix is alive to paint the historic French revolution of global unity that is now taking place.

Instead, we all pick up our social-media brushes and share on Facebook and Instagram while monuments in China, Australia and America light up in a unity of color.

There is a lesson in that. Around the world those amazing French colors — the blue, the white and the red –– visually testify to the people of Paris that my Paris, your Paris (not their Paris) will prevail!

B. William Silcock is the director of Cronkite Global Initiatives and an associate professor at the  Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication.