Japan felt like a world from the seventies to me, thus something out of my early childhood. It was a quality from before the glamorization, competition, fracturing, and corporatization of America. And though Japan was obviously denser and more wonderful than the suburban desolation I knew as a kid, it also shared in a feeling that was already disappearing as I became conscious of the world around me, a kind of human scaled world where everyone experienced the same institutions and schools and stores, and the distance between success and failure, while still tragic, was at least not so astronomical.
France is something else.
Living in this grand old city feels like something from well before I was born. It feels like something I imagined belonged to my parents or even more, my grandparents and great grandparents. It is a world of the fifties or, maybe better, the early nineteen hundreds. It is all my dreams of New York City. It is a much more wild sense of city.
We live now in a small attic apartment on what to you is probably the sixth floor, though here it is the fifth. And although it is a nice building in a frankly lovely and brilliantly situated area, it is also a small apartment in a building full of modest apartments that fill the place up, and it is sitting on a street and in a city among hundreds, no, thousands of more buildings much like it, all six and seven and eight stories high. The neighborhood teems with businesses, shops, bakeries, corner stores, cafes, all to serve the very, very many people who live here. And when I walk up and down the staircase of my building, which I so often do, well, that is what I wanted to tell you about.
I feel like I live in a tenement building. Maybe even, strictly speaking, I do. And though I don't at all mean to compare to the miserable side of tenement living; poverty, rats, poor ventilation, crowding, and discomfort, there is something. There is a sense of so much life here. Every flight of stairs I take has different smells, sometimes different sounds. A mere trip outside might include on our way down our single stairwell of solid stone, wrapping an ancient elevator, and leaning with age, the scent of burning rubber, sewage, herbs, mouth watering cooking, perfume, murmuring voices, smoke, raw onion, and more. I can hear children playing on the third floor. Outside the streets are always full of people, even as today in the rain and in Winter. It is all modern and full of modern things, but my god, it just seems like it has been like this forever.
Today we had some things delivered, including a turntable, and then waited for some item that never came. We went out finally, after giving up, in the early evening, to buy chocolate and a record album by John Coltrane. We walked down to the stones of the empty beach and watched the storm waves roll in. The ocean is all dark at night, but when there are waves and they crash, the foam of them is brilliantly illuminated.
I brought home an "Oaklahoma" burger from a great burger place run by an exhuberently manic man, but we ate the french fries from the brown paper bag while we walked, steaming hot out of its carton, finishing them at the top of the stairs and as we entered our apartment, and surely leaving our own smell for whoever would be coming home next.
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