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?
This is about an hour of waiting in line for a few scoops of ice cream. I’m sure it’s tasty but, I’m going to go with a different vendor, thanks…
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.
There’s a beautiful little park here, somewhere, under all these people.
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.
I came here on a bike loaded for wilderness-level touring. I couldn’t help it, because that’s the load-out I used in Iceland and the bike has been stored in a basement, untouched, since the Iceland tour finished almost two years ago. When I got here – to a rented apartment on Rue de la Fontaine au Roi – I stripped all the bags and gear off the bike and threw them in a closet, and have been going around with nothing but a phone, some Airpods, a house key, and a very sturdy bike lock.
Tried this cafe a second time, but the mocha was no better.
Tried this cafe a second time, but the mocha was no better.
Parisians seem to love the recumbent. Of the thousands of bicycles I’ve seen so far in the city, I haven’t seen a single recumbent, so it gets a lot of commentary. I understand why it would be rare: Paris has turned out to be what I would call an “expert level” place for bicycling, much more so than any other giant city I’ve been to in Europe, and you need to be very good on a recumbent to avoid injury in a place like this. Relatively speaking, Amsterdam, Brussels, Hamburg, Copenhagen, and London are all easier.
Back in the US, I’d say New York is relatively easy, and so is most of Boston and Chicago. In terms of danger I’d say that Paris is not top of the list – downtown LA occupies that spot for me so far – but it’s a strong second place. It’s not fear of deliberate violence I’m talking about, but the risk of accident, from the sheer press of people and the contempt they show for the rules. And it bears repeating: This is Europe. I have yet to experience bicycle touring in, for example, Rio de Janeiro or Bangkok. I’m sure Paris would be way down the list by then.
The weather is perfect, but the air quality is pretty bad. I’ve noticed that smog laws in Paris are treated as suggestions, especially by people on ancient scooters and mopeds. While biking around I’ve encountered entire city blocks that stink of car exhaust to the point of making me feel physically ill.
And I’ve gone to believe that the French take a dim view of laws and government in general, which I suppose is great where personal freedom is involved but is also a barrier to organization and urban planning, even daily logistics:
Will a shop respect its own posted hours? Maybe. Will you get warning when a street is closed for construction? Maybe. Will the bus actually stop where the schedule says? Maybe. Will the postman deliver your package? Maybe. Will there be a bike lane? Maybe. Will it be on the left, right, or middle or the street? Take a wild guess! Will there be a delivery truck parked right on top of it? Maybe. Will the train be on time? Maybe. What platform will it arrive on? Nobody knows until 20 minutes before it’s due to leave, ever, even if that train line has been operating for years, and even then it may be wrong.
Every intersection is a free-for-all hash of bicycles, people, cars, and scooters. Crosswalks are a suggestion. Crosswalk signals are less than a suggestion; they are ignored. On the other hand, people almost never honk their horns regardless of the thickness of the snarl or who is technically at fault, because the response they are most likely to get is, “screw you, this is France.”
I shouldn’t have been surprised. What sort of organization would I expect, from a nation whose most truly defining era is still the French Revolution? Where laws, for the vast majority of its history, were used to funnel wealth upwards first – into the laps of clergy and kings – and organize people second? The nation I come from owes an incalculable debt to the same thinkers and activists that drove the French Revolution, and the influence shows, but I get the impression that the French had to swing a lot harder to knock their tyrants off their posts, and that impact is still echoing around in the culture here.
That’s a cerebral place to go, starting from a description of the air and the traffic… No doubt it’s subjective and I’ll have other impressions as the days continue.
Today I sat in the restaurant where Amelie was filmed, and listened to music and a series of podcasts about Russia, and then a book about French history.
It was well weird comparing the current and former state of both countries, and asking the question that’s on a lot of minds this year: Can Russia ever change away from fascism and still remain Russia?
