Shhh... It's Thanksgiving

There is a certain condition that is bred from living in a city as dense as Paris is. A city-dweller knows that he is never really alone; he is constantly surrounded by people. To leave his apartment is to interact with others: to avoid brushing up against people in a crowded subway car, to order a sandwich, to inadvertently make eye contact with someone else while crossing the street. The city-dweller also knows that even when he is innocuously tucked away in his apartment he is not alone, not as long as he is in the earshot of his neighbors.

To “BE CONSIDERATE” of those pesky strangers that happen to co-inhabit his building, the apartment-dweller is always turning down his music, taking off his shoes, and telling his friends to leave before it gets too late. It’s exactly this kind of constant self-awareness wrought by oversensitive (and overbearing) neighbors that drives Roman Polanski’s main characters to insanity in his three films about the maddening lifestyle of a crowded apartment building.

My friend, whom I’ll call Lisa, typically does not invite large groups of people over to her apartment. Her French-American parents own her place, which is located in the chichi 16th arrondissement. The building is mainly inhabited by older couples, families, and other residents who like to keep the noise level low, especially at night.

For Thanksgiving, Lisa decided to make an exception to her no-party policy and invited a group of 20 of us over for dinner.

“Hey, Happy Thanksgiving, will you please take your shoes off and leave them by the door?” she greeted her guests, thinking of her neighbors that live a floor beneath her.

Hosting a party is always a stressful activity, even without the added pressure of keeping your guests quiet.

“Shhhh” Lisa would coax every time our laughter got too loud.

The dreaded complaint finally came after dinner was over and a few of us were helping Lisa clean up in the kitchen, washing dishes. The doorbell rang and a stern old woman told Lisa to stop banging around all of those plates in the kitchen; the running water and the clanking disturbed her quiet. Lisa nodded, apologized, and kicked us all out the kitchen.

On that Thanksgiving evening, in the private domain of an apartment, we were all sensitive to the presence of others. Living in a city, in order to balance the sensation of being constantly surrounded by strangers, we become somewhat immune to their existence in the public domain: we have personal conversations with friends in crowded cafés, we talk loudly on our cell phones as we walk down the street, we sit face-to-face on the subway with people we’ve never seen before. In a city environment, the borders between private and public domain become porous, and sometimes, it’s more comfortable to be in public. Maybe next year we’ll try eating Thanksgiving dinner on the street.