from Abecedarium

Déchets. If, as Baudelaire tells us, the form of a city changes more quickly than a mortal’s heart, then one’s first experience of Paris should be a scaffolding or a construction site. From the start, the permanence of metamorphosis, the immodesty of the city’s entrails, exposed. If you’re lucky, arriving at your first apartment on a bright June midmorning, Paris greets you not just with a chantier, but with a crisis. Just as you turn the corner onto your block, a truck driver, negotiating the one-way street towards the Place des Vosges, collides with a five-story scaffolding set up on the north side of the rue des Francs Bourgeois, nudging the metal frame. Nudging it, but enough that it falls back over the truck. It crumples in a leisurely arc into the third floor of the building opposite, leaving an awkward jungle gym curled across the street, a flimsy flying-buttress for your arrival. Almost immediately, firemen arrive from the station on the rue de Sévigné, but they are stumped by the stubborn jumble. They can do no more than redirect traffic, and confer helplessly around the trapped camion in their navy blue jumpsuits, arguing with the driver—who argues back defensively, his hands estimating the breadth of his negligence in millimeters. As heads peer out of windows along the street, the firemen try to look industrious amidst the broken glass and rubble. One passes close by, and you see your face reflected in his shiny silver helmet: it is the first time since you’ve arrived that you place yourself in the scene, here, living here now in this bustling, shocked streetscape.

Such an introduction is indispensable if it unburdens you of at least one of your suitcases: the romance of the Paris you’ve read, the Paris you’ve dreamed, the Paris you imagined so clearly before you got here, which didn’t resemble this at all. James Baldwin claims in No Name in the Street that he had “never, thank God—and certainly not once I found myself living there—been even remotely romantic about Paris . . . My journey, or my flight, had not been to Paris, but simply away from America.” I too had not been particularly romantic about the city itself. I did arrive in Paris romantic, though: romantic about James Baldwin, about the idea of a black American experience of the city, especially as expressed in his eloquent, probing essays. Even if that experience no longer existed, even if the community of African Americans and African students on the Left Bank (and the conditions that made that community possible) had largely dissipated after the 1960s. I was romantic, hopelessly naive even, about what Baldwin called the “allowed irresponsibility” of expatriation in Europe, about the needful, almost desperate quest for voice. Baldwin’s writings were the romance I carried with me, along with those of James Joyce, Walter Benjamin, Julio Cortázar, George Orwell, Ernest Hemingway, and Langston Hughes, and in their words I learned by heart a city that no longer existed.

The first and most brutal lesson to comprehend in Paris, if one is going to live there for any amount of time, is how to make one’s way out from under such a romance, out from under the reams of paper that swaddle the city, that overlay and blur one’s vision. Baldwin himself offers this insight in essays like “The New Lost Generation,” where he cautions that, even in travel, we cannot escape the hardships of constructing a life. Life is difficult in part because our suffering is so banal; it cannot be ameliorated by the solace of distance, the idea of a “new existence.” In poverty, in solitude, the seeming allure of those layers of words drop away. Eating baguettes for breakfast, lunch and dinner in Paris, in other words, is no more nourishing for the fact that George Orwell did the same seventy years before. Seriously considering strangling a pigeon in the Jardin de Luxembourg for a meal is no more glamorous because Hemingway had the idea first. But as Baldwin also...