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Where Jim Morrison Isn’t Buried |
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When I went to Paris’s famous Pere Lachaise cemetery, there was a Swedish teenager lighting little birthday candles in front of Morrison’s modest gravestone. In the equally famous Montparnasse cemetery, I had to walk in smaller and smaller circles to find the black stone silently marking Samuel Beckett’s grave. But for millions of Parisians there are no candles, no gravestones. These Parisians don’t even have caskets. Their bones are stacked like cordwood in the limestone quarries under the city, a vast region known as the Catacombs. I’d seen photos of Cambodian skeletons in the Museum of Genocide, but you enter it aboveground and somewhere near the present. You descend into the Catacombs and pass under a sign saying “The Empire of Death” to find the long dead, hundreds of years dead, some of them gaping at the tourist, seeming to ask “Where have you been?” or, more disturbing, “Where are you going?”