March On, Flâneurs!

Dear Readers,

Please excuse the delay between the date of the entry and the date of its publishing.  The writing of this entry has been a bit of a lengthy process, since every time I edit the post, I'm compelled to change or delete everything I wrote before.  But, in the interest of my blog, I said to myself, "Alice, get on with it!"  And this is what I ended up with.

Paris is perched on the shoulder of the season.  As I sat at a café sipping 5-euro thé rouge and nibbling on a gingersnap yesterday (tea is always ludicrously expensive in Paris, though I suppose the cost takes into consideration the aura of subtle chic you acquire in the purchase of a steaming, glass mug), I looked over at the tiny garden that sits atop my metro station.  They have—the mysterious, invisible Paris gardeners—planted a few droopy palm trees.  I usually avoid the park because, to me, it looks like a sad imitation of California.  Only without the sun, or the smiley people, or the flip-flops.  But yesterday, the garden had bloomed.  The cherry trees were pink.  The leaves had filled in the gaps between the starved branches of the trees.  When did that happen?  I walked home.  And they were everywhere; flowers--fragrant, soft and bosomy--dripping over awnings, peeking out of window boxes.  The city is no longer bathed in shades of gray, but in shades of green and a rainbow of pastels.  And speaking of bathing, we've had more than a few April showers of late--the sky heavy and flat with rainclouds, the vague humidity rising from the streets--but I suppose that is the price one must pay if one is to enjoy May flowers.  On a less saccharine note, I recently found a poem--"Spleen" by Baudelaire--that so perfectly describes the recent Paris weather that I can't help wondering if Baudelaire wrote it in April...

Quand le ciel bas et lourd pèse comme une couvercle
Sur l'esprit gémissant en proi aux longs ennuis,
Et que de l'horizon embrassant tout le cercle
Il nous verse un jour noir plus triste que les nuits;

That is only the first stanza--the rest is a bit too depressing to include here, but do read it if you're ever suffering from an attack of ennui or existential frustration.  Baudelaire empathizes.  But enough with the weather!  I have recently been pondering a different sort of issue.

The question is no longer whether I have changed: I have changed, it is a fact.  What I find myself brooding over, turning over and over in my mind as one rotates a hard caramel over the tongue in order to soften and melt it, is this: has Paris changed me, or would I have changed with or without Paris?  Of course I can only speculate endlessly because, as Milan Kundera points out in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, life can only be lived once and it is thus in vain that we attempt to determine how the denouement would be different had we made such-and-such a decision instead of the one we made.  But in any event, I do not think I would have changed thus had I spent the last months in California.  Some of the differences are concrete: I now adore the strong Parisian espresso whereas I used to wrinkle my nose at its bitterness; when asked for directions, I know where to point the askers without consulting my map; every café is mine, and I strut in to order a noisette like I own the place--gone is my former timidity and nobody speaks to me in English.  Other changes are less noticeable--more abstract; these more subtle differences, however, are vaster and far more significant than their more obvious counterparts.

I am relaxed.  Odd--that you should have to take the West Coast girl off of the West Coast to get her to chill out.  A week or two ago, I don't quite remember when--I seem to have lost the conception of time as concrete blocks (day vs. night, work vs. play) in which tasks should be completed--I watched the sun setting behind la Tour Montparnasse.  It had been a good day, I remember saying to myself.  Then I attempted to recall what I had done to make it a good day.  If I was hard-pressed then to remember what I had done, don't expect me to remember now.  Sometimes I pass days doing nothing at all.

That is, if "nothing" includes wandering--though not listlessly--around my neighborhood, comparing coffee at the Couleur Café (which I am partial to because they play Bob Marley) and at the Nemrod.  I realized I must be some sort of flâneur (or, rather, a flâneuse) when, having found myself in the Bon Marché with my friend Julia, I was entranced not by the Marc Jacobs bags and glittering display-cases, but by the sprawling, columned passage, or gallery, in the middle.  The famous obsession of Walter Benjamin, the Paris passages.  An alternate universe, a sense of movement and fluidity, a somewhat transgressive idea (a passage is, after all, a transition from one space to another).  How apt, I thought, to be entranced by a passage during the passage from Winter to Spring.  So I wandered home and began to write.

Or read.  Or make some tea from Paris' best tea shop, Mariage Frères.  My current favorite is called Shanghai Breakfast Tea, described as a "mélange souriant et aromatique."  Idolatry only takes on a negative connotation when it doesn't result in anything.  But my thoughts are blooming faster than I can record them.  Perhaps this dreamy blog entry will be the only concrete result--for now.  But an interior shift is, sans aucun doute, taking place.  Permeating my consciousness like metallic raindrops, something--though I'm not quite sure what--is shaping my thoughts as subtly as water molds clay.

I've been reading a lot, though not quite what I'm supposed to be reading.  It was, in fact, as I was finishing The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath that I stumbled upon the quotation that prompted my disorganized and largely inconclusive philosophizing about change.  Writing about the memories from the period of her life in the bell jar, Plath remarks, "I remembered everything...Maybe forgetfulness, like a kind of snow, should numb and cover them.  But they were part of me.  They were my landscape."  Though I'm not in any sort of bell jar, I am in the middle of a distinct period of my life--one which I will I will probably remember as having a beginning and an end.  Should the memories fade, I am reassured that Paris has become part of me.  It is my landscape.

And so I'll leave you to chew on that.  I have a busy day ahead of me, in which I plan to drink more tea, and read more books, and wander, and wander, and wander.