Time To Go

This post is dedicated to Melissa Murray, who has been sending me the nicest letters. I promise I’ll write back.

About two weeks ago, my watch battery started to die, but it didn’t decide to go all at once. Instead, it’s been stopping and starting, stopping and starting. So sometimes I check the time in the middle of the day and realize that my watch is fifteen minutes, or an hour, or three hours behind.

Normally, I don’t dream up sentimental ideas like this, but I started to think that my watch was trying to grant me extra time here. Extra time to walk the boulevards and the quays and the little streets (the only way to get to know this city is to walk it), extra time to spend with my friends. My departure (imminent) is a fact that has not yet become real. It probably won’t hit me until my plane lands, and I reset my decrepit watch to Philadelphia time.

If I had to choose the most potent difference between France and home, it would be the whole regime of time, here vs. there. In the United States, there’s never enough of it. We’re always running late, running behind, running on empty, just running. Here, time moves with the generosity of shore-breaking waves. It has a kindly rhythm.

It’s frustrating how things here insist on getting done no faster than their own pace. On Friday, I scheduled myself 15 minutes for my appointment at the bank to close my account. After all this time, I should have known better. It’s 40 minutes on, and I’m watching the banker methodically tear the checks out of my checkbook. The scissors she used to cut up my credit card are lying untouched on her desk. After all this time, I should have known better. Things here insist on being done at their own pace because that pace is proper to them, nothing more or less. It is right, even when it is infuriating.

In these hours before I board my plane, French time begins to make sense. Time is precious. We have very little of it. This is a fact, a real fact, that we all share. But while Americans tend to take this as an incentive to pack as much as possible into the time that exists—let’s call it quantitative maximization—the French take a qualitative approach. They savor the liquid passage of time. Time as a red wine, in other words, that you sip slowly and chew.

The expression “spend time” isn’t sufficient anymore. I’ve also earned time because the time I’ve spent returns to me with interest, its value always incrementally greater: the time I’ve spent in Paris’s museums…

… at its libraries…

… along its waterways …

… in its parks…

… and on its streets.

And now, after six months, it’s time to go.

A Couple of Unrelated Things

1.

Aside from Paris, I can’t think of many places where the cemeteries are tourist destinations. A few weeks ago, I visited Père Lachaise with my friend Alli from high school. Alli goes to St. Andrews, in Scotland, and had popped down to Paris for a visit after stopping in London.

Alli with what's left of Georges Bizet

Père Lachaise is where Molière, Balzac, Eugène Delacroix, Georges Seurat, Gertrude Stein, and Marcel Proust are all buried, just to name a few. Maria Callas’s ashes are held there. Oscar Wilde gets a big, sculptural grave that women (and, I’d imagine, not a few men) have covered with big lipstick-smack, Mae West kisses.

Gertrude Stein is buried a few plots away. Her tombstone has “GERTRUDE STEIN” carved on the front and “ALICE B. TOKLAS” on the back, a nod to Stein’s assuming her partner’s identity in the Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, as Rachel, a fellow ‘Brown’ie-in-Paris, told me.

The rocks left on top of the tombstone: an unexpected but completely logical feature. In Jewish tradition, small stones are left on top of the grave to honor the dead. Placing a pebble on Gertrude Stein’s grave reclaims her, in a sense, as a Jew, and I was glad to see that people have gotten into the habit of doing this. Proust, happily, gets the same treatment.

The second thing, after the jump:

Easter Monday

Easter Monday is a national holiday here, and it turned out to be one of the first in a string of gorgeous days. I hopped on the Ligne 2 to Porte Dauphine to have lunch in the Bois de Boulogne.

Around the Inferior Lake (there’s a Superior Lake, too, but I didn’t get that far), people were lying on the grass, enjoying the first day in a week without any rain.

Walking around the lake, you feel like you’ve stepped into a Manet painting. It’s a verdant Paris out of another era. The opposite shore in the photo above is actually a small island in the middle of the lake. It can only be reached by boat.

Emerging out of the park into the avenues of the 16th arrondissement (let’s call it the Upper West Side of Paris), you’re struck by the juxtaposition of the vast woods rubbing up against the Haussmann apartment buildings. But the park’s leisure infiltrates the urban space, too. In a garden near the Musée Marmottan, a group of Portuguese (I think they were speaking Portuguese) men were playing pétanque and getting into heated arguments about technicalities.

Everyone had the day off. The Parisians were out with their children and their dogs, seeking shelter, in these residential outskirts, from the masses of tourists who are starting to invade the city. As they have done, and will continue to do, every spring, when the light, as you can see, is perfect.

The Customers, Always

Mise en scène

Who: Ben and Ben’s boyfriend, Ethan.

When: 2:30 a.m. on Sunday, Apr. 4, in the final hours of Ethan’s trip to Paris. (Photos to follow whenever his plane lands.)

Where: Place de l’Opéra. A taxi stand.

