This year’s IFPEN visit took place a bit earlier than usual, in late April rather than June – because the IFP School was considerate and scheduled my four days of lectures to coincide with our Spring break at HNC. I taught both the ENM (French) and PEM (international) academic groups this year – and spent a lot of time revising lecture modules in preparation, given the new directions in emissions trading & carbon pricing after last Fall’s Paris COP.

My visit to Paris every year is always special, given the wonderful cultural opportunities on offer…. & this year’s targets were both new & old. New to me was a visit to the Musée D’Art Moderne, to see Raoul Dufy’s La Fée Électricité (‘The Spirit of Electricity’), a very colorful work that at 600 m2 is one the largest paintings in the world. Originally prepared for the 1937 International Exhibition on the Champs-de-Mars (& sponsored by the Compagnie Parisienne de Distribution d’Electricité), it curves around the museum gallery, addressing electricity’s complete history…. including portraits of 110 great scientists & inventors who made significant contributions. With large crackling electricity bolts zapping the center of the painting & linking a power plant with the Greek god Zeus, it’s a big, bright & bold artistic tribute to a technological wonder – & exactly my kind of art!

Raoul Dufy’s La Fée Électricité

The older outing was a re-visit to an area of the city I had first explored in the late 1980s, on one of my first teaching engagements at IFP. Montparnasse is best known as a central location of French intellectual life in the period between the two world wars….. although according to the writer John Baxter, it was formerly a waste and rubble-strewn spoil heap sarcastically labelled ‘Mont Parnasse’ by Latin Quarter seminarian students (after the Greek mountain that was home to the Muses — & thus to poetry, music & learning). Baron Haussmann leveled the waste pile in 1860, but the name stuck. Baxter is an Australian who has lived in Paris for a couple of decades, and he has written a number of interesting & chatty books about the city; I followed the Montparnasse walking tour in his paean to its 1920s version, The Golden Moments of Paris.

The real reason I was wandering around Montparnasse, however, was that I had just finished reading Sarah Bakewell’s new book, At the Existential Café: Freedom, Being and Apricot Cocktails, a truly delightful romp through the lives & thinking of Sartre, Beauvoir, Camus, Husserl, Heidegger, and many, many others. Her new book is an excellent follow-up to her equally fine How to Live: A Life of Montaigne, and she points out that existentialists – whatever you might think of their philosophy — think really big thoughts, and are philosophers about life itself & how we should live it:

Their philosophies remain of interest, not because they are right or wrong, but because they concern life, and because they take on the two biggest human questions: what are we? and what should we do?

I had last explored the streets & cafes of Montparnasse with my U. Penn dissertation advisor, co-author and mentor Stephen Feldman, back in those early days at IFP. We had enjoyed a seafood luncheon feast with our spouses at ‘Le Dome’ on Boulevard Montparnasse – the same café that in pre-existentialist days had had Lenin, Trotsky, Henry Miller, Man Ray & Samuel Beckett as regulars. All those late-1980s memories are even more poignant now, because Stephen was already quite ill…. & he would pass away very shortly after that, at the incredibly young age of 43.

On this trip, I visited the local cemetery site where both Sartre & Beauvoir are buried…. and reflected upon my own very good fortune. I can’t pretend deep philosophical introspection, but we all contemplate those very same questions — & I know that I’ve been given both time and the ability to appreciate this wonderful gift we call life.