Our own brand of Frenchness

I know I’ve already blathered about public transit, but bear with me: here I go again. And be patient; I will get back to this point eventually.

We were watching the France 24 (English) TV Station (France vingt-quatre – say it the way they do and it’s waaaay cooler!) over breakfast this morning as usual, and on Saturdays they have a thing they call Reporter, an in-depth show on a particular subject. This week they were talking about a big national debate over “French identity” which everyone realizes is about being a Muslim in France. They went to Marseille, which has a really high percentage of Muslims, and there was much intelligent, reasonable talk, a chat with a young woman who wants to teach French in the public schools but also wants to wear hijab (the head-scarf) banned by public schools here (what is with that??).

But my favorite interview took me back to my old days at Berkeley High, and especially at the Berkeley High Concert Chorale. If you’ve heard this story before, just plug your ears and hum, because here goes: At Berkeley High, what with white flight to private schools, every ethnic group was a minority. That is to say, there were just as many (or as few) whites as Asians as Blacks. If you couldn’t tell which flavor of Asian a person was (Filipino or Chinese or Japanese…now it would be S. Asian or Fijian, too) you were so uncool. Yes, there were occasional tensions, certain bathrooms you didn’t use (pretty much only the bathrooms in the gym were okay to use, and they didn’t have doors, but since you were in the Girl’s Gym and you were a girl and nobody looked anyway, that was kind of okay, too) but that would be true of any big high school. It was in the School of the Arts branch of Berkeley High that things got utopian, especially in the Concert Chorale.

Drama tended to be full of white kids (though I did like the production of “Fiddler on the Roof” with one black daughter), as did Chamber Choir, but Chorale – maybe because of our Filipino-American director, Vince Gomez – was utterly integrated. We also sang everything from Gospel to Palestrina, and we did them all so well and in such racial as well as musical harmony that we were invited to sing at a Choral Music Teachers’ confererence in Anaheim (can you say “with a performance at the Main Street Pavilion at Disneyland with free, behind-the-scenes access to the Magic Kingdom?”) to show that it could be done. We found it hilarious that people thought it couldn’tbe done, but in visiting all the hosting high school choirs on the way there and back, we began to understand that there are schools with big problems…

In the same way, there are three tall high-rise apartment buildings in Marseille that could be a disaster, but in which – an they are large, airy, inexpensive and nicely-maintained apartments – young French families with all sorts of ethnic backgrounds live in peace. The maintenance manager of one building – a former soldier in the French Foreign Legion and native of French Comoros – said he never had any trouble with his tenants not getting along, and they all got along with him fine. A very white-French professional-looking young dad talked excitedly about living there and what nonsense it was that people were talking about Frenchness, since everyone experiences “their own brand of Frenchness.” That’s what I’m talkin’ about!

The trick seems to be living shoulder to shoulder and just sharing everyday life experiences having nothing to do with race or religion, but simple, human experiences like babies, school, paychecks, groceries – well, groceries might point up differences, but could make interesting discussion – life, death, parents, love… One of my other favorite quotations from the show was from a vegetable vendor in the so-called “Arab Market” of Marseille (which, as the reporter pointed out, may be shunned by racist people, but it is festive and colorful and has “good, inexpensive produce”) who said “mixing” is fine, and “mixed children are more beautiful.” Japanese women, they say here, like to marry French men because they are good husbands (the same is said of American men, incidentally), and on the TGV on the way back from Montpellier was such a couple with an adorable girl; I also recall folk on the bus in Berkeley with golden skin and golden eyes… got to agree with the vegetable man on that!

Living together as much as possible, not off in our own enclaves: that is the ideal. Which brings me at last to public transportation. As all of you know who have ever ridden a crowded bus or subway or suburban line train, it is perfectly possible, when a desired stop is reached, for the person in a seat on the far side of a jam-packed car to get to and out of the door of that car in time. How? you may ask (if you’ve never tried it). Here’s how: 1) just after the doors close of the previous stop, you begin to signal that you must get off at the next stop by, say, gathering up your bags, or simply by getting to your feet, which triggers 2) all the people between you and the door (or most of them, there are always a few with earbuds in or who are deep in thought, or deaf, or socially inept) whose peripheral vision is ever alert for the slightest tremors in the Force begin to glance about on the floor for places to put their feet and on the bars for places to move their hands, ways to tuck in their shoulder bags, and so forth, then 3) the stop is announced, or the doors open, and we begin our move – always good to announce our impending arrival with an audible Pardon! Pardon! (in Italy, it would be Permesso! Permesso!), and 4) everyone miraculously effaces themselves, and you get out.