What: We had come all the way from Place d’Italie. We had run through the station to catch the Métro, taking the stairs two at a time. In the tiled corridor, we had passed a group of French twentysomethings going the opposite way, who shook their heads and said, “C’est raté,” but we had had to go up to the tracks to see the darkened train for ourselves. We had re-emerged back onto the street and had found the night-bus stop. We had whispered on the packed bus, all the way to Choiseul. We had walked a minute, west, to the square in front of the Opéra, the lights of its Second Empire façade gone out for the night. We had found a taxi, had heard the click of the doors unlocking, had gotten in.

“Métro Saint Georges, s’il vous plaît,” I said. Ethan’s hotel was there.

“But Métro Saint Georges, it’s right there! You could walk!” the driver sputtered. Saint Georges is a 15-20 minute walk from the Opéra, which is close during the day, but less close at 2:30 in the morning when you just don’t feel like it.

“No, it’s not close at all. Let’s go.”

“But you just take one of the Grands Boulevards!”

“You know what, good night. Ethan, we’re getting out.” We tumbled out of the cab, I turned to close the door, and, for the first time, allowed myself to get pissed off in French. “When someone asks you to take them somewhere…! Good night.” The door clicked satisfyingly shut.

It’s not just cab drivers; it’s practically everyone in Paris in a service profession. You could wave euros in their faces, and they’d still wave you away. I heard a friend of mine wanted to try on a bracelet in a store, and the jeweler wouldn’t let her. Too much trouble to take the bracelet off its stand and then, potentially, to need to put it back. I once walked into an open sandwicherie that had sold all its sandwiches. They were not going to make any more, and they weren’t going to close for the day. They would stay in their open store, selling nothing, in defiance of all principles of profit maximization, and they would bear witness to a January afternoon in Paris, when it is more important to drink an express and watch the sun start to sink. The French have the most beautiful word for idleness: oisiveté. It sounds like oiseaux, like birds, like flight. Ultimately, I think the American who wants anything and everything at any time of the day or night can stand to learn a little from the French obsession with the proper time, the right moment, the guarded gesture.

But that cab driver. He was ridiculous.

Stupid American

Thanks, Diesel marketing

To pick up where the last post left off, I would add that sometimes we quasi-Parisians make mistakes that reveal us to be less than fully acculturated. In those situations, it’s best to rely on the “stupid American” stereotype, which the French seem to like because it validates their preconceptions about Americans.

Last weekend, as part of my history class, I had a midterm, which Sciences Po calls a galop d’essai: literally, a practice run before the final, but also (taking into account the implications of the word “gallop”), an essay that comes faster than you expect it to. The exam wasn’t given at school; I had to take the regional rail on a Saturday afternoon to the suburb of Arceuil where, right across the street from the train station, you can find an X-shaped, eight-story building with nothing but exam rooms. It’s called the Maison des Examens.

At first I resented being made to leave Paris and go to a place I’d never been in order to take my midterm, as if exams aren’t already stressful enough. But I gradually warmed to the idea of going somewhere totally Else and being able to leave the exam behind there when I was done with it. What’s more, the Maison des Examens was run like a machine: ten minutes before 2 p.m., a professional test-giver opened the door to our exam room, filled with long rows of desks. We were assigned to a specific row depending on which discussion section we were in. At 1:58, the test-givers each grabbed a stack of exam packets and lined themselves up at the head of the rows of desks. One of them, a man, turned to the others and said “Distribute the subjects,” and they all took off, running down the rows and handing out exams as quickly as possible. Once every student had an exam, the same man said to us, “Familiarize yourselves well with the subject,” which was our cue to begin.

Besides the exam packet—it was a document-based question, with some texts and statistical materials we had to use in order to answer the question—we were given some pieces of yellow lined paper, and a folded sheet of white lined paper with spaces for name, date, nationality, our grade, and our professor’s comments. To me, it looked like a cover sheet. I wrote my whole essay on the yellow pieces of paper.

The exam took four hours. When it was over, the (French) students in front of and behind me, seeing my many filled-up sheets of yellow paper, looked at each other practically in horror. “You write on the white paper. The yellow is supposed to be brouillon,” said the boy sitting behind me. Scrap paper. There was a chance the test-givers wouldn’t accept it. “I’ll help you explain,” the boy said.

When the “Distribute the subjects” man came to take my test, I told him that I wrote the whole thing on the brouillon. “You did what?” he asked. “I can’t take that.” The boy sitting behind me jumped in: “He’s American. He didn’t know.” The test-giver sighed and took my exam. Disaster averted.

I have another galop tomorrow, this time at a different testing center in a different suburb. Perhaps the brouillon will be blue. Who knows? The point is that living in another country means constantly finding myself face-to-face with irreducible particularities that make perfect sense to everyone but me. It means learning to feel, frequently, quite stupid. It’s good for me.

Some Pictures, And Why They Matter

Let’s get caught up.

Sciences Po’s winter break was the first week of March, which seems like an awfully long time ago at this point. I spent that week traveling: Brussels, Amsterdam, and Berlin with my friend Tess, who is also an American college student at Sciences Po.

