Terrorist attacks cast Paris into ‘an impossible nightmare’

Terrorist attacks cast Paris into ‘an impossible nightmare’

Mon, Nov 16, 2015
By Andrew Hussey  /  The Observer

At about 3am or 4am, I finally turned off the television set. By now, like most of the rest of France, I had had Wthan enough of the endless scenes of cruelty and death. All of this taking place no more than 3km from where I live in central Paris.

By now I had also watched French President Francois Hollande declare in a shaky voice that what was happening was “an act of war.” The French news also said that France was now in “a state of emergency” — borders were being closed, public buildings were shut down. People were told to close their shutters and not to go outside.

Before I went to bed, I looked out into the normally quiet and dark residential street where I live. Lights were still blazing. Nobody was going to sleep much tonight — how could they?

The terror began about 9:30pm, as much of Paris [as I did] settled down after dinner to watch a soccer match between France and Germany. First came the noise of the bombs at the Stade de France and the dazed, frightened expressions of the crowd. Then came the news of shootings across the city.

Within 30 minutes, the news took you with a violent lurch even deeper into an impossible nightmare. This was the massacre at the Bataclan. I have not been to the place since the 1980s and remember it as a dusty, run-down place. However, it is still a totemic site in the imagination of French rock fans. Somewhere, I have a bootleg tape of a Velvet Underground reunion gig there in 1973. How could it be that an audience of innocents was slaughtered in this way and at this place?

However, that was the whole point of the attack.

The massacres all took place in the Right Bank area in the east of the city.

Structure of the Lead：

WHO-Terrorist

WHERE-Paris

Keywords：

1.shaky 顫抖的

2.border 國境

3.residential 居民區的

4.blazing 耀眼的

5.massacre  大屠殺

來源:http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/editorials/archives/2015/11/16/2003632560