Self-effacing is one of the great miracles of public transit: we discover that, by holding our breath and making ourselves somehow flat, we can take up very little space at all. People without this skill, or people who crash into your shoulder with their backpack or cannot seem to dodge you on the sidewalks (and I have to say that the French are much more random, wandering, illogical sidewalk-walkers than Italians, stopping to talk, or kiss, or whatever just anywhere and zig-zagging wildly; honestly, these people must just be a hair too northern-European or something; they probably can’t dance, either, or shoot a hoop; they sure can’t cook spaghetti al dente), are just boorish and unwelcome on the subway. The whole dance, on the RER suburban line with its pairs of facing seats, as to sitting next or sitting opposite your best buddy (opposite is the correct choice, incidentally, being really more intimate), and then the question of whether you should take that empty seat in a crowded subway or train care (you should is the correct answer, unless you are absolutely getting off at the next stop; if you are bashful and don’t take it, you are just adding to the surplus standing population and taking up space some poor slob standoing on the other side of the car could use) is somewhat more advanced, but well worth learning.

The point being that we are sensitive at all times as to the needs of our fellow-travelers, and anticipate where we can help; otherwise no-one would ever get off or on (oh, I forgot to mention the how to get off even if it isn’t your stop but you were forced to stand in the doorway and get right back in again protocol: basically, you hang on to the bar by the door, if possible, even while you step out, indicating to the hordes about to enter that you are still “on base” and are still allowed to “move your piece” as we all recall from Hide and Seek and Checkers, those two great life-modelling games) a train without murder and mayhem, ever again. Like Civil Inattention (the great city-thing where you don’t meet the eyes of those approaching you, difficult for the Howdy-trained Aggie or indeed for country-folk of France), this sort of Civil Sensitivity (I just made that up) is the great emollient of public transit. Not as good as Poetry*, but a good second best! (*see “Pirates of Penzance,” the show-stopping chorus known a “Hail, Poetry!” Google the words or listen to it on YouTube; you won’t be disappointed. The key phrase is: “Hail, flowing fount of sentiment! All hail, all hail, divine emollient!”) A demain!

A good death

That was the subject for yesterday’s walk from the Orsay train station to the university, through the misty fog of a vanishing winter. The night before, I had been chatting with daughter Tia and had learned that the principal at her little El Cerrito elementary school had succumbed over the long weekend to her cancer (I think it was pancreatic; that seems to be all the rage, lately). Last month, Tia was astounded that the woman would struggle on in her job, knowing almost certainly that she would be dead before the end of the school year. “Is that really how I would spend the last months and days of my life?” she wondered. And would she? Would I?

In many senses, we all have been notified of our imminent deaths; it is just a matter of how imminent and how much we are aware of that imminence. If our reaction to a diagnosis of “only a few months to live” is to withdraw from society, from work, and contemplate the state of our souls, revisit the places and people we love best, one might ask why work at all? Knowing that we are to die in the end, should we not give ourselves over to contemplation from the start? Perhaps we should!

But what if our work is what we love, and not merely the thing that keeps us alive and doing the things (in our spare time) that we really do love? What if being a principal, or being a researcher, is what gives us joy? Why, then we would want to work until we drop dead at our desks!

How do we spend this allotment of years on earth? We discussed this in terms also of what we had seen last weekend, in Languedoc, namely the town of Aigues-Mortes (Ag-e-mort -- "Dead Waters" from the marshes thereabouts; marshes always get bad press... must be the mosquitoes), built from scratch by St. Louis-de-France, the king who lead the 7th & 8th crusades, and died of the plague in Tunis, whose life has been written up by several contemporary biographers and many hagiographers, to boot. Louis was, as I have written elsewhere, “the ideal king, so if you ever plan to be a monarch, listen up! He really had faith: he sincerely believed in God and that God was the boss, not Louis. In Paris, King Louis built one of the most beautiful churches anywhere, called La Sainte Chapelle: the walls are almost entirely made out of dark red and blue glass, and the ceiling is spangled with gold stars. He also knew it was an awesome responsibility to be in charge of all the people of France, and he did his best for them. As a judge, he was fair, whether you were rich or poor, and he was merciful, too, even when punishing people who did wrong. Louis insisted on preserving everyone’s rights, no matter who they might be or what they looked like. In dealing with other countries, he was astute (meaning no one could fool him) and respectful, working for peace whenever possible, but he was a good soldier when he needed to lead his troops into battle. You could always trust him to do what he promised. And, like Joan of Arc and most saints, he hated dirty and blasphemous language (swearing by God and that sort of thing) and he wouldn’t allow it around him.” (Folk Like Me, p. 14)

When Louis decided to go on crusade, he wanted to do it right, leaving from his own port on the Mediterranean; since his lands didn’t quite reach that far, he bought a chunk of unwanted marshland from the local landowners, displaced the fishermen, drained and deepened the ship channel that connected to the sea and built himself a neat little city, and encouraged settlers to come and fill it. Its four-square walls and multiple gates still stand, and in near-mint condition. There he was able to host the captains of the 1500 ships that accompanied him, be blessed in a proper church (also built from scratch) and house all the needed craftsman and vittlers to launch such an effort: he really did it right, and the place was built as neatly and snugly as you might like, with window-seats for the archers, all the way around the lower reaches of the walls, plenty of enclosed guard-houses. Someone really thought that place out – Louis himself or someone he trusted to do it properly, and whose work he approved, as the final arbiter.