Why start in Brussels? In the last analysis: because the trains go there on their way to Amsterdam. It’s an odd city, primary seat of the European Union and not much else. Brussels does boast a medieval town square, the Grand Place, that is so charming as to be almost irresistible. In fact, it’s so picturesque that there’s a fakeness about it, and yet—Brussels being a city of surreal contradicitions—the fakeness is irreducibly real. An old market square, it started to take shape in the 14th century but was almost completely destroyed by French bombardment at the end of the 17th, so the Belgian guilds rebuilt it over the next few years, surrounding the square with thin halls in a range of architectural styles that don’t really go together. One of the buildings, the Brodhuis, looks 15th-century Gothic, but it’s actually a 19th-century copy of the original. In other words, the whole square is a reconstruction, just a very old one, which leaves the visitor not so much awed as perplexed. The irony is that the only surviving original building on the square is the one the French were trying hardest to hit, the 15th-century Brussels City Hall. It’s what I’m staring at, agape, in the photo above, and it looks like this:

You’ll notice that the City Hall is asymmetrical. That’s because the original city planners ran out of space on the west side of the building and decided to just leave it at that. Brussels in a nutshell.

The Artsy Post

So, last night, after chorus rehearsal, I saw Audrey Tautou play Nora in Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House.”

What’s that, you say? After chorus rehearsal? Since when is Ben singing again?

An e-mail from Brown University chorus director Fred Jodry got me an audition with Ned Tipton, canon for music at the American Cathedral in Paris, an Anglican church just across the Seine from the Eiffel Tower. It turned out the choir’s baritone soloist was sick, with an evening service coming up the day after my audition. So I swooped in to sing a George Dyson “Nunc dimittis” and the bass solo in the Allegri “Miserere” on one hour of rehearsal. I don’t mean to make this sound like “All About Eve.” It was just an opportunity to help out by doing my thing.

Food Stuffs

Rather than working diligently on my impending exposé (class presentation), I decided to keep up with my new tradition and devote my Saturday afternoon to a cooking project. I made chicken with mushrooms, shallots, and hazelnuts. The recipe originally called for chestnuts, but I didn’t feel like spending three hours doing 400g worth of shelling.

That green sprig leaning into the frying pan, infusing the sauce with its fresh herbiness, is called a bouquet garni. I have no idea if they’re used in the U.S., but you can hardly find a French recipe involving some kind of sauce that doesn’t call for a bouquet garni. It’s basically just some herbs tied together, and it started out looking like this:

That’s after I cut off the dirt-covered roots. You can buy a bouquet garni from the same person who sells you your vegetables, the primeur.

The dish turned out pretty well, though if I do it again I’m not going to use hazelnuts; they were a bit weird in context. Walnuts would have been better. But the mushrooms were absolutely delicious.

After my cooking class last week, I decided to do this thing right and buy my ingredients at the neighborhood marché, not a supermarket. Today’s top four food lessons, after the jump:

Integration

These are my lungs:

An American exchange student, in order to obtain a French residency permit (a titre de séjour) valid for more than three months, has to clear several hurdles. Before he even boards the plane, his application must be processed by not one, but two separate French consular agencies in the U.S. He then receives a visa, which entitles him to enter French territory. Within the first three months of his stay in France, he must obtain lodging and renter’s insurance, as well as a student ID card. Then, and only then, can he present himself at the préfecture, the police headquarters, conveniently located at the Porte de Clignancourt, the northernmost point in metropolitan Paris. I say conveniently because it used to be located at the Cité Universitaire, the southernmost point in metropolitan Paris. But then it moved, something this hypothetical American exchange student is able to find out only by going to the southernmost point in Paris only to be redirected to the northernmost point in Paris.

The préfecture, he discovers, is what the DMV would be like were it designed by real sociopaths. Though a “take a number” system exists, he is not given a number. Instead, he is told to wait at window 1, which he does, for an hour, gradually coming to realize that he could wait forever: In the bureaucracy, to have no number is to have no existence. But he is, finally, attended to, and he  is given a date for an obligatory medical appointment, the last hurdle.

His appointment was this morning. You can read about it, after the jump. I’m warning you, this is a long post.

Lapin agile

In my rush to catch the 9:41 RER A train out of Auber this morning, I forgot to grab my camera, and I’m kicking myself for it. Today was my cours de cuisine (cooking class)—it’s part of the Brown program. A wonderful woman named Maryse took four of us to the Saturday morning market in her neighborhood, where we bought mushrooms, onions, and grenailles (fingerling potatoes) from the primeur, bread from the boulanger, wine from the sommelier, lardons de porc from the charcutier, and eggs, a boudin blanc (it’s a kind of sausage) and a whole rabbit from the vollaillier. Then, at Maryse’s house, we made a three-course lunch: mushroom-and-garlic salad with parsley to start, crêpes to finish, and, in the middle, a lapin au vin rouge. Sadly, no camera, no documentation, so I can’t share any images. But believe me, it was delicious. Next time I embark on a cooking project on my own, I’ll be sure to take photos.

Speaking of which: a clarification, since there has been some confusion. All the media on this blog—photos and video—are my own. Just so you know.