Springtime in Paris

On becoming anonymous in France

Click here to listen to an audio version of this piece, read by the author.

There was a long period, while I was living in Paris, during which things just felt right, inexplicably right. It more or less coincided with the coming and going of spring. Springtime – the season of renaissance, the first season of a new year. The perfect time to materialise a fantasy. Ever since going for the first time, and especially since going for a second, I’d wanted to live in Paris. And then spring came, and I found myself swimming in a verdant ocean, the trees along the Boulevard Pasteur blooming into a fountain of green. I almost couldn’t believe my eyes. 

It was only upon the approach of summer when an aspect of the myth began to show signs of eroding. Paris had become something of a routine. I had grown lethargic, my vision had narrowed, I was overworked. I became accustomed to a certain prescriptive motion, but I was no longer being led anywhere – it was merely a series of forwards and backwards steps, always resolving to keep me where I was. And so, when a new opportunity was suddenly afforded me, one that would take me south to Montpellier for the duration of the summer, I felt constitutionally bound to accept it, on all of its terms. 

But there was an interesting parallel at play, too. After having been to Montpellier twice – much like Paris – it seemed to have a certain unnameable quality which spoke to me in a kind of arcane, almost anagrammatic language – much like Paris as well. And though I wasn’t able to formulate words in response, I was able to understand what it was trying to tell me. Come, it said. Stroll my parched avenues, fold yourself up in between the plane trees, rest at the foot of the magnolias and the sycamores. Take in the sun and stop thinking for a while. Montpellier has no myths to offer. It has only pure phenomena. Sun on stone, crystalline azure skies, breeze in the early morning, full moons in plain view. Here, the relationship between the elemental and the civilised plays out with an organic grandeur, and, in the face of its awe-inspiring beauty, I’m rendered a nobody. Most days I pass wordlessly, lost in the dance of the city's hard light. 

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When I arrived in Paris, it was winter. Up to that point, I'd only ever seen it through the lens of cold weather, tearing winds, rains soft and hard. I’d only ever seen bare branches in the Tuileries, organic detritus and wet garbage scattered across the stone steps. When I arrived this January, the city was still cast in these familiar shades. The same colours, the same textures, the same smell of decay. 

Then spring arrived, and the city began feeling like something I’d never encountered before. Of course, I was in a novel position vis-à-vis Paris. Where, before, I was a visitor, now I was there to try and build a life, to be more “agentic,” to find my way in a place which had always rendered me dumbstruck. But this feeling of novelty was also beyond the pragmatic. It was elemental. A new, protean kind of filter had been placed between me and the city, and I would sit beneath the great canopy and try to keep my eyes open to it all, try to breathe in my fill of it, to cast it like marble in my memory. 

It was right around the first blooming of the daffodils that I noticed that I was developing what you might call a familiarity with Paris, a shorthand, le bon réflexe. It began with me surreptitiously noticing new things, everywhere – different faces in the same street, different shadows in the same park. Even in my local boulangerie, or my local supermarket, or amongst the other residents of my building, I seemed to now have something to hold onto, an assuredness which I transmitted to the outside world and which was fed back to me in turn through a respectful and unpatronising frankness – oh so French. Then there were the many, many moments in which one is required to confront the city’s labyrinthine and seemingly arbitrary internal logic. Metro drivers on strike, supermarkets clean out of fresh produce, getting excoriated by overweight men on cruiser bikes who’d almost ran me and my old Peugeot off the road. But I was buttressed by that shorthand; none of it felt beyond me. It was just life now. 

Most of all, it was finding myself moving through the streets with a certain degree of instinct which hinted that maybe I could actually exist here. Where in both my prior stays in Paris I’d been topographically at sea, completely confused as to which direction corresponded to which compass point, I found that by the beginning of spring I had all of a sudden been gifted with an ability to localize. I didn’t just know which way was north or south; I could feel it, as if a new data set had been transfused into me while I was sleeping. 

This newfound sensitivity indicated that I was, in some inchoate way, aligned with the city. Gone were the days of wanting to conquer the French language in a matter of weeks, or expecting to be able to find an apartment the “proper Parisian way,” or believing myself some kind of peripatetic nomad whose every move garnered the interest of those back home. No; spring had illuminated everything, and I realised that for all the bluster and shivering of my first few months here, I wouldn’t be happy until I cut the self-important bullshit and accepted all the necessary pretentions everyone else already had. This change, epitomised: where, in winter, I obsessively checked my mailbox every day, having given my address to a handful of people who, I thought, may have been tempted to write me, by the time spring rolled around I had stopped checking it, because I knew nothing was coming. 

This realignment wasn’t all my idea; it was mostly Camus’s. He thinks that happiness is simply the harmony between a man and the life he leads. Or, at least, he thought so when he was young. (Camus outlines this hypothesis in his brilliant lyrical essay ‘The Desert,’ which he penned when he was 23 or so.) And having put his theory to the test, I could only feel humbled. Where, at 23, Camus knew in more or less precise fashion the name of the game, I, at 23, was still caught up on egotistical melancholies of no importance, checking the mail diligently, feeling sorry that nothing ever arrived.  

