After a great visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, everything seemed artsy, worth being exhibited in a gallery. That is when I stumbled in front of these trees. This image could have been taken by the great photographer Nadar in nineteenth-century Paris. The trees, trimmed perfectly to look identical to each other, might represent the new buildings designed by Haussmann, with a uniformity that is at once monotonous and satisfying to the eye. The open center reminds of the new Paris’s wide boulevards, while the reddish edges draw the viewer’s attention towards a far off vanishing point. This image depicts what Baudelaire, in his love for extracting the eternal out of the ephemeral, was trying to express. In a passing moment, the camera was able to capture the movement of people walking—at a time when being around others was not a felony. In retrospect, there’s a divine component to the picture, almost sublime: the clear blue sky brings a certain peaceful feeling. Strangely, the majority of the people are walking away, as if to exit. The photo thus anticipates the massive departure from society that I could not have known was coming that long ago day at the Met…