A Paris verse

What can I possibly write about Paris that hasn’t already been said?

The row of tall windows before me began admitting the city's famous light no more than 140 years ago, or so I surmise by the exuberant style of the stone building that is my temporary home. The building is old by American standards but young for a place whose stories of human life began accumulating more than two thousand years earlier. The apartment where I sit faces the rue du Faubourg Saint-Denis, which today is the beating heart of a lively and diverse neighborhood and a vital artery connecting the city's ancient core with two of its great rail terminals. The street's density of Turkish, Kurdish, and other middle-Eastern food businesses reflects its history as a destination of immigration from those nations. Its old brasseries, some not yet having received the full polish that comes with a resurgent interest by the moneyed classes in this cultural relic, are a reminder of earlier arrivals of Alsatians after the Austro-Hungarian war. Long before that the street was known for its large prison complex, and before that as home to the royal stables and leather workshops, and before that was dominated by a large abbey and its many outbuildings, and before that it was probably a trade road.

Through many of those centuries this road was a route of royal procession, delivering monarchs into Paris after their coronations at the basilica in Saint-Denis; they officially entered this imperial city when they passed under the triumphal arch named for Louis the Great that demarcated the boundary between Paris proper and everything else. After death they were sent out the way they came, a symbolic return for interment at the same basilica, making way for the next guy.

In so many ways the rue du Faubourg Saint-Denis has held this singular meaning: as a way of entry. It is the same way today for me, and for the many thousands who continue to pass along here, learning the language and mixing cultures as they pass back and forth under the arch which still towers over this crooked and bustling old neighborhood. The cacophony of cultures, foods, and languages on the street today is at odds with the city's modern image of elegance, order, and luxury; in this place the city says welcome, come in, continue.

So: I have just used the history of one street as a lens through which to view and interpret its significance today. Have I reduced too far? Is it not too easy, in all cities but especially this one, to reduce the city to such a simple and linear narrative, past as foundation for present? The city's history influences its present tangentially, sure, but not often tangibly. It is of little consequence today that the a prison sat for hundreds of years at the top of the street, no more than it might matter a few hundred years from today that foot traffic from the two great rail terminals at the top of the street sustain its many small businesses and provide the pulse of its daily rhythms. History only really matters as long as the present moment; time, and urban life, march forward. An imperfect tool, and yet how else is there to describe a place, this place, whose historical richness is unavoidably present everywhere we look? And yet it's not nearly enough. The city's stories aren't linear. They branch; they tangle. They are a web. They disintegrate into obscurity or obsolescence, as Paris itself nearly did in the troubled Middle Ages, before reformulating and rising again.

Maybe I tack toward the visual: I could describe its ever-changing skies, which give its ever-changing light, which casts onto its edifices of creamy stone. So much stone: the ubiquity of this building material lends the city a feel of enduring permanence, and the light on stone makes the city positively glow. I could describe the city's graceful elegance; Paris is a city of masterful proportion, every detail in harmony, from the vast scale of the axis connecting the Louvre to the Tuileries to the Place de la Concorde to the Champs-Élysées to the Arc de Triomphe, right down to how the filagreed balconies on so many windows are just slightly modified at each floor to match the diminishing scale of the windows from ground to zinc-clad rooftop. Paris puts everything in harmony, and it's slowly but determinedly doing the same to me.

I'm far from the first to sing this tune. The marvelous light, the glorious and enduring architecture, the warmth and glow of stone, the personal transformation: it's all been seen and said. But surely it bears repeating! To these American eyes it all remains sumptuous and new, calibrated as they were to a culture of plastic, of disposable buildings, of disposable traditions, of disposable everything. And so the permanence of this city, of this very street, of the ever-changing light animating the textured stone of the buildings across the street for hundreds of years before I'm seeing it right now: in these things I will continue to marvel. Yes, it's all been said before. Yes, there's nothing new in this city so old and well-trod. Except one: I'm new in it. So too are the many newcomers this year on the rue Saint-Denis, with eyes fresh and hearts tugged down toward the arch and into the city's ancient heart. We've earned our place here. This time it's my turn to stand on that great heap of letters great and obscure and lay down my own verses about the astonishing life of this glorious place.