Yet Louis himself enjoyed that city only a few months, if that long. He left it behind when he went on each crusade, and died far away. Was his effort a waste? Is anything we leave behind us when we go a waste? Ars longa, vita brevis (“Art is long, life is short”) as the Romans have it, and I think they’ve got it. Make something, solve something, improve something, teach something, and none of it will have been a waste.

What keeps us alive

After a morning in which we watched a young anchor of France-24 television grow faint before our very eyes, put her forehead on the newsdesk, and say I’m ill – I’m very ill… I think I’m going to be sick after showing the footage from Haiti, I went to the wing of the Louvre where the Mesopotamian and Egyptian antiquities were, thinking hard about human beings and civilization.

To have civilization in the first place, there needs to be surplus: there needs to be organized agriculture on such a scale as to produce surplus to set aside against disaster, and to create enough wealth to build the things that make for organized agriculture. There must be wealth, and then there must be reinvestment of wealth for the continuation of that wealth. Wealth must be expended upon canals, dikes and seed, upon ploughs and harrows and mules, then upon roads and carts and soldiers to guard the roads and carts, then upon cities to market and store the wealth, to train the intellectuals to ensure the correct time to harvest and how much of the stored wealth to lay out on improvements – and already we see where civilization falls apart, if we can’t trust the soldiers to protect their charges but instead rape or murder or steal from them, or that the officials in charge of the fields take the wealth meant for canals and dikes and seed and spend them on good living for themselves, or choose to destroy the whole structure with war.

Without a sense of sacred duty and the knowledge that to be corrupt and self-centered is to destroy the world, quite literally, the very ground we stand on to saw off the branch we sit on, there is no civilization. The farmers whose lives are taken up in making the basis of wealth cannot be expected to do all the rest of the work of civilization, as well. Give the farmers what they need: let them have some joy in their constant labor; let them see at the end of a long day that nothing has washed away all their work, that something is growing. They are the goose that lays the golden eggs: if they are not held as sacred in their busy poverty, the wealthy will never eat, the whole pyramid remains a flat desert. Kill them, or take away their canals and roads and the knowledge of when to plant and reap and store, and you’ve cut off your branch to life.

In Haiti the wealth flew out long ago, and with it everything the farmers need, so that they have had to eat their seed corn, eat their mules, cut down the trees that held down their soil, and now they beg from one another, and from the world. When you are spending all your life just staying alive, there is no time or energy to make it any better. It seems to me that it is only a sense of the sacredness of our pact with one another that has kept us alive as a species, whether it is the division of duties among those who hunt and gather or the division of duties among those who create and distribute the wealth of agriculture: superstitious dread of the gods went a long way to keep the Egyptian system intact, as did a dread of the Emperor among the Romans, but in the end it is a sense of the God in each of us, of the sacred obligations of the God in me to the God in you, and the sense – as the Romans learned when the plebs seceded from the patricians – that even if we cannot all be at the glamorous top of the pyramid, those at the top should know and worship what is under their feet: without the stomach, as Menenius Agrippa told the plebs, the hands and head of the body die – that is, the merchants and the leaders die without the farmers – but without the hands and head, the stomach is dead as well. The stomach is not as pretty an organ as the eyes or hands, he assures them, but it is every bit as necessary for life as the means to find and bring to the stomach what is needed for life. The organs should not argue among themselves who is the most beautiful or necessary, he told them back in 503 B.C., according to Livy (you may also have heard echoes of this in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus), they should just get on with the business of helping each other out, to let the whole creature live.

To live again, Haiti will need to replant its trees, rebuild its roads and water systems or build them new, rebuild and staff its schools, replant its fields, and then it must have leaders with a sacred sense of duty to their people, and then perhaps rebuild its presidential palace: without that greater vision and unbreakable bond of mutual responsibility – really a love of the whole structure and a sense of service to it – civilization is lost, and humans are doomed. We need each other as surely as we need water, food, sunlight and air. Those privileged to order the workings of the body of civilization must see that they have no choice but to serve, and to serve fairly.

Or that’s what I learned today at the Louvre.

Five Hours at the Louvre

Since the last entry, there has been a day of mostly writing postcards & novel revisions (Friday), a day of mostly writing and then of running out to the Marche aux Puces to buy enough of the tiny pietons (creche figures) that one finds in gallettes to fill out our missing members – a lot, since we only earned one donkey, last year – and a small crystal bowl, and to buy a cheap athletics bag for our weekend trip to Montpellier next weekend, then buy some groceries on the way home (Saturday), and then a day of mostly wandering around the cold streets of Laon and having a grand lunch at the cathedral brasserie opposite the cathedral (yesterday, Sunday).

