A community moment in Paris

The banks of the Seine have swollen in the past few days with throngs of people awestruck at the unstoppable rise of the river, snapping thousands of pictures throughout the day and night. It’s a heart-stopping sight and makes time stand still as people pause to take stock of nature’s ferocity.

Talk inevitably circles back to whether or not we will revisit the scenes of 1910 when the Seine rose to 8.62 metres. It is currently over six metres. French president Francois Hollande is expected to declare a state of ‘natural catastrophe’ next week.

That feeling of awe and powerlessness turns out to be a unifying force. In fact, I have glimpsed something this week I haven’t seen in Paris since 1995, when drawn-out transport strikes shut down the city as we know it but energized and revived people’s sense of community and solidarity. For six weeks people had no choice but to walk long distances to and from work every day. After a while you noticed that people at work were getting fitter, and their moods were improving. All those people roller-blading and skateboarding around produced a carnival like atmosphere. My daily walk from Montmartre in the north took me through the streets at dawn, when the city was waking up, when shop-owners were dousing their street fronts with water and bales of newspapers were being delivered as the street lamps faded with the first rays of sun. These were magical, unforgettable encounters with the essence of a city, and they conferred a very real and rare sense of belonging. Time stopped for a few weeks, and I wondered if I would ever experience such a thing again.

The sight of those waters is both humbling and frightening. Tales of individual heroism are starting to appear. A young man dives into the Seine to save another who finds himself chest-deep in the water, speaking no French but signalling that he can’t swim. Disaster unfolding so slowly, so silently before our eyes brings us closer to people in far-flung countries where extreme weather events are becoming the norm. Unlike after the terrroist attacks of last November, where people were too upset and traumatized to come together in public and make sense of their feelings by talking, this time people are sharing stories of the fabled 1910 floods. “There were boats in the rue du Bac,” the woman at the dry-cleaners tells me.

When the UK was beset with floods in 2014, Nassim Nicholas Taleb cautioned against believing that the worst future flood equals the worst past one.

In his book “Antifragile”, he calls this the “Lucretius problem, after the Latin poetic philosopher who wrote that the fool believes that the tallest mountain in the world will equal the tallest one he has observed.”

“We consider the biggest object of any kind that we have seen in our lives or hear about as the largest item that can possibly exist.” Indeed, 8.62 m may turn out to be little more than a way for people to pause and get into community with one another.