A Twinkle in Time

On July 14, 2001, the Eiffel Tower shuttered its millennium illuminations, a show of visual magnificence that triggered 20,000 bulbs each evening in a dazzling display. From sundown until an hour or two after midnight, depending on the season, residents and visitors would lift their gaze to one of the world's most iconic landmarks, swathed in a twinkling hourly homage to the City of Light. The filaments would heat up and wink; enraptured eyes would refuse to blink for 10 minutes of ocular splendor.

This tribute to the turn of the century wasn't designed to last forever. The tower's electrical system was decrepit and unequipped to handle a long-term energy overload, and so city officials turned off the twinkles barely 18 months after they had begun. The date for the shutdown was purposeful and symbolic: July 14, Bastille Day.

But it turns out you can't keep a good twinkle down, and the flicker-fest was resurrected in June 2003. It's since been tamped down: In efforts to go green, Paris replaced incandescent bulbs on more than 100 of its monuments with energy-efficient metal iodide ones, and it cut down each hourly tower light-show to five minutes instead of 10.

I was in Paris that July week in 2001, two months before the New York I'd fly back to was plunged into darkness by horrors never foreseen. I left Paris on July 13, the day before La Fete Nationale, so my last memory of the Eiffel Tower was the imprint of the night before, one of erratically flashing radiance witnessed while noshing on a sublime Nutella crepe wheedled out of a charmingly grouchy food-truck vendor. 

The next day, as urban event-planners gussied up the Champs-Elysées, I left Paris behind and boarded a train to Amsterdam, a city awash in its own waves of light: the gallery fixtures illuminating the Van Gogh Museum's wares, the symbolism of light and reflection holding calm court in the Prinsengracht's Anne Frank House, even the neon glow emanating after dusk from behind the Rossebuurt's eagerly ogled panes.

That trip seems so long ago, but 9/11 does not, because light and darkness often don't fall on the same continuum in our memory bank. And while much has changed since in what I can claim I've learned about the world, there are only three things I can say for sure at this particular moment: that I love my children unconditionally; that the fog of war of this latest devastation will take some time to dissipate (so prepare for a flood of false information, finger-pointing, and the inevitable references to concealed carry, college campuses, and even Rob Lowe); and that the lights of Paris will continue to shine through that fog.

The tower is shut down until further notice and will remain dark tonight in mourning for the victims of yesterday's attacks. The pervading feeling is one reminiscent of the days immediately after 9/11, when we stared out at the destruction, coated in suffocating layers of ash, in the streets of lower Manhattan. We were unable to fathom not only how we could recover from our psychic wounds, from losing so many loved ones, but also how we could ever clean up our city left in shambles. But we did, and the Freedom Tower was one of the world's red, white, and blue wayposts this week as we scanned the horizon for some hope and humanity. 

The Eiffel Tower will sparkle in due time, taking its rightful place next to the Freedom Tower, the Sydney Opera House, Rio's Christ the Redeemer, and even the brilliance of this week's Diwali. They'll continue to shed light on evil that may shape-shift and adopt new acronyms, but always burrow in blackness—be it in Paris, Beirut, Baghdad, Ukraine, Kenya, Syria, or any of the other places around the globe that don't see the flash of the media's camera when the militants come to town. These are the beacons we'll need to illuminate the dark days that still lie before us.

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