okay, okay, i did like paris a little

Starbucks - Blvd Garibaldi - Paris
samedi 8 février 2014

First view of the Seine.

 "C'est une bonne maladie," said the bookseller in reply to my (in French) "I love books, so shops like this are hard for me," as he totaled up my purchases. It was a beautiful and true reply, and delivered in French, it carried an even greater ring of truth, profundity, and bonne-ness than the same comment would have if uttered in English.

I felt deep down that he, in his French-ness and his bookseller-ness, completely understood and approved of this bonne maladie, this good illness, even more than your average American bookseller does. France carries a bookishness that America can somehow only match in small pockets. In France, one sometimes senses that "livre" and "France" are nearly synonymous.

When visiting American friends and I browsed a tidy, aesthetically-pleasing rare books shop in Avignon several months ago, we discovered that books from 19th century authors weren't old enough for this shop. Basically, a book needed to be older than America to warrant a place on the shop's tidy shelves filled with deliciously old book bindings and their pages. In the thrice-a-week market in Aix, what seems to me like a very old book--you know from the 1800s--sells for practically a dime a dozen (or, well, 5 euros per book, which is not the price of rarity).

Back in yesterday's Parisian shop, I felt like the bonne maladie I shared with the proprietor suddenly erased our cultural differences. In fact, he and I, we're citizens of the same pays, the country of booklovers.

Happy to get to pass by again in
the dark. Love the lights!

When I entered that bookshop, I crossed a threshhold much grander than simply the one marking the distinction between the sidewalk and the room of books. You see, I had just completed my first interview entirely in French for my first reported-from-France article. And then I entered a shop full of books written in French, where I purchased a couple Parisian guidebooks-in-French and made small-talk in French across the bookseller's counter. More adamantly than many other good elements of this current blessed semester of French progress, the threshhold marked my long-awaited arrival onto the first steps leading deeper into the bowels of the French way of life and psyche, a place that has until now remained just out of reach, dependent on my gaining a greater command of the language.

I'm glad I didn't come to Paris any sooner. After 16 months of having a French mailing address, French doesn't make me tired anymore. My grammar is still often terrible, especially when I don't have time to rehearse the sentence in my head first, and I still feel like I've become a very silent, tongue-tied version of my real self, but I often understand spoken and written things now without thinking about understanding them. I understand them without translating into English. Thus, a guidebook-in-French is useful rather than painful now. What a difference a year makes!

Paris, where all your antique fire poker
needs will be met.

The beauty of journeying to Paris at this point in my language-learning marathon is that from the beginning, I've entered the City of Light as a place where I speak French not English. In Aix my identity is too marked by English because I entered that town as an English-speaker (and because it's a place overrun by anglophones). Whereas, French is the language Paris and I are using for our love affair.

I can't yet say, "Paris, je t'aime," but perhaps that's mostly because I'm not a fall-in-love-at-first-sight kind of person. A bientôt, Paris!

Like those in this article, I, too, only stumbled upon the Wall for Peace monument without knowing what it was: "peace" inscribed in 32 languages and 12 alphabets.