Friday, June 20, 2008

Time Travel in Paris

It feels good to have an adoptive city, a great foreign capital to which I can return at different stages of life, marking those stages. This spring I visited Paris for the eighth time. My first visit was the most momentous. I was twenty-one and at the beginning of my first trip to Europe. My best friend and I arrived in the Latin Quarter just an hour before François Mitterrand was declared the winner of the presidential election. Those were the days before the student population had been driven from the quartier by tourism and gentrification, and young people flooded the streets, climbing the statues and chanting. France had elected its first socialist leader, a mere thirteen years after the student revolt of May ’68.

I had studied maps of Paris and read French literature and the Parisian works of American expatriates like Stein, Hemingway, Baldwin, and Miller. I had fallen in love, of course, with my French teachers in high school and college. My prior romance with the language, art, stories, and landmarks animated the city. I remember a morning when the sun emerged and lit up the domes and towers across from where my friend and I stood on a right bank quay, and the world itself seemed like a pure gift, a fresh beginning.

You’re only young once, and you can only go to Paris as a young man or young woman once. By the time I had returned six years later, I was a jaded grad student. The six years might as well have been twenty, I was changing so rapidly then. But even had I returned only a year later, the city would already have lost some of its sparkle, because much of the dazzle had emanated from my own eyes. But that summer I fell in love with a French woman named Chantal, and that was another miracle Paris could produce. She lived in an artist’s loft in Montmartre, and I would take the Metro to her place almost every day, or would wake there and go out to buy baguettes and pastries while she brewed tea. You unlocked the heavy wooden front door of the building with a bit key and turned a few cobbled streets down to the local patisserie. As an American, you fall in love in Paris only once.

Meanwhile, I pursued research at the national library. Later that summer I drank beers with the philosopher Jacques Derrida at a café on the Boulevard Raspail, an event comparable to meeting with Jean-Paul Sartre in the 1950s. If my first trip to Paris was the initiation, the second trip was a higher order rite of passage that set the course of my professional life.

My third visit to Paris came eleven years later, at another transitional moment, as I was preparing my tenure dossier and contemplating marriage. Chantal now seemed far in the past, but I was in Paris again, potentially within her sphere of influence. I was pleased to find that the city had renewed itself, or in other words that I had been renewed, and that my new love called to me from America purely and sweetly over the Atlantic, so that Paris was somehow ours now, even if only I walked its streets.

Just three years later I returned to Paris with my wife and her father at the start of a trip that would also take us to Italy and Greece. It had been years since my father-in-law had traveled to Paris for pleasure. His introduction to the city was as a graduate student in the 1950s, and part of the pleasure of our visit was in vicariously revisiting his past, getting to know his Paris. Now his spirit hovers over the city whenever my wife and I return there, even as we discover our own Paris. And there, also, are my former selves, each inhabiting his own Paris, alive in a parallel universe I occasionally cross fleetingly. The doorway of the past may be opened by the smell of croissants, the roar of a truck on the street, or the glance of a child. I may not know what my most recent visits mean to me until years have passed and my present self has become a ghost capable of haunting my future self. But I know I’ve changed, because Paris is a different place.

Broadcast by Joe Chaney on June 20, 2008
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