If an author does his job right, then the beginning of a story is a rebirth for the reader. The reader leaves his life behind and becomes the protagonist. Not exactly a blank slate, but then again, who says newborns are blank slates? If one believes in fate, the analogy goes ever deeper. Every action is controlled outside the character. Yet, the character persists in acting as though he has free will. Perhaps the reader is more like a soul. Without the interest of a reader, a story is without meaning. However without a reader, the story exists still. The character's actions and behaviors are the same.

Now, clear your mind. Blackness, noise, a shove, a slap, and you are born. You are born, and these words are your life. The flow of time as it seems to you is an illusion. All the words are fixed in place by the author; the ending and beginning are in place. However, to you it is a flow of time. You perceive events to be linear with direct cause and effect relationships. In fact, the flow of time is not linear. This was written out of order.

Not that many people look up from underneath the Eiffel Tower. However, you are not that many people. This is true, because the underside of the tower is not what people came to see first hand. Over across the garden by the Ecole de War or something or across the Seine at the Palais du someone, one can see the tower as it appears in postcards, photographs, and the minds of people, who have never even been to France. Once inside the tower, of course, everyone looks out at the city around them and tries to ignore the century old platform on which they are standing. But underneath the tower, for anyone who cares to look, is the Eiffel Tower herself. The tower as an actual, physical, existing place not just some famous tourist attraction.

Most of the people you came with are concentrating on making the line for tickets to the top go faster via mental telepathy. A few others are looking at the souvenirs and roasted chestnuts being sold by the French immigrants. No one else is looking at the tower. They are waiting to go up it and see Paris. They are trying to remember how spectacular the tower looked across the street. They are hoping that their photos come out well. No one else is experiencing the tower. Maybe it is just jet lag, but you are starting to be overcome.

The Empire State Building does not exist. You should know, you've been there twice. From the street, the building is indistinguishable from the other skyscrapers. It looks just like a nondescript office building. Of course, from the top no one sees the building either. They see Manhattan and the surrounding area. The Empire State Building itself ceases to exist once you get within a couple of blocks of it.

You think about your girlfriend. You wonder where she is and why she ignored you the whole flight over. If your mother taught you one thing in life, it is that love is shown through close attention and hugs. Thanks, Mom. A semester studying architecture together in Paris, what could be more romantic? Apparently, the answer was souvenirs that prove you've been here.

Later, in the subway you see an Eiffel Tower pencil sharpener, finally cave in, and buy a souvenir, because it is functional too. You thought about getting an Eiffel Tower before, but none of the souvenirs no matter how big or how small bothered to get the inside of the tower right. They were just fancy exteriors and smooth metal insides. No first level platforms or elevators shafts to the top. That was simply ignored. It seems that the manufactures had found that no one cared enough to pay extra for an accurate model tower, so they stopped making them around 1900. A hundred years too late for you.

So you got a hollowed out pencil sharpener in spite of that, because when you were a kid your dad bought you a pencil sharpening cannon at Valley Forge. It didn't work very well and later a friend of yours came back from England with the same pencil sharpener. It seems that on both sides of the Atlantic, on either side of the revolution, the marketing was the same.

Back at the Eiffel Tower, you wonder about life and the meaning of a place that symbolizes belief in progress. That symbolizes the belief that through technology and cast iron man could build a tower to the heavens.

You realized that to live is to change. However, to live is also to resist change. These are the twin truths of transistasis and homeostasis.

Cells divide, making new cells. Yet the new cells are mere copies of the original.

Time passes, spring turns to summer. Yet last year, it did so and next year it shall again.

A man and a woman produce a child. Yet this child is doomed to repeat the mistakes of its forebears to the fourth and fifth generation.

Here is the great failure of science, science fiction and utopianism in all its forms. No matter what surrounds man, he is still man. His happiness will not be brought to him by new machines or a new philosophy. Happiness is a battle he must fight with himself each day. No change, which fails to change the nature of consciousness, will change this fact. Communism failed because it was lead by men born in the same bourgeoisie world as all other men. The only person capable of bringing a proletariat utopia would be from a proletariat utopia.

So under that tower, the symbol of progress, you think to yourself, this happiness will do for now. The joy of discovery would satisfy you for one moment. But that moment, like all moments would last for the rest of time.