''O'' *BEAUTIFUL* PARIS''

PARIS is a good place to mourn. It takes itself very seriously in a way that is sometimes tedious when you are young and full of of the future, but is perfect when-

You are entering middle age and walking down cobblestone streets and missing someone you loved very much, particularly if that someone lived there.

Paris is tonally at its most appropriate when you realize that somehow that someone, who was so intricately woven into the city - someone who, for you was Paris - is no longer there and yet the city remains itself.

The city somehow survives. But Paris absorbs your sadness, as it has absorbed hundreds of years of sadness.

Paris understands that you aren't in the mood to laugh.

The museums will provide you will with innumerable paintings of a headless John the Baptist, one from every angle, as if they are crime scene photos, and paintings of Jesus killed in many more ways than are in our historical record-

More ways than actually exist to kill a man in genera   -and still other paintings depicting war and combat and babies being eaten.

Babies! Being eaten!

The sheer scale of the paintings convey their seriousness; their intensity is their importance. The amount of space they're allowed to take up is what you need to know about Paris's priorities. Paris understands that the only cure for for your sadness is blood.

In every corner of Paris I was reminded ; the city is old; it stays the same. Perhaps will try to tell you how different it is, how it has evolved : The food scene is different; the construction is killing that neighborhood; the tourists are getting more obnoxious.

But, for me, those changes barely register. Paris is essentially the same : That's the whole point of it.

Paris reassures you that you are in a cycle of life that will end, and that everyone before you has felt just as important and and just as crucial to the cycle, and yet, they ended, too.

Paris is a good place to remind yourself  that everything ends. Paris assures you that you are mortal, here for a blink of time, that the world will barely register your existence before you are gone.

This is the existential dread of Paris, and this is also the way Paris sets you free.

The Honor and Serving of the latest Global Operational Research on Life and Great cities of the World continues to Part 2. !WOW! thanks author and researcher Taffy Brodesser Akner.