Today, I went to the Louvre, and am home nursing my feet and eating a late lunch of Special K and milk. Tomorrow the Louvre is closed, so I’ll go to the Museé d’Orsay, and then Wednesday I’ll go back to the Louvre with my pastels and my camp stool. Thursday, we’ll see.

So what is that like, going to the Louvre Museum? For me, it was first a matter of careful packing and dressing. Into my small plastic shopping bag from Galignani Bookstore (using shopping bags for carrying even one’s purse is a trick I learned of old in Rome) went my slim reading book (Rousseau’s Reveries of a Solitary Walker), my postcards that still needed mailing, my small sketchbook from Santa Claus, and my small pencil case with inkwash brush pens, pencils, and watercolors. I put on my undies, long-johns (shirt and pants), wool socks, sweater, jeans, blazer and most comfortable shoes, then wool coat, new knit gloves (old ones became too holy at last, yesterday), Roman woolen foulard (as a scarf), and blue fleece hat. Then I set off, a half an hour behind Robin, who was off to Orsay as usual.

Once at the Louvre (walk to Denfert-Rochereau station, take Metro 4 to Châtelet, change for Metro 1, take it to Palais-Royale-Musee du Louvre, follow the signs through the shopping gallery and security check), I jammed my gloves, hat & foulard in the pockets of my coat (noticing that my nice new gloves have left light-blue fuzz all over my wool coat) and checked my coat at the Denon Coat-Check (there are at least two Coat-Checks, at the various entrances to the various wings of the palace), got my 4-day pass – having carefully written my name in the correct blanks – stamped at the entrance to Denon (ancient art, mostly), and went on in.

The plan was to case the whole joint and then return for later drawing, but of course this could not be. The first thing to happen was that the room I came up into was full of Roman statuary, the first of which to catch my eye happened to have been carved for Herodes Atticus in order to decorate his little place out on the Via Appia called the Triopium, so I was immediately hooked (the Big Novel being about H. A.’s adoptive daughter, Ourania) and decided to go through ALL the Roman statuary, looking for other refugees from the Triopium. In the end, I found about twelve, and pledged to return to sketch at least one of the nicest (i.e., the first), which I had used to rub the worst of the rust off my sketching (ouch!). Then – after scoping out a place on the upper landing where I can sketch the Nike of Samothrace – I went to do homage to the Etruscan collection, specifically the gorgeous gold granulated jewelry and the beautiful terracotta portrait bust of the maiden, who deserves a pastel treatment, too. Then I thought it was high time I actually visited the Venus de Milo, and found a spot just to the left of the endless streams of grinning tourists getting their picture taken with her, and did my first serious sketch with my ink-wash pen.

I would have loved to use more than one intensity of grey, but standing up, that was really impossible, so I did what I could with light touches of the tip of the pen: not so great. Someone admired what I was doing, but it is the statue that is truly admirable. My intense scrutiny turned up some interesting gaffes in the drapery, however, and of course the reason I started to sketch was the curious line across the hips, which seems to indicate a very thin ribbon tied there…I got her from navel to knee.

Then it was time to wander, the idea being to walk as briskly as possible to counteract the effects of standing so long in one place (maybe 40 minutes on the Venus sketch?), so I went down to the cold, cold ground floor’s little collection of Northern European, high medieval religious sculpture, nearly all in wood, and came face to face with not only a really gorgeous Magdalen, but probably one of the most beautiful Christs I’ve ever seen – and believe me when I say I’ve seen quite a few -- second only to the Pantokrator in the cathedral at Cefalù, I’d say. Represented as ascending into Heaven, he stood only about two feet high in his bare feet, wearing only a gorgeous red bishop’s robe trimmed in gold, swirled modestly about himself, standing in a very graceful contrapposto curve, showing his wounded hands in a lovely gesture between blessing and surprise, tilting his beautiful head to look out of big, limpid eyes under delicately-pencilled brows, lips slightly parted amid his trim beard and moustache, dark hair curling away from his face and onto his graceful shoulders, Byzantine-style. Under his feet was a black storm of clouds which, according to the note on the label, represented the clouds which hid him from the gaze of his adoring disciples as he ascended. Got something like the look in my sketch, but only something.

I had sit down on the bench nearby to eat two Prince cookies from my purse (and got a scandalized look from a visitor) before going off again. Luckily I remembered where a bathroom was (they are few, and carefully hidden in the Louvre, though to be fair they are marked on the maps) and went up the stairs where the Cellini Diana sculpture is and down the hall with the temporary exhibits are (between Italian and Other Paintings and French Paintings) to nip into the loo. Then I was ready not only for the temporary exhibit of Franco mannerist-era drawings (wonderful pencil and ink work, gorgeous bodies but weird faces) but for a quick-march down the Italian and Other gallery in search of future subjects. I did see three or four easel painters with their oils, laboring away on copies in a way that made me feel good about my plan… Two Raphaels stopped me dead: Baldassare di Castiglione and the Madonna and two children known as La Belle Jardiniere. The blacks of the man’s portrait completely mesmerized me, and I had to sketch ‘em, and my most successful sketch yet. Then, on the Madonna, I began with the perfect curves of the front of her bodice – the beautiful half-oval on the left and the recurved line on the right, and gradually worked in the cloak and sleeves before attempting the heads of the Christ and the John the Baptist and finally and least successfully, the tender face of the Virgin herself. These two sketches kept me very happy for a long time.

