Almada Label top (similar)
Mango jeans
Sezane heels
Vintage belt (similar)
Sezane bag
Celine sunglasses
Agape Studio necklace (c/o) (similar)
Linjer rings (c/o)
Maris Pearl Co. earrings (c/o) (similar)
Location: Sixteenth Arrondissement – Paris, France
Paris, May 29, 2023
Dear friends,
Do you ever pause to contemplate what life was like before the invention of everyday objects whose existence you take for granted, like your toaster?
…me, neither. But there’s a story behind every single one. And a story of what life in the world was like before they existed. In Les Envolés, Etienne Kern tells one of those stories, about the invention of the parachute. Or rather, about a man called Franz Reichelt, who devoted a period of years to developing what would become the parachute, only to fail in a moment of spectacular tragedy that caught the whole world off-guard, but was forgotten almost as quickly as it happened.
I love to read on holiday. I always love to read, this isn’t news. But when we travel, I raid the bookshelves wherever we stay, working through every literary work I can get my hands on in the afternoons while I sip tea or wine. The contents of a person’s bookshelves tell you a lot about who they are. I learn as much about individuals I’ll otherwise never know through the novels they choose to read as I learn from reading the novels themselves, which are often ones that would be hard to find otherwise, or that I simply wouldn’t pick up on my own. In that way, reading on holiday is a bit like taking a vacation from my own perspective to visit someone else’s. It’s fascinating.
But I chose Les Envolés. It’s relatively new, just published in late August 2021. I found it in the bookshop at BHV, and the concept sparked my imagination immediately. I knew nothing about the origin of the parachute, before I picked up the novel to read the back cover. Parachutes, for me, are ubiquitous. They’ve been commonplace for as long as I’ve been alive. I’ve never reflected, despite how often I fly, on their origin. Or on how much more dangerous air travel was before their invention. Isn’t it wonderful, how we can do that? I’m always struck by what a marvel it is to live in a time and place where we can so easily take our safety for granted. We can do that because of brave, but probably somewhat mad, people like Franz Reichelt, who made immense sacrifices to develop safety equipment… and often failed in the process.
I don’t know that Les Envolés has yet been translated into English. I expect it will be, eventually, given the number of awards that it deservedly won. It’s a short story, less about the parachute really than about the fear of, but also temptation to, let ourselves fall from a great height. Etienne Kern takes the story of the invention of the parachute, or rather of one man’s catastrophic failure to create a parachute, and makes it a story about a universal sentiment. We’ve all, at some point in our lives, stood at a height, experiencing a mixture of trepidation and wonder as we considered the possibility that we could fall… but that maybe, just maybe, we might fly, instead.
I doubt the invention of the toaster was worthy of a novel, the way the invention of the parachute proved to be. But then again, a story is only as captivating as its writer makes it. Franz Reichelt faded into obscurity after his great leap because he was eclipsed. Someone else succeeded in inventing the parachute where he failed, and that’s the story we ultimately remember. Etienne Kern brings him back again because often, stories of failure are more interesting than stories of success, which tend to end quickly and offer few lessons that readers can apply, consciously or otherwise, to their own lives. All this to say, reading is a powerful thing. It’s worth looking around you, now and then, to contemplate the origin of the things around you.
And, most critically, risks, up to a point, are very often worth taking, even if our chances of success are minimal. It’s failure that we learn from, after all.
