Why People go to paris
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People come to Paris for all kinds of reasons. They come to hold hostage the banality of their daily lives back home. They come to compare and complain. They come to repair love that is ailing or to find love that is missing. They come to treat themselves to the guilt of calories that they usually deny themselves. They come to re-ingest the buzz of recognizing the details they discovered, the tastes they recall, and the waiter who charmed them when they visited 8 years ago as a student, or last summer with their children. The intensity of Parisian feelings multiplies on the return: There is the visit, and there is the return, the tiny thrill of reconnecting with the person you were in Paris. The person in you that you like best and can’t always be. Paris is a tumultuous contradiction of pleasures and annoyances, and it almost seems as though one feels the power of the other. Traffic, pollution, quick tempers, bitchiness, highmindedness taken for arrogance, a natural unwillingness to comply, and lofty prices all lock horns day and night with the unfaltering beauty of the Seine, the attractiveness of Parisian women and men, the attention the city’s residents devote to their flowers, their hair, their window displays, their shoes (but not always their sidewalks).... If you pay attention to language and dig into the collective history of words, spoken French itself becomes your mistress or lover, and the inelegant attempts of Parisians to take on the Americanness of global contemporary life absolutely lose importance. Forget the last 20 years of the 20th century when you’re in France. Just let it go. Often in denial, the real place lives elsewhere in time. |
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