Whenever you go on a trip, whether the voyage constitutes a vacation or even work, you experience a certain suspension of time. You leave your normal everyday routine and find yourself unmoored from time, even if your family, friends, or co-workers accompany you on your journey. It’s a feeling that makes you forget what day it is. It’s a feeling that detethers you from your routine consumption of media (news, sports, television shows, etc.). It’s a feeling that both liberates you but also disorients you because you see people all around you seemingly living their lives while you feel as if you’re standing still, watching them pass you by on their way to their daily obligations. I’ve had this feeling a lot during my travels, but on my current excursion I have felt it more acutely than I have in the past.

For the next few months, I will be in France on a fellowship, an ocean away from family, friends, and co-workers. As I sit and write this, it is the start of my fourth day in Paris. I flew out of Atlanta on a Saturday, arrived in Paris on Sunday morning, and have only, so far, slept three nights in swelting heat as a heat wave envelops Europe. Taken alongside the jetlag, the heat has caused me to question time my place within it. Amidst the constant sweat, I feel removed from reality, somewhere in a liminal space between actual existence and a waking dream.

Since I arrived in Paris Sunday morning, following an overnight flight, I knew that I had to stay up as long as possible to help ward off the effects of jetlag on my body. I couldn’t check into my accommodations, so I dropped my bags off and walked, walked, and walked, covering over 17,000 steps on the first day alone. I picked up some of items that I needed, such as my metro pass, but I really just wandered around the neighborhood, traversing one street after the other, continually getting lost and having to open my phone to get my bearings when I couldn’t spy landmarks such as Notre Dame that would take me back in the direction from whence I came.

Along with just aimlessly traipsing through the streets, I went to the Museé d’Orsay because I knew that I wanted to get an annual pass to the museum so I could visit it whenever I had a free chance to walk through the galleries. (In four days, I have already visited the museum twice.) I first went to Museé d’Orsay back in 2019 on a whirlwind, three-day trip to Paris, and I stood amazed at the space, a converted train station, and the collection, spanning from the later part of the 1800s to the early 1900s, focusing on the movement towards impressionism and following through to post-impression. The Museé d’Orsay contains works by Van Gogh, Monet, Manet, Gauguin, Cézanne, and many, many more. While these pieces inspired me, I found myself drawn to the numerous sculptures within the main hall.

Upon my first visit, I stood before Jean-Léon Gérôme and Aimé Morot’s Gérôme exécutant Les Gladiateurs. Monument à Gérôme, piece that Gérôme started with the two gladiators, modeled after the gladiators in Gérôme’s own Pollice Verso. Later, Le service d’acaht aux artistes vivants commissioned Morot to create a sculpture of Gérôme. He did so by adding Gérôme to the sculpture of the gladiators, thus turning the piece into a work depicting the artist in the act of creation. My first trip to Paris back in 2019 made me look at the intricacies and detail of scuplture more than I had previously. I visited the Rodin museum and became enthralled by the detail of his work, then I visited the Orsay and stood amazed at pieces such as Gérôme and Morot’s work.

While I marvelled at the detail of the piece, what stood out to the most was its placement in the hall. From a specific angle, I could capture the clock at the far end of the hall in between the two gladiators’ suspending it between the conquerer and the conquered. On my first visit, I took this picture at about 10:30 in the morning (as you can see above). On my most recent visit, I returned to Gérôme and the gladiators and I took a similar picture, seeing the clock situated between the two figures as Gérôme shapes and molds them. I took almost the exact same photograph, a little over seven years after the inital photo, and the fiugures had not changed. The time moved forward, even on the clock, as I took this photo at 3:55 in the afternoon, but the gladiators remained the same. Life passing them by every day as they stay fixed in position, one conquering the other.

Seeing the sculpture from this angle, I envision the fallen gladiator not pleading with the crowd and emperor for his life but with time. I see his open mouth struggling to form words to let him out of this eternal submission, to allow him to move forward. Alas, though, he remains stuck. He exists among the living, who pass by him day in and day out, but he feels distanced from them, stuck in that liminial space between existence and a waking dream. He sees others move around him, but he cannot move. This is how I’ve felt like the past few days, getting acclimated to my new residence. I feel stuck. It’s not necessarily vacation time; it’s something different. I’m not sure how long it will last, but I know it will linger for some time until I get settled into a routine.

Perhaps part of this feeling has arisen from the fact that while I slept well my first night I found it difficult to sleep the next two nights, partly due to the heat, but also partly due to my internal clock adjusting to the time change. On the second night, with my windows open to hopefully cool down my room, I heard what sounded like a concert on a street close to my apartment. I listened to the music, attempting to drift off, but I couldn’t release the day. I kept thinking the concert would end and the crowd would disperse, but I was wrong. Then, I thought about the World Cup and looked up when France played its next match. Lo and behold, it was halftime, with France up 1–0 against Iraq, so the sounds I heard, the music and the chants, turned out to be a World Cup watch party. I had been watching the World Cup before I left for France, but merely two days in France I had forgotten about it, partly because I did not have access to any media about the World Cup. That experience made me feel like the gladiators and Gérôme, standing for eternity in the same position, looking in the same direction, as people pass them by.

What are some of your thoughts? As usual, let me know in the comments below. Make sure to follow me on Bluesky @silaslapham.bsky.social‬.