Going Through Old Notebooks Part 13: Trees and Their Absence

I felt an affinity for that space, where a tree’s branches had swayed for over half a century, if not longer, and now did not

Pont Royal, by Edmond Henri Zeiger de Baugy, 1921. Collection of the author.

Dear Reader, this was adapted from a notebook entry written in the summer of 2021. I know that where many of you are, in the U.S., it is Thanksgiving week, autumn, and while of course it is a time of abundance and celebration and gratitude, many of us also notice the empty chairs, remember who once sat with us and now cannot, or the ones we thought would arrive but then did not. So, I suppose this one is for you, for them, and for all the trees not yet planted.

---

The air smelled of linden blossoms and hot pavement, so I went to have a citron pressé down by the river. While sitting there, I 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 a 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 over half a century, if not longer, and now did not. These gaps exist in so many of our lives, our atmospheres vibrating with the aftershock of lost particles.

I am like that air, I thought, shimmering with lack.

The spring had faded into summer, and yet I had missed most of it. My mind was elsewhere. I had seen the cherry blossoms coming into bloom in a cemetery, a beautiful, old, French cemetery, which was also where I saw the tulips, and the daffodils, and the tender violets coming up. This was because of the Terrible Thing that had happened, but which I don’t want to speak about now. Then for weeks afterwards I was driven indoors by the assault of the copulating trees, which rained an ungodly amount of pollen down, battering the streets and the sidewalks and the parks, a veritable orgy of pollen, in a city of arboreal Casanovas, coming in through the windows, collecting in our hair and on our clothes as we took our daily walks along the river so as not to go mad.

First there was the golden pollen of the lindens and the chestnuts, and then the acid green rain of the honey locusts, followed by the maniacal fluff of the poplars that caught like wool between the cobblestones and gathered into white cotton drifts along the quays, quivering in the crisp spring breeze

Not long ago, there was an avenue of large chestnut trees in the Luxembourg gardens that I was particularly fond of. I would sit at the nearby café and watch the children playing there under the trees with their parents. I imagined the child that I would soon have, and then the other children that would follow, and how my husband and I would walk with them like that under those very trees, not bedraggled by parenthood somehow, but miraculously more at ease instead, our clothes more stylish and well-fitting than they were in real life, a little Parisian fantasy.

When the city cut that avenue of old chestnuts down a few months later, due to some tree virus that had made them unsafe, I tried not to read too much into it.

Then in June, I accidentally bought a painting at an art auction. I was just there to look, part of the research for the book I was writing, but when the auctioneer was about to call sold on a little canvas from the 1920s for not very much, I found myself putting my hand up. It showed the banks of the Seine, and a corner of the river near the Pont-Royal, where an old willow tree now sits, trailing its green fingers in the water. At the time, I was walking by that spot nearly every day. Sitting there myself, if the water was quiet enough, I could see little fish glinting and swimming against the current in its shade.

The painting was by someone called Edmond Henri Zeiger de Baugy, the grandson of a close friend of the painter Gustave Courbet. A tenuous connection to greatness, surely, but it intrigued me. In the next moment the gavel fell, and the painting of the quay near the Pont-Royal was mine.

I think I bought it because 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 into my life. I’m not sure why, but it made me think of the last two minutes of Richard Linklater’s film Before Sunrise. Even before the two 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, and 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 remembered them. Their moment, their magical night, has already been swept away, chopped up and stacked, awaiting removal, as the city moves on, but something invisible still crackles there, some shimmer of lack that remains.

It makes me think also of Richard McGuire’s graphic novel Here, which is more or less about the history and future of all life on earth as seen from the vantage point of a single place. 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, while 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, while 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, yet 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 there somehow, in ghost form, all around her.

What I liked best about the painting I accidentally bought, by Edmond Henri Zeiger de Baugy, who died in 1994 at the age of ninety-nine, is actually what it didn’t contain. There is the fleeting pink light of some lost spring evening from 1921, when the artist was twenty-six years old. You can see the footbridge near the Musée d’Orsay in the distance, and the blue dome of the Grand Palais just beyond, but there is no old weeping willow tree, my familiar tree, under which I liked to sit. It had not been planted yet.

It was a reminder, I think, that we never know what the future holds, what storms may come and take beloved trees down, or the new trees that will be planted one day, but are not planted yet, but which may come to define our whole little world—a new universe of swaying branches and scrambled light, of shadows and leaves and singing birds, as though the tree had always stood there; as though it always would.

---