Paris

I've totally fallen in love with this city. It wasn't the food, it wasn't the culture, it wasn't the architecture, gorgeous as it was. All it really took was a couple of hours on Saturday afternoon spent wandering a neighbourhood alone.

I went to Notre-Dame to look for some travel guides in an English-language bookstore I had heard about. As it turns out, Shakespeare & Co. is utterly brilliant. Just a tiny shop, shelves used as partitions, leaving the narrowest of corridors for the throngs of people to wriggle through, books stacked from floor to ceiling, broken tiles on the floor, an old well in the middle of the shop, a pile of coins in its centre. That alone wouldn't have been enough. No, it was the books. I actually wandered through the shop for a while, mouth slack as I read the titles of the volumes on the shelves. Literally, this was the bookshop of my dreams. History, literature, science fiction, vintage photograph books, quick and dirty biographies, wine guides, social science. Everything I could possibly want to read in my lifetime was stacked in those shelves. Even in the dustier corners far up in the regions beyond my reach, I saw names like Bacon and Aquinas sitting there patiently, waiting for me to muster the courage to pick them up. I think I could spend every day of my life in a shop like that. Prices are a little steep though.

I ended up hunting through the store with a Colin Farrell look-alike for a translation of Caesar's account of his conquest of Gaul. I actually found it before him, by poking through the classics section instead of the history shelves. Then I wandered down the Left Bank for a while, stopping to watch a group of roller bladers who had set up on one of the bridges to show off around three rows of paper cups. Spent a good fifteen minutes there, ooh-ing and aah-ing along with a pair of little British girls there on holiday with their parents and their dog, a huge, friendly, shaggy creature. Then I browsed the booksellers along the Siene, with their touristy gimmicks and rows of second-hand French books. Ended up buying a few gorgeous prints of 1930's black and white photographs.

I liked the Siene the way it was today. Dark, cold, the grime evident on the walls of the river. When it's bright and sunny, it somehow seems a caricature of itself. I had the sense of it today as a river around which a culture has spent the last two thousand years developing into the highest in the world today. It was old, not ancient. Not so much a sense of history as a feeling of age. It wasn't beautiful, it was entrenched. A part of the world that is not so much indispensable as would be missed if it were lost. A place of sentiment, not need.

The Paris I fell in love with this afternoon was not the Paris of beautiful boulevards and fine wines and fantastic food. That I like, not love. The Paris I see is the Paris that has aged, not beautifully, not tastefully, just aged so self-consciously and gracefully. A contradiction in terms? Perhaps that is why there really is only one Paris.