Actually drawing what one sees makes one realize the perfection and the sweetness of these (the second, I really mean; the man is wonderfully vital), so that it is impossible to keep from smiling while trying to follow the lines.

I did homage to two Caravaggios I intend to return for on Wednesday and took a gallop down to the Mona Lisa by way of the other end of the hall where a handful of English gems lie – six paintings worth all the nameless-Italian baroque stuff in the place – and to which I hope to return Wednesday, and then I enjoyed turning my back on the sublime Gioconda to gape at the enormous Veronese Wedding at Cana and to basically slurp up every Veronese in the room. You can keep your Titian reds: give my my Veronese blues, and the way he transitions from flesh to sky. Holy cow!

Then I dashed through the French collection – standing astounded at the big, dark cross-roads room with the Brutus Condemning His Two Sons to Death and grinning foolishly at the Aeneas and Dido – then staggered home, after a mere five hours, hoping to save my feet for another day.

Tomorrow: scopin’ out the Musee d’Orsay, and watercoloring from the top floor café, God willing. Now: back to revisions!

Going Native

The big aim of every tourist is not to look like one. Today I was loose in Paris by myself, doing errands, getting ready for bigger errands to come, and today I was asked directions for the first time, and asked to donate to a local charity: I look like a native! Our first days of reconnoitering and using our Navigo Découverte cards all over the Metro (and past years’ experience both here and elsewhere in Europe) have done the trick, as has walking in a deliberate manner, wearing a good wool coat, as well as a Roman wool foulard that has an arabesque pattern on it, black clogs and a determined expression.

Last night, there was snow, and this morning the fish-boys on Rue Daguerre were feeling frisky, scraping snow off the awning for snowballs. At Place de la Concorde, the Tour Eiffel rose bluey-grey in the mist across the river. By this afternoon, the sun was back out, but there is still a sense of continuing holiday in the air, brought on by the snow. How long do the decorations stay up here – until Lent? Hooray for Epiphany-tide and Carnival! The skating rink is up and running in the place in front of the Hôtel de Ville (City Hall), as is the double-decker carousel. The big wheel is up in Place de la Concorde, and there are blue lights on all the trees along the Champs-Elysées.

Part of going native is using local public transport, and for people coming from suburban College Station for the first time (past students of mine, for example), it is an entirely different experience from someone visiting from New York or even San Francisco (though BART is pretty silly-small next to the London Tube or the Paris Metro). The amount of wear-and-tear saved on the feet is incredible with a Metro pass, although you get to know the various quirks of the various subway cars and the ethnic make-up of the various subway stops more than you do the surface of the city.

The trains on the 4 line, for example, have curious little levers you jerk upwards to open the car doors (other lines generally just have a button) and some of them have a little bell that rings -- as well as the buzzer – before you pull away from the station. The 1 line, which goes straight from La Defense to Vincennes, right along the main axis of the city, is much slicker and built for heavier traffic, with no breaks between cars and lines of seats along the walls, Japan-style, and doors that open of their own accord. Then the real trains, the trains that take you to London, or to Montpellier or places like that, those are yet another experience for the car-driving suburbanite… and all of them make it easier to read and think rather than just drive, or (God forbid) drive and talk or text). Oh, and there may be texting going on during subway rides, but virtually no phonecalls: only quick answers like “yes, I’m almost there, I’ll see you soon” and no long, loud conversations.

And I intend to become a native of the Louvre: I now have a 4-day pass which I intend to use for as many hours of the 4 days as I can. I also now know that I may in fact take my tray of pastels, my pad of paper, and yes, even my little portable stool into the Louvre, so let me tell you I am one happy camper. More on that as it happens. Oh, and a trip to Galignani Bookstore has set me up with a good English-French/French-English Dictionary, so that now I know that the sign on the well-worn wooden stairs of this apartment building means: “Wipe Your Feet!” and that the wonderful shop sign Quincaillerie means “Hardware Store” and that the incredibly exotic sounding Bonne Maman jam we bought (Quetsches) is just “Plum.” With that, and with my new George Sand novel and Rousseau essays (in English of course!), I am ready to “walk the walk,” even though I really can’t “talk the talk” beyond a few basics and “vous parlez l’Anglais?” Oh, well: until I open my mouth, nobody needs to know I’m not a native!

