If there has ever been a post that I want everyone to watch, hear and experience, this is it.
““Imagine dying and being grateful you’d gone to heaven, until one day (or one century) it dawned on you that your main mood was melancholy, although you were constantly convinced that happiness lay just around the next corner. That’s something like living in Paris… It’s a mild hell so comfortable that it resembles heaven.
“Why is the flâneur so lonely? So sad? Why is there such an elegiac feeling hanging over this city with the gilded cupola gleaming above the Emperor’s Tomb and the foaming, wild horses prancing out of a sea of verdigris on the roof of the Grand Palais?… Why is he unhappy, this foreign flâneur, even when he strolls past the barnacled towers of Notre-Dame soaring above the Seine and a steep wall so dense with ivy it looks like the side of a galleon sinking under moss-laden chains?
“There is a fault line to the city that weighs heavy. Paris and its people were occupied. They were a people that fought, fled, surrendered, resisted, rescued, collaborated, kept silent, watched, much as any occupied population does. De Gaulle’s defiant rhetoric on the steps of the Hotel de Ville on the day of the city’s liberation does not erase the humiliation and compromise of four years of Nazi occupation. Parisians do not assume a moral zone of black and white. Nothing is unequivocal, absolute, indisputable.
“Paris is grayness and fractured humanity, an acceptance of fault and frailty that is disconcerting and disorienting to the Anglo-Saxon system of beliefs… I came to Paris fifteen years ago, with an English sense of right and wrong: self-righteous, simplistic, judgmental, puritanical, an island mentality… When I came to Paris, I believed in queueing, apology, duty, ideals. I believed that life could be achieved by will… The French are endlessly subtle in their embrace of humanity and the mutations of life. They accept human fault. They expect it. Recognition of human frailty brings with it an inevitable sadness; there is no joy to Paris, no helium of optimism… ‘You always want to master it,’ my piano teacher once said to me, ‘but you have to feel it first.’ Paris has taught me my will alone cannot get me there.
“I walk home through the jardins du Luxembourg; it is brown and humid. They have placed warning posters at the gates, signaling strong winds and the possibility of falling branches. Beneath the warning text is a line drawing in black ink of a Parisian dressed in a winter coat with an umbrella turned inside out; she walks bent beneath a swooping tree, shards of branch flying. She walks through the jardins knowing that a branch can strike, asking if she will be strong enough to resist. Always this doubt. Paris knows that human failing is part of human endeavor.
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Excerpts from A Mild Hell, by Edmund White, and The Sky is Metallic, by Alicia Drake. Both taken from Paris Was Ours, reflections on the City of Light edited by Penelope Rowlands
