My retreat in southern France ended last Friday, but the timing and logistics on flying back were a bit complicated. I had some meetings in New York on the following Monday, which made flying back to Seattle just to board a flight twelve hours to backtrack to the east coast seem like a really bad idea. Lucky for me, though, the timing worked out that if I went to Paris, I could see the fireworks on Friday, which was Bastille Day. So I got my flights to New York worked out for a Sunday night arrival, and booked an Airbnb for two nights in gay Paree.
I’ve not had the best of luck with Paris visits in the past, ranging from a trip one January where my then-wife got a horrible cold and spent days in bed with fever, to the time where my former employer went insolvent and was seized by the government while I was in town. Also, I had overseen some Paris operations in one of my previous jobs, an experience that further depressed my view of the city – it was a money-losing operation, with the resulting heaviness of working with demoralized staff, dreary offices with no hope of ever being renovated in a neighborhood far removed from anything beautiful, and an endless stream of excuses, complaints, and misery. Even my museum experiences have been cursed: each time I’ve tried to visit the Musee d’Orsay, which focuses on the art periods I love best, more than half the galleries were closed for renovation or for new installations that would start just after I’d be leaving town.
I pinned my hope on a good patriotic fireworks show – figuring newly-minted President Macron might pull out all the stops. On Saturday, trying to hedge my bets on the museum front, I had booked an Airbnb “experience”, tours or wine tastings or things of that nature that the site recommends based on where you’re booking a room. The first thing that came up was a tour of the Louvre offered by a stand-up comedian in English. If nothing else, I’d get to laugh, which seemed like a good idea after a week of soul searching in the hills of the south.
I arrived on the train on Friday evening, and after checking into my flat and dropping off my things, I went out to see the fireworks. I found a cafe on a street on the left bank with a gun sight view of the Eiffel Tower and had dinner, reading a book on Dutch art by Zbigniew Herbert, my favorite Polish essayist, and lingered over coffee and cognac until it was time for the big show. I wasn’t alone in this (well, I was probably alone in reading an obscure Polish essayist), as hundreds of Parisians were also in the there, packing the cafes waiting for the show, and as the event got closer, the bars and restaurants emptied out onto the street.
We were some distance from the launching area and the Tower, and as the fireworks began, the crowd collectively realized that the buildings blocked out more than half the explosions, but it didn’t really matter – it was a warm night and the view was good enough. I took a lot of pictures with my iPhone, although at some point I realized I was watching the fireworks more through my screen than actually using my eyes directly to look at the sky. Embarrassed, I looked around and noticed that probably half the people in the street were doing the same thing – they were looking through cameras or at their phones, missing the actual experience. I noticed something funny: while the buildings on the street blocked some of the fireworks, on a certain level they made the show even better – the bursts of color were reflected in a patchwork of upper story windows and the Parisian copper roofs, and the cafe neon at street level added a kind of carpeting of red and gold light to the spectacle above. A lot of my fellow camera men and women were climbing cars and street lights to get a tiny bit more perspective, reduce the blockage of the buildings just a little more to try for that perfect shot, but they missed the bigger picture of the street itself as the perfect frame. I stopped taking pictures, stopped spying on the others in the crowd, and just looked up, eyes wide open.
The crowd oohed and ahhed as they do at fireworks, but with a French accent, the “ooo” being a little longer and deeper and the “ah” sounding a bit more like a drawn out Canadian “eh”. Heads were tilted upwards and shining back as the purple and white and red explosions lit up their faces. Mouths opened up and stayed slack with joy as the finale roared into play, ending with a series of huge star bursts that were mostly blocked from view but the sound boomed across the street with a rolling echo a few seconds after the light had died out. The crowd clapped and whistled, a slow wave of conversation came over us, and we dispersed into the night in a steady stream, towards taxis and pedicabs and Metro stations and home.
I walked home just beaming, navigating through the crowds back to my flat, seeing Parisians of all stripes in a sea of unadulterated joy, so different from their normal practiced and aggressive indifference. It was all the better for being so unexpected – I mean, I knew I’d get to see fireworks, but the crowds were what made the experience. Having spent a week in the countryside facing my own personal demons, guided by my teacher but essentially on a journey of my own, navigating alone there and back feeling intensely foreign in a country that didn’t understand me, could not have contrasted more fully from this immersion into a common stream of people, all of us temporarily united underneath the joyously exploding sky.