That is, until I brought my expectations to the city’s level, whereupon a remarkable realisation was yielded. I understood that, for the first time since God knows when, I was caught in the grip of an unrelenting passion. That passion was Paris, and it reached its apogee when I travelled to the outskirts of the city to visit the observatory at Meudon, and climbed its unassuming little lanes, catching the scent of lilac and peonies, whereupon it suddenly dawned on me, with the stultifying force of a cardiac episode, that I wanted to be wedded to this place, for good. “What – all because of some leaves?” you might ask. But remember: I’m an Australian after all, a product of the misty south-east, and so without foliage, without sprigs of grass, without the smell of mud or the fresh petals of a flower, I am lost. 

All through spring, I felt this passion take me over, felt it with a great and unabating fervour. But it was an abstract kind of passion, like most youthful passions are. And when I tried to explain to people what I loved so much about Paris, I was empty, out of ideas, and even somewhat confused. Something about the city held my speech, wanted me to keep quiet. With its bursting flower buds and relieving cool winds, it dazzled me into an august silence. 

Was this why I was unable to write for so long? Maybe it was because, in spite of my sincerest affections, I have never felt as though Paris belonged to me in any lasting way. Rather, I belonged to it. Much like Simone Weil’s idea of decreation – wherein you love with such intemperance, give yourself away so completely to someone else, that you end up leaving yourself behind – I had let the city completely inhabit me, and I didn’t dare ask for anything in return. It could swallow me whole for all I cared. And, in some ways, it did. The city dwarfed me; it was about so many things at once. There was simply no room left for saying ‘I’. 

That Melbourne belongs to me – or that I feel it to be so, which ultimately amounts to the same thing – is evident to anyone who really knows me. I have always been on its wavelength, naturally tuned into its secret frequency, drawn effortlessly through its passageways without having to lift a finger. But Paris insisted on my awareness that I was just another one of its fellow-travellers. I was forging an illusion, following a narrative I'd only pretended to write, and I knew it, all the time. It was humbling. But that’s what it means to live in a city like Paris. You’re humbled, constantly. Humbled by the immutability of the place’s history, highlighting your own comparative transience. Humbled by the endless struggle with which people contend just to call themselves residents of the city. Humbled by desperation, by confrontation, and – especially remarkable to an Australian – by the pleasure principle which seems to constitute the key to living “the Paris way.” 

This is, in part, why I stopped caring whether I was a fellow-traveller or not. Sure, I was living out an assortment of romantic notions, the ideation of which never belonged to me. But it was meaningful, to be so humbled by my surrounds. Strolling through the cemeteries, traversing the old bridges, I was put in my rightful place. So what if I couldn’t write? I never wanted to write about Paris while living there anyway, because it seemed a sophomoric ambition of which I was hardly worthy. You don’t need the words; it’s all right in front of you, blossoming afresh with every new spring morning, and all you have to do is say yes. In this sense, Paris is, contrary to popular belief, a tower of uncomplicated construction. You either scale the tower or you don’t. You either live the myth or you don’t. The only person who cares which one you choose is yourself. 

Indeed, the fulgent splendour of the city in springtime reminded me that, sometimes, there really isn’t anything more than the myth. If you get lost enough within it, become sufficiently decreated, you can learn to love your anonymity. Although, maybe I’m an egomaniac, whose clearest path towards self-aggrandisement was through self-abnegation – kind of like holding a sign that says “Don’t look at this sign.” Or perhaps it’s simply a case of yet another human being standing beneath a downpour, deciding between huddling with the others in the tent, or opening his broken umbrella and continuing on his way. After living in Paris, I know which one I’d choose. 

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Now it’s summer, and I’m in a new place again, nourished with an array of new sights and sounds. There are sweetgum trees, birds nesting outside my window, warm strips of cracked pavement, terracotta roofs. Montpellier, thus far, retains its mysterious language; something about its power remains hidden beneath the immense brightness of the sun, which, in this part of the world, shines resplendent, 300 days a year. Blanketed by such solar benevolence, life feels that little bit easier. Simply put, where Paris cast a judgmental eye on my melancholies, and made them seem unjustified, it’s hard to have melancholies in a place like Montpellier. 

Hard – but not impossible, and they’re probably coming. This piece itself betrays a kind of nascent melancholy. As in, I missed Paris before I’d even left; as I write this, in an apartment in Montpellier, I miss it still; and I’m resolved to go back in autumn, when my time down south is over. Of course, it could be another brief stay there before my instinct for self-sabotage kicks in once again, and I let my antsyness get the better of me. Sometimes, when I think of my future, I see nothing but a sequence of short-lived explorations, of fleeting connections, of lines briefly held before the tether suddenly gets cut. But I’m not sure I could function were it to be any other way. After all, myths have a shelf-life. When their power over us is all used up, they must die. 

Yet Paris, which is a passion both imperious and spectral, continues to occupy me. Neither of us, it appears, are quite yet ready to let go. Yes, it may be dusty and dry out, and the sharp southern sunlight might leave me dazed, but the scent I still catch is, without question, the scent of spring. 

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