I'm in Paris with my retired French teacher mother, who is a big fan of Jean-Paul Sartre. Sartre famously wrote 'hell is other people'. I certainly got an insight into this yesterday when hubby and I queued for 75 minutes to get into the Musee D'Orsay in the rain, a wait which was exacerbated by some sort of strike. You visit France often enough and you get to know the word for 'strike'. Once inside the museum, which is fabulous and actually is worth a 75 minute wait, we made a beeline for the coffee bar, along with the 700 other people who had been queuing for over an hour in the rain. Then I visited the facilities - for another predictable queue outside the ladies' toilets. So many of us, all clamouring for our needs to be met. L'enfer, c'est les autres!
Mum insists, however, that this is a misunderstanding of Sartre's original meaning. Apparently what he was trying to say was not that being around other people was hellish in itself, but that other people see us as fixed objects. They perceive our personalities as set and unchanging, not realising that we grow and evolve with life's challenges, perhaps resolving to develop certain traits and downplay others. And of course we do the same to them. I am not the person I was ten years ago, and neither are you. A Christian might speak of 'sanctification' - becoming more like Christ as we seek to follow him.
The queue outside the Orsay is certainly a great place for training in righteousness. Anyone who can queue for over an hour in the rain and not begin to perceive everyone around them as objects in their way is doing pretty well.
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