After a bit of sleep, delayed by the adrenalin hangover of the evening, I woke up, had a coffee and a croissant for the sake of stereotypes, and headed off to the museum. The guide was named Cedrik, a lovely French guy with a bushy beard and dressed like an underpaid intellectual. He apparently is best known for a standup routine where he impersonates a South Asian guy, complete with thick faux Indian accent, but he was also trained as an art historian, making him qualified as a traditional museum tour guide. There were just six of us in the group, and a good mix at that. There was a nice youngish couple from North Carolina, both in the military and on holiday; two women from Indiana spending the summer at Oxford studying; a lovely woman from New Zealand, Helen, a programmer working remotely for two months from Europe; and me, boring underemployed financial guy from Seattle.
It wasn’t a laugh-a-minute kind of thing, more of a quirky version of a traditional tour of the main bits of the museum told by a guy with a great natural sense of humor. That sense of fun had us noticing random absurdities, Cedrik encouraging us not to take the museum seriously. At one point, walking through one of the many hallways filled with priceless sculpture and about twelve hundred people, our troop walked by a Chinese tour group, each of its members with headphones on while their guide at the front narrated into a microphone, holding aloft the standard issue umbrella used by Chinese tour guides to herd their groups whenever they leave the mainland. The faces on the Chinese people were terrifying – a zombie like mix of pain and indifference but above all, a grudging and fierce look of duty. I remarked to Helen that they looked awful, and she laughed and said she had thought the same thing, and it was making her realize that a sizeable majority of other visitors looked equally unhappy to be there.
Scanning the crowd, I guessed that about one person in six looked happy or content – and who knows if it was because they were appreciating the art (which is, you know, the purpose of a museum) or just enjoying the sensation that they’d be able to tell their friends they went to the Louvre. For the rest, they wore a curious blend of fatigue mixed sometimes with indifference, sometimes with annoyance. There were just so many of them – Cedrik at one point mentioned that 8.7 million visitors come every year – that the cumulative self-induced ennui was more than I could comprehend. Helen then pointed out that online, the reviews were always glowing, but it was hard to find the person who was going to give the place a 9 out of 10 on TripAdvisor in the sea of people who just desperately wanted to get out alive.
After the tour, our guide took us to a hotel bar for coffee and we chatted about the experience. We thanked Cedrik for a great tour, and compared notes on the other tour groups we saw. The couple from North Carolina talked about how they’d seen the same stunned look on groups in other museums, and Cedrik said that tour guides – who yes, actively gossip and make fun of the people on their tours – comment all the time about how little most guests actually want to be there, and how it often leads to people getting quite upset in ways which make for great stand up comedy fodder. We finished up our coffees, and when Helen said she was going to go back to look at some of the other galleries, I asked to join her, and we headed back over together.
We both shared similar interests in art and thus bypassed the more crowded corridors and headed for the Dutch galleries. My reading from the night before made me pretty excited to see the landscapes and peasant portraits, and Helen was fascinated by the still lives, especially the floral pieces, with roses that burst fat with thick petals and color and delicate lilacs and sinewy stems framing out of dark crystal vases. We both were taken by the portraits as well, so different in form from the outdoor pictures and the flowers. She had an amazing eye for color, while I focused on form and how light was caught here by brushstrokes, there with a wash. We noted that no Dutch painter could successfully paint children; we ended up seeking out portraits of children and background shots of children, each little more than a squashed adult or, in one case, more of a blunt turd than anything human.
I rarely look at sculpture, but Helen was quite interested in looking at some, so I followed her into a domed courtyard streaming with late afternoon light. There were terrifying pegasus statues snarling and rearing on hind legs, and we paused at one garden sculpture in particular, with a woman so beautiful and lifelike that I imagined falling in love with her. The museum closed, and walking out, we both realized we’d had a kind of perfect art afternoon, the running comedy introduction of Cedrik’s tour giving way to a proper couple of hours of looking at art that our eyes longed to see and understand. Thinking of the crowds, we also realized that most people visit great museums because they’ve come to believe they have to, not out of any love of art itself, which made me feel very lucky. We headed around the corner for a drink and a bite to eat, four hours of the Louvre having made us a little tired, a little hungry, and very, very thirsty.
