L'amour et l'isolation

Beautiful. Don't You Just Hate Them?

Being here, you can understand why peole think of it as the city of love.  The presence of human attachment, the desire to share what you experience with another person, is palpable nearly everywhere you go.  But so is the absence of the fulfillment of that desire, and so I say that Paris is the best place I can imagine to be depressed in.

New York, by contrast, is the best place I've ever lived (admittedly a somewhat short list) to be enraged.  Like Paris, New York is perfect for lovers, but New York, I think, is too high energy to allow for depression in the face of domestic bliss.  Anytime I find myself depressed in New York for more than a day, the hard edge of the city creeps into my apartment and finds me, and soon I'm having one of those days where I'm just walking around, waiting for someone to do something that justifies me telling them to fuck off (and luckily, being New York, I don't have to wait very long.)  In the absence of positiv human connection, New York facilitates a negative one, and just walking down the street you can see those people who aren't getting any and as a result have become ticking time bombs just waiting to explode.

But Paris, the birthplace of ennui, raises loneliness and depression to an art form, even a religion: a communal, ever-present, transcendant state.  While spending a Saturday night drinking by yourself in Nw York makes you a loser, in Paris every night of the week you can see at any bar a couple guys, of a variety of ages, often good-looking and well-dressed, sitting by themselves and knocking one back, looking for all the world like this drink is all that's keeping them from offing themselves.  On even the most popular streets in the trendiest quartiers, you can always spot that woman in her bathrobe, standing on the balcony of her second story apartment, smoking a cigarette and watching the happy drunken children stumble home, cat-calling and scream-laughing into the night as the take leave of the friends.  The look on her face, the woman, envy and self-preserving disgust, it's a familiar feeling to anyone who's spent enough time here and no one would hold it against here.  You are never alone in your loneliness; in fact, you are reenacting a tradition as Parisian as cheese plates and hating the Eiffel Tower.  Compounded with the loneliness of being an American, the one who can understand the language but doesn't get the jokes, the weight of it can be staggering, crushing, unlike anything I've ever experienced in New York.  This feels almost ancient, more primal - like grieving for something you weren't alive to remember. 

During bouts of home internet access, the soundtrack to my homework has been video after youtube video of bitter anti-love songs which best fit my mood - I will forever associate writing in French with Carly Simon.  As a result of these elaborate searches, my sad sond reportoire has expanded tremendously.  So quick shout-out to my latest fave: anyone else know Josh Rouse?  If you don't, next time you feel homesick, listen to "michigan."  And have a box of tissues handy.

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