Being, In Paris

There's a reason for the comma.

It's all well and good to be a tourist in one's adopted home. There's a courtship ritual. I'm glad I got to have so many fantastic dates.

Now, Paris and I are in a relationship. And as such things go, we're starting to settle down.

I've got my permanent Métro pass. I no longer travel: I commute.

My weeks are programmed. I have activities (i.e. my mémoire, which requires me to read a lot of Proust and academic research in very dense French), classes (all in French, bien sûr), and bureaucratic activities that require a taxing level of my new language, using jargon I have to learn as I go along.

But it is structure, ultimately, that allows us to flourish. Academic, bureaucratic, even culinary (my friends and I made cookies last week, which required the mastery of unfamiliar verbs): practice makes--well, if not perfection, at least improved proficiency.

My former task was Being, in Paris. Now, I am being in Paris.

In a way, it's exactly what I was hoping for. I know my boulanger and my épicier; they recognize me on the street and say bonjour. So does the security guard on my block. I'm a staple of the neighborhood: a cog in the wheel of my petit quartier within the 15e.

I can even make a bit of small talk now.

But the principle remains: the more competent one is in reality, the less competent one feels. The ignorant feel invincible with a phrasebook; the scholar feels dreadfully unequipped with the Petit Robert in hand.

My new teacher--actually, my now belovèd camarade de classe--impresses upon me that this is normal. She speaks what sounds to me like beautiful, nearly impeccable idiomatic French, and she tells me that she still apologizes to native speakers. 

I used to tell my students constantly that to learn a language is to learn a way of thinking. Now it's time for me to follow my own advice.

And to try, as much as I can, to get used to--defying the urge to be in Paris--simply Being: In Paris. 

On the upside, I've accomplished mountains of Novel.

Memento Mori

Mes petits vivants, this is a long post with diverse offerings. But the first and longest leg of the journey takes place in the catacombs.

I offer you the same warning the signposts outside the catacombs offer visitors. Those of you with weak hearts or stomachs may be upset by what's ahead. For the rest of you with a taste for the morbid--greetings, brothers and sisters!--welcome to L'Empire de la Mort: the Catacombs of Paris.

À la recherche de Marcel Proust

Yes, petits, I have done it. That most misguided form of literary worship, the pilgrimage. 

We forget sometimes that writers' experiences are not in themselves unusual; it's the prowess, the vitality with which they describe the ordinary that consecrates their particular experience as notable. The reality will undoubtedly be a letdown: a narrowing to concrete form what was before a beautiful amorphous visualization, imbued with our experiences, and thus the emotions and associations by which we connected to that author in the first place. For me, volumes II-IV of Proust will always be interwoven with where and when I read them for the first time: in Victoria and Vancouver, Canada, at age seventeen, to the soundtrack of an Elly Ameling album of Schubert lieder I had uploaded from a CD I borrowed from the library. Like Proust's narrator, who falls in love with Gilberte the moment he sees her among the blooming hawthorns in the garden at her family's estate, I fell in love with not only Proust's work but the milieu in which I encountered it.

But how could I be within an hour and a half of Combray and not see it?

So I  bought my ticket at the SNCF boutique and set off Saturday for my pilgrimage. I present the results, narrated with pictorial assistance.

Mon ancien quartier, le 6ème

As promised, my pictures from playing tourist on my last day living in the 6ème. I'm of the opinion that a person can see better (read: professional) pictures of major monuments and attractions by doing a good ol' fashioned Google image search. I've included some links to get you started.

Instead, I prefer to show pictures that show you a perspective, that capture a particular instant or help one occupy better a described space (the occasion for my next picture post). So here's my 6ème; enjoy.

Des Pensées Academiques

This is the first of several posts for tonight. I've been busy, but the fruits of my exploration are ripe for internet harvest. My blog is one of feast and famine, mes petits. 

First: the results of my placement test, and the events that followed. The whole thing was rather a shock to my system, and a contributing factor to the latest delay.

With my kindergarten-level street French and very short career of study, I was pretty confident of what to expect. I certainly didn't expect to be at absolute débutant level, nor were the upper reaches of avancé orsupérieur in my line of sight, but I was rather worried about whether I would place in elementaire or intermédiare. You see, without going into too much depth, one's niveau affects what kind of classes one can take. I had signed up for civilization lectures open to intermédiare students, hoping that I wouldn't score too low to take them.

On Monday, shortly after I posted, I reported to the secretariat to claim my classes. When the man who was handing out the class assignment cards and inscription sheets slid over mine with the word supérieur, I think I stared at it for about a month. Surely, I thought, they must have made a terrible mistake.

But of course, I'm human. So as I strolled down Boulevard Saint-Michel, giggling now and then like a crazy person, it began to feel right. I adjusted my self-image from someone with atrocious French to someone with atrocious spoken French. 

Long story short: I went in to change classes, took a three-hour-long essay test, and was admitted into the French literature Masters preparatory program. It's very exciting.

Still--it doesn't do to get too cocky. After writing an eight page essay in French deconstructing the use of tense and leitmotif in Proust, Colette and Duras, I left the building and walked to an Orange store to try to sort out a problem with my iPhone (which is currently functioning as a delightful iPod Touch rather than a proper phone), where I struggled with relatively simple sentences like: "The 3G reception seems to be working, but I can't make or receive calls." And when employees at several Orange boutiques told me to call the help line, and I asked how I could call a help line when the whole problem is that I'm unable to make any calls, I prayed I sounded indignant and not confused.

Well, learning a language is a process. So is French bureaucracy. With work, I hope to become fluent in both.

Truancy

I have relocated to the 15th; it is quiet and lovely--and remote.

As promised, I did take many pictures. Give me a little while to upload and sort through them. Only the best for you, coucous.

Meanwhile, I have received my iPhone. It took a lot of running around in digital circles on the French-only website (acknowledged even by the employees as onerous), and two trips to the Orange store armed only with my pathetic French, but it's finally up and running.

O, mes choux, I am a Believer.

Loving details soon. About France, I mean: not about the iPhone. Listening to someone rave about a new gadget has all the charm of listening to a new mother talking about Baby's First Everything. Or "cute" stories about someone's cat.

Meanwhile, off I go to the Sorbonne to get my class information. While I'm in the neighborhood, I will probably wander around in the neighborhood I do, as predicted, miss terribly.

À toute à l'heure. Je vous promets.