Over drinks, Helen developed the theory that it was precisely those people who wore looks of sad exhaustion on their faces who went home and wrote rave reviews on the Internet. Cedrik had made a joke over coffee about how most visitors were only at the Louvre, only in Paris, because it was on their bucket list, not because they had any real reason to come. Helen’s theory was that, having checked the box, they could only fully demonstrate to the world their successful conquest with a gushing online review. Had they mentioned their fatigue, their lack of interest, or their annoyance when seeing the Mona Lisa was smaller than they expected or that the Venus de Milo looked a bit funny up close, they would have admitted to being philistines. No, no matter how disappointed or even just indifferent they had actually been, the experience would only be justified by telling others that it had exceeded their expectations.
We went our separate ways after our quick dinner – we were staying in different parts of town – and as I walked back towards my flat, I stopped by one last cafe. I was still a bit hungry, so I ordered a glass of wine and some oysters (despite the fact that Helen and I had compared food poisoning incidents in our past during our dinner conversation, with shellfish coming up more than once). I was profoundly happy, and realized this was the first trip to Paris where that had happened. On prior trips here, I was more happy to leave the city behind when the trip ended. Sometimes it was circumstance (you can’t do much about your memories of a visit when your goes company fails while you’re on the trip), but usually, I had gone to Paris because I thought I should or because I had to, and didn’t find any real spark.
Instead of developing a forced fantasy of the place, though, I built the opposite, an image of a fraudulent City of Romance, living off reputation and Hollywood sheen when the reality was essentially unlovable. I narrowed my vision down simply to the bad bits – the Parisians and their hauteur and insults, pollution and garbage, traffic, dog shit. My eyes passed over the beauty of Haussmann’s boulevards for the down market brutalism of the Pompidou and Mitterrand years, ugly scars in every neighborhood. I closed myself to Paris, put off by this sense that I was supposed to love it but hadn’t found a reason to do so just yet, resenting the world’s expectation that I love it.
I’m glad my guard was down this visit. I was in town just to kill time, not with a purpose forced on me by an employer or by a sense of cultured duty. Instead I found this time a beautiful flow of serendipity and contrast. I could not have intentionally paired reading Herbert’s A Still Life with Bridle the day before meeting a fellow devotee of Dutch art who was willing to spend an hour or so comparing brushstrokes and ugly babies. I could not have manufactured the difference between the childlike smiles of Parisians under Bastille Day fireworks and the blank stares of Chinese tour mobs.
As Saturday night got darker, as the end of my visit approached, I scrolled through the pictures I had taken on my phone. I had taken several dozen photos of the fireworks before I had put my phone down and just experienced it. None of them were as compelling my memory, and seeing the photos actually tainted the memory, made it seem just slightly less real. I’m sure I’ll send them around to people who ask what the fireworks were like, but I’d rather find a way to share them without looking at them again myself.
At the Louvre that afternoon, I took only six snapshots, four of portraits that had caught my eye and two others of sculptures, that I thought I would share with my artist ex-girlfriend at some point. All fine for what they were – aides de memoire for a future conversation, no intention of being an actual memory in itself. And one picture of a meringue pig from the last cafe which seemed like something fun to show my son back in Seattle. What wasn’t in the photos was that mix of things that I actually, really, in my own body and soul, had experienced and had loved.
I had a coffee and a cognac, paid the bill, and walked back to my flat. I tossed in bed and stared at the ceiling, my mind too much on fire – still integrating the week in the countryside, playing with memories and sensations of the past couple of days, mentally already stressing out about returning home to the underemployed limbo that I’m living in these days. I was also thinking about those things that you’re supposed to love, supposed to savor, but you don’t and therefore assume that you can’t. Some are things that you once tried too hard to love and have come to resent. Others are things that haven’t yet revealed their reason to be loved. Along with all the other processing going on inside me, I wanted to give those things a chance to reveal their magic, too, on their own terms and in their own time.
I finally fell asleep around dawn, waking up with barely enough time to make it to the airport for my flight. My taxi took me through first the tree-lined city, then through the grim concrete suburbs and finally bursting out towards the green of Roissy and the airport compound. Terminal 1 at Charles de Gaulle is an ugly bunker of a place; as the plane taxied back towards the runway, we passed the ruins of one of its boarding piers, a jumbled but neatly swept pile surrounded by wire fence. The people next to me were comparing pictures on their phones, this one in front of the Mona Lisa, this one in front of Nike, the selfie in front of Napoleon’s coronation. They deleted the pictures with bad facial expressions or slouching. They deleted a lot of pictures.
The plane’s engines whined into high throttle, the wheels lifted. I left Paris.