Since coming back to Paris from Rome, I have been thinking about the possibilities of living in the present moment, of trying to learn how to master the fraction of the second that lies before me – which is the only part of the present and the future that I can ever truly know. How to stop running (or hiding) from it and embrace it?
But instead of flinging my arms with abandon around this knowable nanosecond before me, I have always felt a compulsion, instead, to engage in a continual emotional traffic between places – between where I am but instead want to be, between where I am instead of where I feel I should be. I have always felt paralyzed by this ambivalence – feeling the pull of equal strength in more than one direction.
Which leads to an existentially irritating question – what am I trying to do
here, right now? Writing here in this blog instead of
being in Paris? Why do I continue to tease this ache of nostalgia, a word combining the meanings of
ache and
return (nostos)? And for what, exactly - for which place - am I aching?
I remember feeling a clang of recognition from which I am still vibrating – when I first read in
André Aciman’s False Papers: Essays on Exile and Memory: “The true site of nostalgia is therefore not a land, or two lands, but the loop and interminable traffic between these two lands…This eventually becomes the home, the spiritual home, the capital. Displacement as an abstract concept, becomes the tangible home.”
I had bought
False Papers at
Shakespeare and Company this past October, a few days after I had arrived in Paris. Shakespeare’s is that little bookstore across the Seine, in front of Notre Dame, next to the best café in Paris, Café Panis. This bookstore is a place replete with public and personal mythology. It is the sister bookstore to City Lights in San Francisco. It is the bookstore which Sylvia Beach founded, originally a lending library which Hemingway at first avoided because he did not even have the money to borrow a book. Beach, in her tenderly tactful compassion, gave him not only a free membership but also free food. With her intuitive insight, she was also the person to first publish James Joyce’s
Ulysses with her own funds and publishing press (practically bankrupting her) when the rest of the world was hostile in its attempts to silence his so-called obscenity. Although it can be easily and quickly scoffed because of its cheap inclusion in Ethan Hawke’s and Julie Delpy’s movie
Before Sunset, and all the American tourists crawling about – speaking loudly while not reading anything. It also has infuriatingly outrageous prices (10 Euros for a USED Dover edition, which in the States costs $1. New. Seriously?), it is still and also the first place that I go whenever I am back in Paris.
During my first nights in Paris last October, I had finally found the gumption to scurry from my dubious and dank hotel near la Bastille. Unfortunately, it had taken me all day to carefully and cautiously coax out this strength to leave the confines of my room. I had begun to regard the seediness of the place and my fellow lodgers as familiar, and therefore safe, and it was now late. I knew I would have to pass the gauntlet of the way-too-friendly, completely unprofessional garde de nuit, who would always ask me to be his playing partner in
Grand Theft Auto, or some other gracious American video game. Thankfully, this night, he was passed out next to his glaringly obvious brown bag. Also thankfully, Shakespeare’s is one of the few places in Paris that is open till midnight.
That night, I was like a junkie scanning the shelves frantically, looking for something to narcoticize me, to still the silence of arrival, to wrest me from the panic of my coming to Paris. There is always a certain jolt when catapulted into new time zones. It was, granted, a catapulsion which I had not really prepared for. I had lived a very itinerant lifestyle in Bloomington before leaving for Paris. My only focus has been finishing my Master’s paper on narratives of exile for my Comparative Literature degree. While writing and researching, I had been house-sitting multiple houses for months, subletting my apartment to unfortunately disreputable sorts in order to save on cash. My last few weeks in Bloomington, I had spent trying to store books and valuables with various loved ones and getting rid of so many old clothes and papers and memories so quickly that I felt like a molting snake on a time-lapse Discovery program. Slapping the few socks that I could still find into a ridiculously small bag had been the extent of my practical Parisian preparations.
So, I was looking for something preferably trashy and long-winded. Anita Shreve? Jonathan Franzen’s new memoir? As I was leaving with both, of course, I was stepping over the resident black cat (whom the booksellers pride on not naming) when another book caught my eye. Tripping over the cat, I reached to take a used copy of Aciman’s book from the shelf. It was by the door. In the autobiography section. It had the word
memory on the cover. And
exile. As I opened the front cover, it had more talismans which soothed me like incantations:
Paris, Proust, nostalgia, Emily Dickinson, Italy, loneliness, wandering, Ulysses, departure, New York…
This was the slanted answer, speaking to my sense of displacement of being in Paris, making it concrete. In the first pages, Aciman writes about his return to his birthplace, Alexandria – a city which for him, expulsed as a Jew with his family in 1967 – is a shadow city, a city existing only in the memory and mythology of his family: “So this is Alexandra, I think, before shutting the window, feeling very much like Freud when, in his early forties, he had finally achieved his lifelong dream of visiting Athens, and, standing on the Acropolis, felt strangely disappointed, calling his numbness derealization.”
I had always wobbled shakily around the geographic centers which gave my family its own eclectic identity: France, Beirut, Vienna, Canada, Japan, Miami…
In a way, Paris had always been my shadow city – a place more abstract than real. In my head, it – along with all of France – belonged to my very French mother.
Beirut, my own birthplace, also felt like a shadow city. It belonged to my parent’s romance and immense vistas of majestic cedar trees and civil wars.
It was in that Beirut apartment, the Casa Blanca, that my family had its very happy, but very short, tenure as a complete unit. After fleeing the civil war, my father died, and my mother began looping our now-triadic unit between the possibilities of France and the United States. Since we left Beirut when I was so young, it is swathed in my own un-remembered memories.
In a way, I was coming to Paris to hypostatize it, to treat something conceptual as if it were real.
I reached for Aciman’s book as I had reached for Paris – in a haphazard way, led by nothing more concrete than intuition – yet I felt like I had landed on it like my birthright. I had come back to my mother’s country as an apologetic American and a lapsed Frenchwoman. I had wanted to create with the fusion of these two adjectives something brilliant, but now that I was here, the traffic between these two adjectives was proving to be more congested than I had anticipated. Hence, these bloggable moments. They are my way of pulling off to the side of the highway to marvel at the collection of city lights before and behind me, becoming more real. Maybe that is what all writing is – a metabolization occurring on the page while the heart is busy looping in between its imagined shadow cities.
thank you, matt, for being such an integral part of my re-membering...
