Vide-Grenier (Garage Sale)

If, as the French Christian mystic and philosopher Simone Weil said, "absolute attention is prayer," think of all the objects we have prayed over, by bringing our attention to them at the moment we chose them, and the attention we paid them when we held them dear.

And now those individual prayers rise in chorus at the annual neighborhood garage sale in our tiny public square, Place Contrescarpe, and the narrow streets that run downhill from it. It's a smorgasbord of the things we once held dear, or even sacred.

We sellers wish their numinosity might spark in someone else's heart; or we simply wish, on a more mundane level, that we can extract a stray euro from a once-loved, now-unwanted object. It may seem heretical to conflate mundane consumer goods with the sacred, but there are those who say that capitalism has elevated the cult of consumerism to the status of a religion. 

Wherever you stand on that argument, we invite you to witness our neighbors, with some of their now-desacralized objects, their discarded prayers, and imagine each booth a shrine.