Play of the Day

After a somewhat disastrous 26-hour delay,* I arrived in Paris yesterday morning for two weeks of general wandering, eating, museum-going and an inordinate amount of people watching (to take place with hot café cremes in hand, on wicker chairs under heat lamps on the side walks).

I am thrilled to be back in this city: no surprise. What itinerant wanderer, particularly the sort with an urban bent, wouldn’t want to while away the short days and long nights of winter in Paris? None. And here is a partial reason for this: the fantastic, Proustian nostalgia we in the Western world have for Paris is not just nostalgia. Strangely, magically, perhaps even terribly, the thing itself–that scene in the French novel you read, the French film you saw, the memory you have of a childhood visit to the city or a visit not so far in the past–is still here. You can still find it. Everybody gets déjà vu in Paris because everybody gets, if they want to, the particular joy of actually having in some way been here, in this little cafe, in these particular chairs. Whether the memory is fiction or reality doesn’t seem much to matter.

Thus the play of the day: My friend and I, jet-lagged and weary, pulled ourselves together in the early afternoon to wander along the streets of le Marais and work our way to a cafe along Rue Rivoli. We sat and watched the Parisians (yes, still wildly attractive and well-dressed) meet with friends after work, or rush home with actual baguettes under their actual arms. We then slowly walked to a bistro near the edge of the quarter, Le Temps des Cerises. This place is perfectly Parisian. Extremely good-looking waiters (who are likely also owners) offered calm service (and were only very mildly, almost imperceptibly annoyed at my crappy French). We ate, I kid you not, French onion soup and escargot. We dipped fresh bread into melted parsley butter. We drank rosé. Basically we did what French people and tourists alike do: enjoy Paris as it has been for a very long time. Sitting in a tiny bistro with low lighting, small wooden tables pushed close together, sipping something that’s been made in France forever: this can’t be too terribly far from the Paris that Baudelaire wandered, the city Hemingway loved, the Paris Brecht took as his own.

Perhaps it isn’t that the city doesn’t change. It does. It has. It’s that we don’t. That picture of Paris shared in the collective imagination can still exist because so many among us–French and foreign alike–unabashedly adore it.

Oh man. I love this city. Don’t you?

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*Chicago O’Hare, as it turns out, is not exactly the best choice of airports from whence to begin a whirlwind tour if your departure date is in winter. I know. Total shocker. O’Hare does boast some tasty sushi and craft beer, however, just in case you ever need to kill 6 hours wandering around within it.