Trees and Their Absence
Pont Royal, by Edmond Zeiger, 1921. Collection of the author.
Today the air smelled of linden blossoms and hot pavement.
I went to have a citron pressé down by the river, and saw that two of the big quay trees, poplars that were downed in the recent storms, had been chopped up and stacked, ready for removal. In their place was the bright shock of empty air, a nothing where once a whole moving world had amassed, of shadows and birds and scrambled light. I felt an affinity for that space, where a tree’s branches had swayed for half a century but now were gone. I thought, I am like that air, shimmering with lack.
These gaps exist in so many of our lives now, our atmospheres vibrating with the afterimage of lost particles.
Not long ago, there was an avenue of large chestnut trees in the Luxembourg gardens that I was particularly fond of. I liked to sit at the nearby café and watch children playing under them with their parents. I imagined the children that I myself might have, and how my husband and I might walk with them like that under those very trees, miraculously not bedraggled by parenthood but instead somehow more at ease, our clothes fitting better than they do in real life. When the city cut the trees down a few months later, due to some arboreal virus that had made them unsafe, I tried not to read too much into it.
Last month I accidentally bought a painting at an art auction. I was just there to look, and as research for my next book, but when the auctioneer was about to call sold on a little canvas from the 1920s by the grandson of a close friend of Gustave Courbet, I found myself putting my hand up. It showed the banks of the Seine, a corner of the river near the Pont-Royal, where an old willow tree trails its green fingers in the water and little fish glint and swim against the current in its shade. It was about to go for a very low price, and then in the next moment I had claimed it, and then it was mine.
I think I wanted to be able to imagine the artist there. To live with his painting, and in so doing, to invite the moments of its creation to haunt me a little. To walk through the ghost of it, or feel it like the dancing apparitions seen when you close your eyes against the sun.
It makes me think of the last two minutes of Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise. Even before the two stunt-spaced sequels came along, it was already a film about time and the fleeting nature of a moment. In those near-final shots we see dawn breaking over Vienna, the pale light touching all the places that the lovers have just been. We see the bridge and the boat, their table, the corner of an overlook, pallets stacked in an alley, the cemetery for the nameless, the ferris wheel now standing still, a square with a fountain, the riverbank, and the green grass of the park where they have just spent the night. It is as if the air still remembers them. The moment is swept away (chopped up and stacked, awaiting removal) but something invisible crackles there, and remains.
This makes me think also of Richard McGuire’s groundbreaking graphic novel Here, which is more or less about the history and future of all life on earth as seen from a single vantage point. In Here, all of time is happening at once. In the 20th and 21st centuries, that space is a room. But in the past and future we see that it is something else. Overlapping panels connote a simultaneity. In 1927, a man in a green jacket has lost his wallet. In 1203, a pink sunset falls on a marshland, with no buildings in sight. In 1970, a girl lies down at the edge of a carpet. In 22,175, hummingbirds visit an enormous hibiscus flower, the backdrop turned to water once again. Banality is punctured by gesture, by romance, by violence. Some undefinable constant remains. A woman dressed in pink in 1957 also stands in a forest in 1423. The trees are long gone, and yet they are all around her.
What I liked best about the painting I accidentally bought, which is by Edmond Zeiger de Baugy, is actually what it doesn’t contain. There is the fleeting pink light of some spring evening in 1921, when the artist, now long dead, was 26, and you can see the the Solferino footbridge near the Musée d’Orsay and the blue dome of the Grand Palais visible just beyond it. But there is no old willow tree.
It had not been planted yet.