In Search of Lost Joy on the Sunny Streets of Paris
Capturing a city’s collective effervescence during the Olympics
I’ve got a confession to make.
Now that the Paris Olympics are over, I regret not showing interest in them sooner.
Until I discovered a sense of excitement on the streets of central Paris, I had been labouring under the delusion that the games were going to be a disaster. Months of cynicism from the mouths of others had persuaded me that the Olympics weren’t going to take place in Paris, but in Pandemonium.
Yet, as things turned out, I will probably never see the City of Light in such a beautiful light again.
The joy I saw all around me made me realise that I hadn’t seen it for a while. During the pandemic, I remember reading an essay in The New York Times about the “collective effervescence” of a Dave Chappelle concert in Madison Square Garden. The author of the piece talked about how that particular form of bliss, which was first described by the French sociologist Émile Durkheim, had been missing during the era of social distancing.
As its name suggests, collective effervescence is the feeling of unity and excitement that a community experiences when they simultaneously share a common purpose. It’s pretty much what the…
