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I finally finished Paris to the Moon today. This working two jobs nonsense is getting in the way of my reading... It's a wonderful book, and I highly recommend it. Gopnik writes with a soft touch, and half-way through you discover that you're as deep in love with Paris as he is, even if you've never been. La Machine � Dessiner le Monde (A Machine to Draw the World) is perhaps my favourite of his essays. It starts with a gift his wife and son give him...basically a camera lucida. "You place a piece of vellum on it, and if the light's bright enough, and it has to be very bright, it projects the thing you're looking at right onto the paper. All you have to do is trace it." He goes on... "Tracing becomes a deep, knotty problem, a thing to solve, and I am completely absorbed in it. I take the Machine to Draw the World to the Palais Royal or the Luxembourg Gardens and just watch the screen, pencil poised, at the translation of Paris into this single flat layer of translucent, lucid shimmer. I no longer try to circus it, or mourn it, or even learn from it, since just drawing it is enough. What you really need from the world in order to draw it is a lot of light and for everything to just stand still." Makes me weep, every time. That and his description of the fight to save a local, well loved brasserie from becoming one more in a restaurateur's chain of eerily similar holdings. My Parisian self is prepared to fight to defend the Balzar to the end, whatever it takes. My American self suspects that the Balzar will stay the same, and then it will change, and that we will love it as long as we can. I don't know if it's being so tired for so long, or my sentimental nature, or an overdeveloped love of place, but those two sentences rouse in me a longing and despair and beautiful sorrow for the Real. Real places are difficult to describe, but easy to know when you find. The tea shop just inside the Burgate, in the shadow of Canterbury Cathedral, is Real. All Saints' Cathedral is Real, as is Milwaukee's City Hall. The small grocery stores in Toronto's Little Poland are Real. There's a used book store in Alpena, MI, that's Real and the old New American Theatre in Rockford, IL, was as Real as any place ever gets. Real depends on love and skill and time. There's no such thing as new-minted Real. New things can have Real potential, but too often they're designed to "look" Real without being the slightest bit so. Snap in muntins and Ye Olde Porche Lighte don't make a cheap house into a Colonial cottage. I suppose what I'm really weeping over the the loss of place. I know I'll be moving soon, and even though it's a positive move, I do know that some part of who I am is tied to the places I frequent. I'll lose some of that. |