One of the people I listened to was Mikhail Shishkin, speaking as a guest on an Intelligence Squared podcast episode, titled “Is Russia Doomed By Its History?” He made a very sobering point: People who live in a fascist state, and do not oppose it, do not see themselves as fascists, and when their state attempts to bring fascism to a neighboring state through subjugation (e.g. war) they see themselves as liberators, rather than conquerors or subjugators. Since fascism is what they know and believe in, inter-state conflicts are not a matter of freedom versus subjugation, but a matter of a big fish eating a smaller fish. It’s kill or be killed in a zero-sum game, because there couldn’t possibly be a form of governance they could switch to that would move them even a little bit out from under the bootheel of the criminals at the top.
Want to escape from that restaurant in Amelie? Here’s how.
Besides, if you live in fear of your ruling party, then what better way to distract them from plundering you than encouraging them to plunder someone else?
Just so with the Russian people, over the last 100 years, inside and outside the USSR.
Anyway, I ate two lunches at the cafe, since I’d skipped breakfast and intended to skip dinner: A caesar salad with ham, and a rich avocado toast with salmon on top. As one should on a proper vacation, I ate slowly!
Lots of people came in to take photos of the place, giggle a bit, and then dash right out again. So to be a contrarian, I left without taking a photo of the interior. If it ever came up, I could certainly remember that I’d dined in the restaurant used in the film. I wouldn’t go scrambling for photographic proof of it and no one would ask. What, would they accuse me of being a liar? Maybe when I was 16 years old and boasting in a schoolyard. Not now. At the same time, that photo isn’t something I’d put on my wall or even in a screensaver. Most of my keepsakes are either highly portable digital items, or living things walking around looking after each other.
I followed this train of thought as I rode the bike over to the Cimetière de Montmartre. Alas, it was closed for the day…
Hmm, Montmartre cemetery closes at 6pm. Good to know. I’ll have to come back later…
I still remember the time when film was expensive and photographs were prized artifacts from an otherwise obscure and unseen era. That’s so thoroughly not the case now. And now we’re making our way into a realm where photographic evidence is no longer evidence of anything in particular, given that you can ask a computer to bake you an image of yourself doing whatever you can describe, in any place you can name. So what is the point of taking a photo when you do go there?
Maybe now you can start to relax and just be. You can even take the photo retroactively if the need arises.
It seems like a matter of time before we’re all wearing gadgets that take – or gather – photos of us everywhere by default. I’m imagining high-quality cameras all over the place that are not just used for city surveillance by the police, but made available to our phones (or whatever the gadget is), so when we want – if we want – we can just gather up dozens of photos of ourselves taken by these devices and aggregate them. You can imagine a camera on a stick planted in front of every scenic vista, constantly recording. People will embrace the implied total surveillance because of the convenience of sending a “selfie” to their friends and social media without even needing to reach into a pocket.
Roll that forward two or three decades, and we will not be carrying anything around at all, yet still able to gather photos of ourselves afterwards, interact with our personal digital worlds by talking to lampposts (since our voice and face is our password), pay with our fingerprint or our face, access transcripts of everything we’ve said, and so on. People will embrace total surveillance and recording because it will be fun. They’ll get to buy into it. And the old saying, “if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear” will sound so very reasonable… That’s what they said in the USSR, as they dumped radioactive waste straight into the river…
I loathe this future.
The opportunities for exploitation will be practically infinite, and practically invisible. And as I get up and walk out into the seething crowd of tourists on this street, I’m asking myself a really frightening question:
At what point does a state become so exploitative – and skilled at crushing dissent through social manipulation and surveillance – that the people trapped permanently at the bottom of it have no other choice but to take up arms and start physically smashing the apparatus? Are we heading towards a level of lock-in through technological advancement so high that the ONLY way out is to beat down doors and set fire to mansions? Are we headed for another French Revolution, but on a global scale, with the attendant scale of death and chaos?
Huh. So that’s where it is. No desire to go inside currently, but, good to know.
Huh. So that’s where it is. No desire to go inside currently, but, good to know.
‘Cause you know, at some point, the food’s going to get too expensive even with fertilizer, and the water is going to get too expensive to clean, and the digital apparatus is going to be tightened and tweaked so that the wealthy keep eating, while the rabble drowns in poison.