The Shakespeare Effect

Over the years I have noticed certain things about my brain, which, as a convenient shorthand and imitating the great doctor-types of the world, I like to call “effects.” One example of this is something I dubbed “the Norway Effect,” inspired by the geological fact that, after the ice sheets that covered it melted, the whole landmass of modern Scandinavia (the most important country of which, as we know, being Norway) rose hundreds of meters on its pillow of magma and is rising still. It is happening in the Arctic today, and is one of the reasons that part of the world isn’t suffering from coastal flooding, even as the ice melts. Brain-wise, the Norway Effect is the elated feeling one has after a big project is over (in my case, it was on finally finishing and defending my dissertation that I first identified it): kind of giddy and goofy: a sort of “feels so good when you stop” feeling, as in the old joke about hitting yourself on the head with a hammer.

The effect I’m experiencing today, our second full day back in Europe, is something I call “the Shakespeare Effect.” Why? Because every time I go to a live performance of Shakespeare – partly because I am not well-read in the bard and don’t have anything but about one speech of his memorized (wait, make that two) – it takes me about a page of text before I understand one single solitary phrase coming out of any of the players’ mouths. This is why I am so grateful to said bard for not saying anything particularly important on the first page: it’s usually a couple of old geezers of the backstairs staff discussing the sad goings-on in the throne-room. I really don’t know, since the whole page is a blank to me. Anyway, understanding kicks in pretty soon and then the whole thing is translating itself inside my head into meaningful parcels of information, poetry and whatnot. Does this happen to anyone else out there?

Speaking metaphorically, the Shakespeare Effect when travelling is when suddenly something makes sense that was really opaque the day or moment before. When I’m translating something from Italian (or Latin, but Latin is easier) into English, sometimes I just have to read it over aloud or silently a couple of times, and bingo! the light dawns (ouch – lights don’t go on when you say “bingo” except at really fancy Bingo parlors, do they?) and the meaning shows clear. I suspect this happens to you, too, and when you or I are in a foreign country, or staring at a poster in a language we sort of know, a couple of interesting things happen.

First of all, it takes a couple (lots) of tries to get down the whole daily routine/train times/places to shop/things to wear/fastest route home in a new place. Even with judicious use of maps, it isn’t until you’ve literally “walked the walk” and gone into a couple of shops, hurried for a train (and missed one that left moments before – the one everyone was running for, elbowing past you), tried that particular outfit and discovered that the hat drove you crazy, after all, forgot to wear wool socks instead of cotton and froze that you settle down to something like a seamless routine, and can give your attention more to the higher things in life. That’s something like the Shakespeare Effect.

A quite literal experience of this happened to me on the train this morning (yes, the later one, not the one everyone was hurrying for). I was facing, as yesterday, two advertising posters, nearly exactly the same as two I faced yesterday.

One was from a clever campaign that was also running last January when we were here, a play on words that doesn’t work in English for Telelangue, a language-teaching school specializing in English teaching. The catch-phrase is Arretez massacrer l’Anglais! (sorry, French experts if have remembered it incorrectly), literally “Stop massacring the English!” but meaning “Stop massacring the English language!” but showing an apparently battered man covered with bandages and clearly “English” (meaning British), either because he has a plaid draped over one shoulder (yesterday’s poster) or is in full bobby uniform (today), getting a big kiss on the cheek from a pretty nurse. Last year, incidentally, they just showed the bandaged and battered bobby, a look of terror on his face, holding up a crutch to fend off the reader of the poster with the (then no doubt new) phrase in much larger letters. The nurse is a nice improvement, but that is not the poster that really jumped out at me today.

The second poster, whose French I really will massacre if I try to reproduce it, is something to do with furniture storage. Yesterday, fresh from my on-the-plane French refresher course in the form of a good, hard look at my Rough Guide Phrasebook (during which I made the amazing realization that French is structured a lot like Italian – incredible!), I realized that the name of the company advertised was something like “the missing piece” or “the extra piece” or “the piece left over” and that it had something to do with moving. Today, I sat down, looked at the poster, and realized that it said, “breaking up house?” (or “moving away?” perhaps), then “have you considered what to do with your furniture?” The same sort of sense of recognition and “translation” can happen, yet more metaphorically, with life in a new place, especially in a new country, where the differences seem at first so great.

On the way back to the apartment yesterday, for example, as part of that whole “figure out which grocery is right for you” thing, I tried a different grocery store on rue Daguerre: Monoprix, instead of FranPrix (the names have something to do with price, I expect), and discovered quite a different clientele there from the first. Being on a busy corner, Monoprix seemed to attract more hapless, dizzy tourists (“oh, look, gallettes!! I just love gallettes!”), more crazy people and more very elderly ladies than FranPrix just down the block, though the checker at Monoprix was much sweeter than the chilly little blonde at FranPrix. In front of me in line was a tiny, elderly white lady in fur coat and pink felt beret, buying her box of kleenex, her dozen containers of plain yoghurt and her liter of CocaCola, who was fussed over wonderfully by the kind checker, a richly-darkly-beautiful woman of central African extraction. The checker greeted the pink-beret lady with a smile and a question of how her holidays had been, raising her voice good-humoredly when the little lady didn’t hear her at first. The lady answered that she had spent them, as she said, tout seule (“all alone”), at which the checker expressed appropriate shock and sorrow, raising her voice and speaking very clearly into the lady’s ear, as she did when telling her the cost of her purchases. I, in my turn, being in the “hapless tourist” category, she was quick to help out with a little English.

