Image of Samuel Beckett's grave in Paris.

So, I was having a little bout with insomnia. And, rather than lay there in bed and try all of my usual tricks again, I decided to get up and work on some of the projects that are keeping me awake at night. For a brief reprieve, I found myself wandering through my images of Paris from last year, and in particular, this image of Samuel Beckett’s grave.

I loved how the old and the new co-mingle in French culture. This cememtary was in the middle of a well-to-do neighborhood, was a couple of hundred years old, housed a great number of famous artists (Cesar, Rodin, Simone de Beuvoir, Jean Paul Sartre, Samuel Beckett, Balzac, etc.), and was overshadowed by the tallest building in continental Europe. The old and the new.

Many of the graves had flowers, or some other tribute paid to the artist or the dead. And, because of the number of famous people, many of these tributes exceeded your typical flower arrangement. Out of all the graves, however, Samuel Beckett’s had the most attention. Perhaps it was not the most ostentatious, but it was definitely the most.

Scattered on the ground around his grave were hundreds of the little purple tickets. They were the very tickets that those hundreds of visitors purchased to ride the Metro across Paris to see the grave of the famous playwrite–Samuel Beckett.