An Introvert In Paris

As an introvert, I felt deeply uncomfortable for the first week in Paris. I arrived in an introverted state of mind, desiring solitude, and a chance to sit down and work and think quietly, perhaps in some nice green spaces.  Paris laughed at that.

Any time of day or night when I went outside, I saw throngs of people walking around and sitting at tables conversing with each other.  Every night, even at the grand hour of 3:00am, the river near my apartment was thickly lined with people, most of them young, some of them eating food, some sitting on chairs or couches hauled to the edge of the street, all of them talking.  The crowds waxed and waned, but they never, ever went away.

It was constant and eternal, the conversation.  I was not used to the physical closeness of the seated crowds.  The equivalent closeness back home would be at a ballgame, or a concert, or some other collective activity.  We were packed close, and if you weren’t talking, you were the odd one out.  Almost no one sat alone.

Back home I could enter a coffee shop with plenty of space to sit down, and be completely undisturbed as I sat among other people, most of them working on things or reading quietly, with the occasional conversation happening in between.  I would have room to spread out papers, or a laptop next to a plate.  Often there would be music filling out the atmosphere.  I found almost no recorded music playing in Paris.  Because, why bother?  The talking would just drown it out.  It was like the busiest part of a thriving downtown, reproduced around itself, spiraling outward to the size of an entire city.  There was no place you could go, outdoors or in, aside from your own home, that wasn’t in line of sight from at least one other person, and usually a crowd.

I don’t know whether my initial discomfort with this was because I am an introvert most of the time, or because I couldn’t speak very much French, and felt isolated due to that.  But one thing that only occurred to me in retrospect is that I was witnessing a version of urban life imbued with so much energy that it actually squeezed out the presence of the smartphone, and the internet in general.  There was so much audible conversation vibrating in the air that the wireless signals now permeating everything were superfluous.  I’m certain the people here have cell phones in just the same quantity as any other modern city, but I saw them far less than back home.  When people sat down at a table, they conversed with the person across from them, and almost never pulled out their phone, except perhaps to check something germane to the conversation.  Why be concerned about information and dialogue happening miles away when there is so much directly in front of your face, pushing into your ears?

I arrived here by train, and I imagine almost all the other tourists either did the same or arrived by the airport, which means the impression we’re building of France is confined to this city.  The rest of France, and French people in general, could be wildly different.  I get that.  But I can say this about Paris: Nowhere else have I seen such a combination of narrow streets, packed bars, tiny tables decorated with “no laptop” signs, public parks so covered in people that the green of the grass is drowned out by the colors of clothing and skin and food, self-assured pedestrians striding out into traffic, bicycles and scooters barreling through narrow corridors cut into throngs of people, and gawking tourists with sunburns and sore feet.  I’ve seen this stuff in other European cities, including large ones like London and Copenhagen, and bicycle-mad places like Amsterdam, but not to this manic degree.  Not to the point where it feels like an expression of something fundamentally different beneath. The city feels ripped out of modern time, existing in a space where things invented this century are treated as a suspicious, uncool intrusions. Especially things that create metaphysical distance between people, like the smartphone.

Maybe I’m reading too much into this. But I imagine someone living in Paris would find practically every other city in the western world to be lonely by comparison.  Even though there is a language barrier for me, the press of constant dialogue and the sense of being insulated from all of the change and chaos of the outside world by the buffering chaos of the city itself is weirdly reassuring, as though I’m experiencing a unique synthesis of being anonymous in a crowd while also being intimately close to everyone here with me.

On the other hand, how intimate is it, really?  Americans are known for being very gregarious in public encounters, even with strangers, telling them all kinds of personal details about their lives, to the point where many foreigners feel like their privacy is being grossly invaded during the average subway ride or transaction at a supermarket.  And I suspect that reaction would be the same even for a Parisian wandering around New York.  I think they would feel hesitant, and the funny, scrappy, slightly pugilistic dialogue that’s been the baseline of my random exchanges in New York or Chicago would probably feel uncomfortably aggressive to them.

And if you took a million Americans and crammed them together in a city as close as Paris, would we all sit alone at tiny tables on the street hunched over our cell phones, too afraid – or too overworked – to talk to one another in this way?  Or would we would blossom into our own American kind of dialogue?

Actually I suspect most of us would immediately feel hemmed in by the lack of space to pursue hobbies and keep equipment.  I mean, hell, I occupy a lot less space than the average American my age, but even I have five bicycles and a heap of touring hardware, which I keep crammed in a garage.

When Ann was planning her portion of this trip, she said, “I’ve done plenty of London and Berlin, and it feels like enough. But I could always do more Paris.” Now I understand why.