Until I become brave enough to go into the specialty shops for bread and milk and meat, I believe I will keep shopping at Monoprix, and maybe even after that. Kindness needs no translation, and no Shakespeare Effect to grasp.

Waking up in Paris

The sun finally peered over the edge of the smoky horizon at about 9:00 this morning; we were headed out of the city to Orsay. The sky at the zenith was that classic alto-cumulus of every Monet poppy-field you’ve ever seen, lit gold from beneath and backed by the most limpid of pale blues; the lower bits were swathed in shreds of dirty-grey stratus, with hierarchical mists in the valleys: the hither irregular ranks of houses and apartments clearer and darker, the far fading into their backdrop of high, bare poplars. The rime of hoarfrost edges every fallen plane-leaf and crusts the grass in the fields along the Yvette, in Orsay. In suburban yards, the pollarded plane trees send up their bare bouquets of thin canes against the sky, and along the roads the Lombardy poplars punctuate the voyage outward like downbeats in a dance. Suddenly I’ve lost the environmentalist’s fury with the destructive hand of man and love the pollarding, the smoke, the poplars, all the mark of man, and high up, the blue streaks of contrails, racing across the upper air. We’ll be gone soon enough from the surface of the earth: long live the present moment! (Now there’s an oxymoron for you!)

It seems that Rue Daguerre runs right from our doorstep (or nearly) to where the entrance to the RER and Metro stations appeared to us, this morning, directly under the street crossing at Avenue General LeClerc. This is the sort of epiphany that happens the second or third time one explores routes in a new place, and really, the quieter, more direct route was better yesterday, laden as we were with big rolling suitcases. But Rue Daguerre is a treasure! Lit from end to end with festive swags of lights (watch for a photo to appear soon) and truly – we saw today, now that the holiday is really over and life’s patterns return to normal here – the pedestrian-only block at the far end is like a street market in Rome: the shops there spill out onto the pavement in booths of fresh ravioli, of oysters and mussels, of cheeses and rolled roasts. The fragrance of brioches and baguettes are wafted into the street on every side: there are Viennoiseries and Boucheries on either side of the street all the way from our end to LeClerc, and already we wonder how to manage a visit to each, should we be brave enough to go in. Last night I braved the chain bakery Brioches Doree and bought an apple-spice gallette… today perhaps one of the unique places? Oh, and there is a toy-shop with Tintin figures at our end of the street, as if I need any more! But everyone needs one, am I right?

But how silent and cool the Parisians are, of course! The young women stalk along in their skin-tight black jeans and black boots, their hair uncovered and their coat collars turned up high, the young men in their huge scarves and turtlenecks…and on the train this morning, not a person was talking, except for a trio of blithe Italian students headed back home via Orly Airport, chatting away happily, Maria laughing her musical laugh for all to hear, and all of them speaking a wonderfully gutteral dialect, perhaps Venetian? It made me smile and think of the cacophony on your average Roman busful of students. Yes, Parisians are awfully northern European. But so much feels familiar here: there is a fragrance used in European cleansers or laundry soap or something that I remember from a scruffy apartment near La Sapienza in Rome which I also smell here, and those built-in wardrobes in the apartment, with their drawers like the drawers in doll-cases of yore, and their taller spaces for coats and suits where the doll should go. Yet the streets of Rome are more fragrant even than Rue Daguerre: I don’t catch the espresso on the cold morning air, or the wonderful diesel fumes of the buses roaring by, or the smell of wet pavement from the sluicing down of sidewalks every morning by shop-keepers, using the water from eternally-flowing street fountains. That pearly beauty of the sky and trees and pale houses is only Parisian, however; nothing Roman about that.

A Little Sleep-Writing

It is so common for Japanese tourists who long to come to Paris to suffer disappointment when they get here that there is a syndrome for it and psychologists specialize in its treatment, but there is no danger of either Robin or I succumbing to it. We already know some of the grim realities that our friends who were green with envy that we would be spending a month here might have forgotten: specifically, that Paris is big, it is modern, and it is full of non-Parisian-looking people who do all the hard jobs and live in the northern suburbs. Paris is a primate city, meaning that not only is the country’s government centered here, but also its industry, culture, banking, you name it: all the HQs are here. And so culture isn't the only thing happening around here, and much of it is neither beautiful nor romantic!

