Adorno’s Years in California 321introduced was switched on in every house. That experience of twilight
in Amorbach anticipated the shock that I experienced as a refugee in
America. So well had my little town taken care of me that it even
prepared me for completely different experiences.’^227 After his arrival in
Paris, where he stayed on the Boulevard Raspail in the historical Hotel
Lutétia with its traditions of the belle époque, he wrote to Horkheimer
on 28 October 1949: ‘The return to Europe gripped me with such force
that words fail me. And the beauty of Paris shines more beautifully than
ever through the rags of poverty.... What survives here may well be
condemned by history and it certainly bears the marks of this clearly
enough, but the fact that it, the essence of untimeliness, still exists, is
part of the historical picture and permits the feeble hope that something
humane survives, despite everything.’^228 Adorno’s spontaneous joy went
so far as to lead him to vary the motto from Minima Moralia and to
comment that ‘life still lives’ here. He urged Horkheimer to join him
in looking for a life together on this continent – a wish that was to be
very shortly fulfilled.