Tagged — Jamie Lyons
In my twenties, I spent time in museums. A lot of time. Because in your twenties, when you're broke, all you have is time. Time is the only currency you've got in abundance. The museums were warm in winter, cool in summer, and if you played it right, you could kill half a day for the price of admission. The Musée d'Orsay. The Rodin Museum with its garden where you could sit for hours. The smaller ones, the ones tourists skipped: the Musée de Cluny, the Carnavalet, the Picasso Museum back when it was still in the Marais.
I'd stand in front of paintings until the guards started giving me looks. Not because I was having profound artistic experiences, though sometimes I was, but because I had nowhere else to be and no money to be there. You learn to move slowly through galleries when you're stretching time. You read every placard. You sit on every bench. You study the other people studying the art. Sometimes the people are more interesting than what's on the walls.
The Musée Rodin garden, I practically lived there some weeks. You could bring bread and cheese, sit under the trees, watch The Thinker think, and pretend you were contemplating sculpture when really you were just trying to make your meager funds last until the next traveler's check, the next wire transfer, the next miracle.
Fast forward thirty years. I've been back maybe twenty times now. Corporate cards have put me up at the Ritz, at the George V, all that gilded excess, the kind of places where they remember your name and your drink and press your shirts while you sleep. And sure, fine, it's nice. But my favorite place to stay is L'Hotel. That gloriously morbid little place on Rue des Beaux-Arts where Oscar Wilde died broke and in exile, supposedly saying, "Either that wallpaper goes, or I do." That's the Paris I'm in love with. Not the corporate-expense-account version, though I'll take it when it's offered. But the other one. The one that doesn't sanitize its history. The one that lets you sleep in the room where a genius died in poverty and doesn't pretend that's not exactly why you're there. Although I've never managed to book that room. I'm obsessed with the cemeteries. Père Lachaise, Montparnasse, Montmartre, I've wandered through all of them more times than I can count. People think that's morbid, but they're wrong. The cemeteries are the most honest places in the city. All those lives, all those stories, compressed into stone and dates and sometimes a photograph under glass. Jim Morrison's grave is covered in lipstick kisses and cigarette butts. Sartre and Beauvoir lie together under a simple slab. Baudelaire's monument is more dramatic than anything he wrote. You can spend hours there, and I have, watching the old women tend graves of people who died before I was born, watching teenagers make out against mausoleums, watching the light filter through the trees onto weathered stone. I once spent three days tracking down Robert Capa's residence and studio. Three days. And when I finally found it, or what I'm pretty sure was it, because these things are never certain, there was nothing to mark it. No plaque, no sign. Just a building where one of the most important photographers who ever lived once developed his film and tried to forget what he'd seen. That's what I'm talking about. The Paris beneath Paris. Two days doing the same thing with Man Ray. Because that's what you do when you're in love with a place, you chase its ghosts. You want to stand where they stood, see what they saw, understand how this particular confluence of light and stone and river and history could produce such an astonishing amount of genius and heartbreak and art. The thing about Paris, whether you're a kid with your family or sleeping in train stations or tracking down dead photographers or letting some corporation put you up at the George V, is that it doesn't give a damn about any of it. Paris is indifferent to your circumstances, your reverence, your Instagram posts. It was here long before, and it'll be here long after. And somehow, that's precisely what makes it so intoxicating. I've wandered these streets at every hour over three decades now. I know which café in the 11th has the best spot to watch the morning light. I know which bridges are emptiest at 2 AM. I know where Capa lived and where Man Ray worked and where Wilde died, and I know that knowing these things doesn't make the city mine. It just makes me one more person who fell under its spell and kept coming back, trying to figure out what the hell that spell was made of. The Parisians themselves remain magnificently indifferent to my affection. They're not going to smile just because you've been here twenty times. Why should they? But make an effort, show some respect for the place and its language and its rhythms, and sometimes, not always, but sometimes, you get a nod of recognition. You're not a tourist anymore. You're not quite a local. You're something in between. A regular ghost. The contradictions still get me. How it's simultaneously the most beautiful and most dog-shit-covered city in the Western world. How you can stay at the George V one trip and sleep on someone's couch the next, and the city doesn't care either way. How there's always a protest about something, and yet everything continues, eternal. The same arguments outside the same tabacs. The same old men in the same cafés. The same rain on the same cobblestones. Walking along the Seine at dusk, I've done it hundreds of times now, and it still works. The bouquinistes packing up. Lights in apartments across the river. People living their lives, unaware that some sentimental fool is watching them and thinking about Capa and Man Ray and Wilde and everyone else who walked these same streets and saw these same lights and felt this same ache. Paris doesn't need you to love it. Didn't need it when I was a kid in 1977, doesn't need it now. It's been the City of Light, the capital of the 19th century, the birthplace of modern everything, and it will continue being all of those things without your validation. But it gets in you anyway. Under your skin. Deep. And after twenty visits, you're still trying to understand it. Still chasing ghosts through cemeteries. Still finding new layers. Still in love with a place that will never love you back.
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Here’s what I didn’t think about when I was standing there at midnight in front of Notre Dame with a Polaroid camera: that I was taking a photograph of something that wouldn’t exist anymore. Not in two days. Not ever again, really. Not the way it was when I was there, then. I’m just exhausted. […]
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Engineering 2019
The cemetery is an open space among the ruins, covered in winter with violets and daisies. It might make one in love with death, to think that one should be buried in so sweet a place. Percy Bysshe Shelley, Adonais Death tourism: let’s talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs among the tombs and rubble […]
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Marcel Proust. 1871 to 1922. Fifty-one years, most of them spent indoors. Asthmatic. Sickly. Spent the last years of his life in a cork-lined bedroom in Paris, writing in bed, sleeping during the day, working at night. Obsessed with memory, with time, with how the past lives inside us whether we want it to or […]
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Here I am stumbling down some nameless Paris side street, half in the bag on a bottle and a half of wine I probably couldn’t afford but bought anyway because what the hell, life’s short and I’m already here aren’t I, and I’m hauling this ancient Kodak with a Polaroid back, juryrigged on because I’m […]
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