Où flâner?

Chers lecteurs, kindly be sure to read the end of this post, as I have a favor to ask of you.

Winter, listlessness, and a very sticky illness have kept me from being up and about all day during my school vacation. Not to mention that when you haven’t got much money and you’re trying to shed some winter pounds, your activity options get cut down a bit.

But the weather is warming; the days are lengthening. In response, I have become, once again, a flâneur.

When I didn’t yet have a Navigo pass, which allows one unlimited Métro access, I walked nearly everywhere. Even though I bought my tickets in carnets of 10, it still cost 1,20 euros per trip—which makes you think before descending down those steps. And in walking everywhere, I found weird and wonderful stuff: taxidermy and antique shops, chocolatiers and confiseries, surprising boutiques and cafés and churches and public buildings of all kinds. I got lost a lot in those days, without the iPhone with its maps and search and compass that can now get me un-lost in a matter of seconds (and even give me a tip for a good nearby café). But even now that I can orient myself easily—especially now, since I know how to get somewhere else quickly if I need to—it’s good fun to wander into places I have no reason to be.

For the past couple of days, I have not once ridden the Métro. I have walked through and around seven or eight arrondissements, right and left bank. Today I walked up the route of ligne 8, meandered through the 1e and 2e, then threaded from the Opéra Garnier down to Les Deux Magots and walked home roughly along the route of ligne 12. I took pictures and detours and paused in front of pretty windows, looking for all the world like a tourist.

Mes loups, I am having a marvelous time of it.

Therefore, I want to try something new. This week, while I still have a bit of time to do nothing in particular, I would like a new idea: a generative constraint, if you will.

So here's my call to arms. In the comments section, pitch a route for me to flâner. It can be a quartier, an arrondissement, or even a specific street or monument as a starting point.

I will pick one of your suggestions, flâner, and post in greater-than-usual detail.

Trois mois

When we were sixteen and seventeen, my Xavierites and I dreamed of expatriate life. I longed for it. Even thought I might be meant for it. In those days, to me, it meant England or Italy. I'd been to both, albeit briefly, and liked them. Even so, as we wove our shimmering, fragile collective dream, something always nagged me: the anxiety, even the belief, that I would always be too scared to take the plunge. That I wouldn't have enough money, or wouldn't find something besides pure caprice to bring me there, or that people would talk me out of it and I would listen.

Of course, in the end, we wove a different web, casting out to different coordinates of the country. Of all of us, I'm the only one who ended up moving abroad. It turns out that reasons to become a foreigner don't find you; you must find reasons. There's a whole host of reasons people don't do this. It's hard. It's frustrating. It's expensive. You lose your identity; you regress; you reforge; you metamorphose into something quite different. No one warns you about how lonely it is, or how humiliating. And when folks back home ask you, how is Paris? is it wonderful? you don't want to spoil their lovely, shimmering candy-floss dreams. You say, yes, it's wonderul, it's amazing, it's everything I dreamed of. Because it is. It's also everything I feared, and many things I neither dreamed of nor feared.

Now, mes amis, it's official. I have been here for three months.

Proust Questionnaire: Or, Shameless Navel Gazing

Mes petits, today marks one week before my twenty-fourth birthday.


Instead of telling you about Paris, I'll hijack my own space for some reflection on Identity. Mostly mine. But there will be an opportunity for audience participation.


If you're in the mood to gaze at some navel (and for two German compound nouns in one post--what a deal!), on y va.

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.