nostalgia for the present

It was unusually cold for the last day of May, and the boulevard Saint Germain was quiet for a Saturday night. The maze of a bookshop that sits in the glow of Notre-Dame cathedral had collected an eclectic mix of literary itinerants: couples had wandered in after their post-dinner Seine strolls, and solitary walkers sought refuge from the late evening drizzle. The crowd was clean and quiet; most of the people in the shop weren’t even browsing or milling, they were just standing. The gypsies had gone for the night and the clochards must have had a day successful enough to take them to some louche but legitimate bar in the Butte aux Cailles or off the Gare d’Austerlitz for a long and drawn-out pichet de vin. After closing up the bookshop – a job made quick with lots of Tumbleweeds bringing the benches in from outside as Collette, the black pup, sat atop as her throne-bearers bore the weight – James and I meandered up the winding pedestrian streets, albeit void of pedestrians, of the Latin Quarter and in the direction of place de la Sorbonne. Over white wine and ice cream we sat, crossing our legs back and forth, on the terrace of the café closest to the boul’Mich. Both in the same situation of having to leave Paris within a few months, the topic of home and the making of it inevitably came up. We talked about aesthetics, networks, and the art of leaving. “It’s just that life is so great here – without being reduced to any of the clichés of the magical Parisian life that is nauseatingly glorified – it just is what it is, and it’s fucking amazing.”