There is a wonderful Henri Cartier Bresson photograph of a gentleman looking at some graffiti in Paris in 1968. On a wall is written, “Jouissez sans entraves” – pleasure without limits.
Why should I think of that now in these days of darkness and indescribable carnage? Perhaps because like so many I watched what happened in Paris this weekend and moved from fear to anger, to grief, to incomprehension and then finally only to this instinct: the smallness of resistance is to take pleasure in what we do and how we live. These attacks were an attack on joy: on young people in bars, in restaurants, watching football or a rock band. To see the people on the streets talking with such bravery and to see Paris look so incredibly beautiful at the edge of its grief is quite something.
There will be summits and deals by our leaders but I see social media seems to have sorted much foreign policy by shouting solutions into its own moral vacuum. There has also been a strange grief Olympics. If you care about Paris then you cannot possibly care about Beirut or Iraq or Syria. Some felt the bizarre duty to correct other people’s feelings of shock instead of seeing a simple human reaction to the death of someone we recognise who could be us, all of us, any of us, doing things we do being mown down for their pleasures not their politics or religion.
That is why it feels so close to home and that is why my own family gathered the next day to be together and eat cake. Do I think Islamic State can be defeated by cake alone? No. But I do think that living well is a form of resistance and Paris of all places best epitomises this.
These people who would kill us because of how we live are smaller than us in the end. Cowards ensuring their own quick ends. There will always be small men with big guns. But they cannot kill the one thing they fear most: joy. When they say that they love death more than we love life, they do not understand love or life.
Joie de vivre may seem an inappropriate phrase right now, but like the candles on the streets of Paris, its flames flicker still. When they go out we will light them again and again for we will not live in darkness. Tiny illuminations maybe. But they shine through the tears.
