Why do we fall in love with Paris?

Russia grumbles. It’s eaten something that won't go down, caught a cold it can’t get over. Doors slam. Everyone is telling somebody they can trust a dirty thing about somebody they can't, or about somebody who's died, or about somebody.

Paris purrs. Electric trains run silently over electric tracks, porpoising underground and above. Smart cars whiz through gnarled streets before nestling into petit niches. The language flows, mysteriously unobstructed by its own unflattering consonants. The corners of buildings and sidewalks and stairs are rounded by age, and Robert Doisneau photographs.

I can’t articulate why I fell in love with Paris, but I can tell you why I liked it:

Paris mixes the elegance and efficiency of a city like Stockholm, with the verve/freedom/happeningness of a San Francisco. Of course any local could point out a million flaws, but in my experience everything worked: I always got where I needed to get, I rarely waited in line, I didn't see backed up toilets or buildings in serious disrepair. To the contrary I ate well, slept well, and had nothing but pleasant interactions with the Parisians I met. You could say it’s simply a very wealthy city and that's true, but if wealth were everything I would be drooling over London.

I think the difference lies in Montmartre--the hillside neighbourhood crowned by the Basilique du Sacré-Cœur, historically the home of the artists, the poor, and the prostitutes (though it seems there are fewer of all three than in years’ past, especially the poor). Somehow the spirit of their Montmartre seems to flow down the hillside and splash through the city. It's the love for a flawed species, harbored by artists who also starved, poor folks who also worked like dogs, and hookers who also prayed forgiveness. Or maybe just the first group. By the cohabitation of the three groups, Montmartre framed the city as both romantic and realistic, urban and rural. It was a place of transition for all three, and in some ways still is. To further illustrate my point, Montmartre is where you find the last vineyard in the city, as well as its last working windmill. It’s also where you find the resting place of the 3rd century martyr St. Denis alongside a statue of Marcel Ayme’s man who walked through walls (I’d never heard of it).

The last thing I’ll say is that Montmartre appears to be the product of an organic, democratic development, unlike anything I’ve felt in Petersburg. Peter the Great didn’t commanded Montmartre to look like Montmartre, nobody did, or rather lots of people did over many years which is how it should be. Petersburg sickens me not because it is ugly, but because it was born of tyranny and vain mimicry. Falling in love with Petersburg, to me, would be like falling in love with one of the knock-off villages at Six Flags, to grossly oversimplify my own opinions.

The New Place

So I moved into a new place; packed my backs, rolled out of Tanya’s family and into a place in the old side of Vasilevsky Island. Ten minute walk from school, which will save me an hour a day. I figure I’ll spend it learning to cook.

Already I feel like a newer man. Life in the family was weighing on me. They were decent people, but no matter what I did they depressed me. Everything and everybody in that apartment was stagnant, and I felt I couldn’t escape the slow rot as long as I was there. I spent so much of the last three weeks being irritated at the food I had to eat, the endless arguments about the same old shit (Tanya yelling at Serioga for acting like a normal fifteen-year-old), the interminable sucking sound of the television, and the cigarette smoke that was killing my host-father.

There was nothing self-conscious about his smoking; he did it like a true addict, which is to say as unglamorously as a diabetic injects insulin. Cigarettes had become fully integrated parts of his daily cycle, his entire body had grown around the habit like a tree around an old wound. There was a crevice in his fleshy right hand––the one whose thumb he’d shot-off in the army––contoured to the cigarette. When he brought it up to his lips he inhaled gently, and when he brought it down the suction made a soft puckering sound, like a mother’s kiss.

I’d walk into the kitchen at three in the morning and he’d be there, smoking. He had these beautiful light blue eyes, always moist around the edges. To see him there, night after night, burning away his only free time on movies he’d already watched made me want to scream. He once told me he writes poetry, and that he used to play the accordion, but I’ve never seen him do anything you could call a hobby (except cook, which he did better than my host mother). When he was a young man he’d been to Odessa, the Crimea, and the Caucasus, and occasionally he’d speak of it with nostalgia. Every time he’d just about get carried away, then something would tick and he’d stare off for a while and when he returned it was not with the eyes of a young man, but of the old one sitting in front of me, for whom another adventure was––for reasons real and imagined––simply out of the question. The conversations ended there. I’d go to my room, he’d go back to his movie. Nothing ever changed.

Just want to end by saying happy birthday to everybody and happy birthday to Gaga. May 2008 kick ass for all of you.