I've just returned from a trip to Paris. The experience has made me almost contemptuous of the U.S. I'm sure that will pass, but for now I hold tightly to still vivid memories of the charmed city, and of the life lived by Parisians. With so little time to gain perspective, it's difficult to separate the virtues of Paris from the inherent excitement one feels for all things new--new surroundings, a new language, new perspectives and people, a different aesthetic altogether. I perhaps too easily become enamored of new places. But Paris really does seem to be special. The Parisians, and perhaps the French at large (I only saw Paris), seem to have a wonderful sense of beauty, and perhaps even more important, the importance of beauty within their daily lives. Am I being too dramatic? Perhaps. But everywhere I looked I saw beauty--in the way they build their streets and homes, in the way they work and do business, the way they dress, the way they eat, the way they interact with one another. Where were the ugly, brutish parts of Paris? Where was the crass, the ugly, the profane, the distasteful, the foul, the cruel? Every street had virtue. Every sight had context and reason.

History seemed to be a part of their daily lives. There is a continuity in Paris. They recognize and embrace their past and fold it into their ongoing lives. Of course there are museums dedicated to displaying their history as spectacle, but they also live among it. They attend mass in the same venerable medieval churches as they have for centuries. They seem to add to and augment, but do not supplant or excise their history, which it seems to me that Americans often are too inclined to do. They seem to be able to control crass commercialism in ways Americans are not so inclined. Why? Americans like to make spectacle of things to unnatural degrees. They crave the new and marginalize the old by compartmentalizing it as history, as spectacle. Americans worship and then sin. The French sin, but just a little every day. I think Americans need to venerate and exhault less, and internalize their own history more. It's all so much "otherness" in America, otherness as alienation. I think maybe the French have developed such a profound sense of beauty in their daily lives because of their relationship to their past, and to the things around them. They see themselves in others, in their surroundings, in their past. It should be no surprise, I guess, that existentialism florished as it did in France. They understood long before Sartre told them, that one can know oneself only through the "other." The other is to be embraced as reflecting ourselves, and so it must be valued and preserved.

Well, I've quickly gotten too philosophical. Let me explain in other ways what I loved about Paris. It is not peculiar to Paris, of course, but I love cities. I love always seeing new things. I love being absorbed in culture--other ethnic faces and languages, shops, papers, events, a million unexplored streets and corners, the oddities of other people, the joy shared by being immersed in the unfamiliar. I need to live in a city. I loved what I believed I sensed in Paris--a balance in the lives of Parisians between their life during the day, their work and the pursuit of a living, and their lives otherwise. It wasn't so much a balance as it was a blurring of the distinction. Maybe I imagined it, but I felt as though they were friends and neighbors, Frenchmen, lovers, and diners, as much as they were workers, merchants, bankers, and salesmen. The dicotomy between professional and the private life which one understands and respects in America was not as apparent, I thought. I loved walking among the shops outside the hotel in the morning, seeing people visit the pastisseries (sp?), and in the evenings seeing people walking from work carrying their bagettes and other food. I loved all of the cafes, the endless cafes, and the people in them sharing a bottle or wine, perhaps, drinking a beer, and talking, just sitting and talking. My god! Yes! We don't do enough of that in the U.S. I loved the history. I loved walking along the Seine and seeing the staggeringly beautiful buildings. I loved the medieval churches. I venerate the old so much. A church like Notre Dame, the immense beauty, the centuries, the stained class, the cloisters, the organs, the music, the rows and rows of small wooden chairs.... it all makes me want to drop to my knees and worship, pray. This is the best that mankind has produced; this beauty is the best that mankind has to offer. So I loved Paris. I want to go back. I want to see the rest of Europe. I want to see new places. I want a larger context, larger than the one I have in Rochester, NY, larger even than the U.S.