“And this sadness gave a subtle satisfaction and held me a long time in that spot; and it held me to the city; and it didn’t really leave me that night when I went away.”
-Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire
New Orleans is anything but silent. It’s everything I expected – and didn’t expect it to be. But the one thing I’ve found that I’ve come to love most is that fact that the city is teeming, just filled to the brim with life. Its streets are wonderfully worn down from the constant foot traffic and the buildings loom overhead in their wearied French Colonial style, paralleled by unfixed ruins left behind by the hurricane. It has its bright lights and exciting night life, but a lurking danger and mystery that we’ve come a little too close to, both in real life and in the novels we’ve read. There’s excitement, unpredictability, and celebration, but a profound sorrow for the history of people who were enslaved and suffered in these places that’ve been converted into restaurants and hotels without reparations to those who are due it.
This city could very well be immortal, or seem that way, with its history and its naturally exciting nature – but there’s something unnatural about immortality, even for a city.
Still, wouldn’t it be nice to be immortal? Experiencing generations of history, being able to do everything and be everywhere you could’ve possibly dreamed of. Instead of coming on a four-week long experience, what if you lived in New Orleans for decades at a time, taking your time to watch its culture grow into what it is today?
But if you look at the infrastructure, you see that the even the architecture that the city is so well known for is bursting at the seams with nature. Alleyways hide glimpses of lush greenery, walls are disrupted by branches breaking through and brushing countless shoulders on sidewalks, concrete is upturned and crumbles at the roots of trees that have been around longer than we’ve been alive.
What better way to realize that life will find a way? And what better way to remind us of our own mortality? That we’re not meant to be immortal, that even the things we build to structure our lives are meant to fall away and be rebirthed. New Orleans celebrates life and death and that extensive range of emotions that life in between those two points. Having only been here for a few days, you can practically feel the sorrows that the city’s history has, but the joy, too, that’s been able to come out of it because joy, like life, persists.
“What does it mean to die when you can live until the end of the world? And what is ‘the end of the world’ except a phrase, because who knows even what is the world itself?”
-Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire
In Interview with the Vampire, Louis lives through whole centuries of change and nothing is so important as the companions he surrounds himself with. Births and deaths of inventions, historical events and people (non-vampires) all blended together and sometimes weren’t even important enough to mention in his personal history. But his companions: Lestat, Claudia, Armand; they were his history, because what is a history or a culture without others to make it resonant?
Roses in front of a statue in Congo Square.
We had talked about Thoreau at one point during this trip – perhaps on Grand Isle – about his quote, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation,” that our lives are misguided and unfulfilled by our learned attachment to worldly possessions. Initially, I hadn’t interpreted it this way: this general consensus about its meaning felt negative and even a bit condescending to me, but the first impression those words left on me was a certain kind of sadness. What desperation is so harsh that it cannot be shared? Why, when we’re so full of life, would we choose to live quietly? If we want something, even a worldly possession, shouldn’t we live and desire it and celebrate our feelings loudly?
It seems that in New Orleans, life is lived boldly and loudly. There is celebration, even in death. In Louis and Lestat’s everlasting life, they strive to form eternal bonds by creating new vampires and trying to sustain those relationships over decades, but they can’t: Claudia dies, Armand leaves, Lestat can no longer even step out of the house to support his own needs. Our relationships and our emotions won’t last forever, so it matters now that we treasure each other and these moments we have together as a class even more so because we are mortal, and this is a chance in a lifetime to experience a city like this. We don’t choose mortality, much like the vampires in Anne Rice’s novel don’t choose to be immortal, but in this city, I think it matters only how we choose to live that life.