Snippets of Paris

I told people I was in Paris to study. Really I was studying in order to be in Paris. But when French people asked me why I was in Paris, I knew how to say, “I am a student.” I did not know how to say, “I, like so many upper-middle class American students, am trying to quench my wanderlust.”

I realize now that that was indeed what I was doing: I was wandering and lusting.

Certainly I was searching for something, for the same thing everyone is: something more. I was looking for Enlightenment and Romance and Eudaemonia, the Aristotelian happiness-as-virtue that I had learned about in my classes at the University of Chicago. I was looking for a change, for something I couldn’t really identify because I didn’t have it.

Simply going to Paris was a change for me. I’d heard people talk about their experiences studying abroad, how they changed their lives. But I had never planned to study abroad because I hadn’t realized that I was so much like everyone else.

* * *

I went to Paris for the romance and found loneliness instead. I went for Hemingway and Joyce and Fitzgerald and found that the cafes they ate at were expensive, touristy places. I went for love and found it was a hoax, like blue arrows painted on the sidewalk, leading nowhere. But it was precisely that loneliness and lack of romance that helped me learn how to be alone and to enjoy being alone.

Often in Paris I would wander around while listening to my iPod, even though it was a very American thing to do. But the freedom those little white earphones provided me outweighed the possible threat to my cover as young, sexy Frenchman.

With my earphones on, I could sit across from couples on the metro and listen to them, staring at them even, and no one would pay me any attention. Everyone thought I was lost in music, gazing at nothing. So I could eavesdrop and spy and stare and stalk, even, following interesting characters while pretending to step in rhythm with the music.

I found a book at a café did the same thing: it created an invisible barrier between me and the other customers, so I could look furtively over the edge at an old woman with a strange hat or an old man who called the waiter by name. If I furrowed my brow as if considering some line I had just read, I could even look right at people.

The downside, of course, was I didn’t get as much reading done as I’d hoped, but the upside was I really saw Paris, the real Paris, the hallways behind the exhibits that are for employees only.