The Language of Cities

Paris wants me out. It knows I didn’t come here for it, I came here to see some friends, none of them even from Paris, and to show my wife a world I knew before we were married. I never came for Paris itself and the city knows it. And it’s angry.

Cities can get angry at you. This isn’t the first time it’s happened to me. New York threw me out once. Los Angeles and I left on mutually hostile terms, though we’ve since made up. Cities have personalities just like people, and to really be part of a city your personalities have to mesh, you have to find each other on your own terms everyday¹.

Paris is jealous and possessive, wants you all to itself. This time around I set out to see all the things I had seen before, St. Chapelle, my favorite cafes in the Marais, the Louvre, Pere Lachaise. There was very little new ground broken. Which is not to say you can’t go back again. You can if you do it right, so long as you realize that while a place may be familiar, it is always something new. Sometimes it’s even just like the last time, but the danger is that your agenda gets in the way of what the place is trying to say. What you hear today is not what you heard yesterday, not what you might hear tomorrow. When you repeat too much you fail to give more of yourself, you’re asking the city to perform for you like a trained seal.

When you fail to give them everything, cities bite back. In Paris it started with stomach sickness, a day alternating between the bed and toilet. Then it moved on to headaches, but it wasn’t until a cop kicked us off the Pont Des Arts bridge for drinking beer that I realized the problem wasn’t me, it was that the city was unhappy with me.

Sure there are probably causal explanations for the runs, something I ate perhaps, or the headaches — allergies, a stiff mattress — but if you think causality explains the sum total of the world, your life will never be very interesting.

For me the truth is this: I went to Paris with my own agenda — repeat what I had loved about it six years ago — and that’s just a recipe for personal disaster. Even though Paris did deliver everything I asked of it, it exacted a price on me. My most memorable moments of this visit will be the shower stall opposite the toilet in our (very lovely by the way) apartment, which I spent far too much time staring at.

That’s not how you want to travel the world. What you want is irrelevant to the world. You ask for greatest hits and the world will give you toilets to hug. Ask nothing and it will give you everything. Paris wanted me and my agenda disrupted, brought around to the larger agenda, the world’s agenda.

Unfortunately it took until nearly the last minute before I realized this essential truth. But the minute the plane to Rome tucked its landing gear into the fuselage I started to feel better. Too little, too late. Next time Paris, next time, I will remember what you have taught me.