It is a huge employer, for one thing. Yesterday afternoon, we flew over the winding Mississippi, and this morning at dawn we were over the Seine twisting through the darkened countryside, and already, the narrow, double-laned roads clogged with car headlights were snaking towards Paris from miles out in the 'burbs, freeways were already over-filled with traffic: it was nearly 8:30 AM. Dawn comes very late here, and sunset comes very early: we are as far north as Newfoundland! On the RER train into the center from the airport, there were places – the Stade de France station comes to mind – where we could indeed have been in suburban Japan, so many businesses were overlapping with highway bridges and apartment buildings and then with trains and stadiums. And a Japanese tourist could reasonably complain that most of the buildings are painted that pearly off-white of all the self-respecting apartments of Paris: so much more staid than the paint-box colors of Rome! A few whimsical houses from the '20s in multicolored stone and brick pop up here and there, heavily decorated with graffiti.

And Paris is sofar north that all day the angle of light looks like late afternoon, and it is indeed cold! Teens and twenties fahrenheit overnight, and about freezing during the day, so that every stitch of wool that we brought will be worn, and gladly. Snow is expected towards the end of the week, so this weekend will be a good one to lay in supplies for, and just venture out on foot for explores down to the river, not try to take a train anywhere. A good day to raid Shakespeare and Co. for English translations of Georges Sand, things like that.

We are at Robin's office at the University of Paris Sud, Number 11 (Science) in Orsay, 45 minutes south of our apartment in Montmartre, fighting off sleep: I, for one, really slept not at all on the plane, sitting upright in my seat all the short night. It is sad how scattered I sound, but I'm about to flop over on the desk! After our three-day drive back to Texas last week from California, Robin reflected that Paris would be just an eight-day drive from College Station, if the Atlantic were filled in, since Paris is only about twice as far from Texas as California is... (Oh, a tiny cup of strong coffee has appeared on the scene, and a piece of chocolate: I'm saved!)

Speaking of food, between the Denfert-Rochereau RER station whence we go out to Orsay, and our place on the second floor of 124 avenue du Maine (check Google Maps!) is one of Paris' famous pedestrian streets devoted to food, the Rue Daguerre, but shops were mostly closed this morning because in Europe groceries are generally closed from Saturday afternoon to Monday afternoon…but oh, we did see some bakeries open, with brioches and breads and gallettes galore – it being that time of year when one eats gallettes in honor of the Three Kings, washed down with hard cider from Brittany. What is a gallette des rois, exactly? A disc of flaky golden pastry, scored on the top into diamonds, filled usually with almond paste and holding a small figure: in a King’s Cake in Texas or Louisiana you might find a plastic baby Jesus, but here, a tiny porcelain donkey, or angel, or king, or bambino or other character from a creche scene appears somewhere in the filling. Last year at the Marche des Puces (literally the Flea Market of Paris), we found a whole basket of such figures from years past for sale, and if we can’t eat enough gallettes to collect ‘em all, we will have to go back there and invest!

Getting around town and out to Orsay will not be a problem, since -- after snooping online for just such a thing -- at the airport train station, we successfully negotiated getting our Navigo Decouverte monthly travel cards, running out to Walgreens the night before we left to get two photos, trimming them to the correct size and slapping down Robin’s European credit card (courtesy of the folks here at U. of Paris): now we can travel in any and all of Paris’ five concentric zones by subway or train for a whole month just by paying a cool 100 Euro each and by swiping our equally-cool Navigo card across the entry sensors.

But don’t ask about the airport itself: Charles de Gaulle Airport is a scandal and a place to be avoided but, alas, never can be! Over the years I have been insulted there when I was ill and had lost my ticket, yelled at for not speaking French, led astray by supposedly-sympathetic agents, I left books on planes never to be returned, looked in vain for seating or bathrooms at gate waiting areas designed (like everything else at CDG) for looks rather than for human utility … and today there was an hour-plus wait for bags, for no apparent reason. But there was the considerable comfort of watching – as we waited patiently – the pink-and-red light show on the interior of the doughnut-shaped building and the occasional drifts of bubbles up from the bubble machine at the ground level. Wonderfully pointless!

We have also successfully met the representative of ParisAddress (found online) at the door of our apartment building on rue du Maine, learned from her how to turn on the heat, how to work the various appliances: can you believe a washer-drier combination in one machine? You put the laundry in to wash and don’t have to take it out until it is utterly dry! And the ingenious dishwasher-oven? These two are one right above the other; not connected, this time. We have left the tiny radiators heating like mad: perhaps by bed it will be somewhat toasty in there?

Ah, but the entry to the building was classic: something very much like our first night in Sendai, at the university guest house, which has no elevator and upon whose third floor we stayed, and had to remove our shoes at the front door, put on slippers and slither up the carpeted stairs, hauling our several heavy bags behind us. Here in Paris we did not have to put on slippers, but the twisting wooden stairs are slippery in a different way and… oops, not to complain! One simply needs to be robust, to a certain extent. Certainly the walk from the train station to the apartment with those two suitcases was something for the robust; long may we still be so!

So, once we admit that we can do no more here in our state of somnolescence, we will potter to the nearest FranPrix grocery store or similar for basics for the next week or so, cook up our finds, eat them, and fall into bed… here’s hoping it is not too lumpy! But we will be waking up in Paris…