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But it all ended so abruptly. In less than
six months our project was born, and then died -- like so many ventures
before ours -- for lack of cash. I know that to be a fact, though
I still secretly think the rain may have had something to do with
it. The grey skies, the grey vision of the future that seems to
seep from the stone facades of so many buildings, from the stone
faces of so many people in this city.
The Seine is strangling the trees. The
economy is strangling the hope that might have turned the crisis
around.
And so, my story of Paris. The winter of
our discontent. A few images that remain impressed upon my memory.
Not the kind of stuff a correspondent files back home. Not news,
although news is there too. More like impressions. Omens. Like the
other day. The first clear day since I can remember. And the stream
of clouds in the evening sky that formed a huge white cross in he
sky. What was it telling us?
Paris, the city overflows with cold cruel
arbitrariness. At a whim the police stop this person and not that
one.
At night walking the boulevard I pass a
young man standing in the middle of the Boulevard Sebastopol crying
and shouting at another man standing on the sidewalk. The man in
tears ran. The other chased him. They ran, weaving in and out of
the moving traffic, down a darkened street and around a corner into
the night. The police pass yet again in their arbitrary manner.
They menace the African boys standing on the corner. They reassure
the old couple walking along the street, and they leave me feeling
the heaviness of the state. The coldness of the government. The
meaning of the word arbitrary.
And the rain continues to fall. I stare
into the greyness of Paris. The grey sky blends at the edges with
grey roofs, that blend, too, with grey buildings, right down to
grey stone sidewalks and stone grey people who walk the boulevard.
The question becomes how to escape the greyness.
Suddenly, the old-ness becomes apparent.
The veneer of modernity has been lifted a little. In fact, the weekday
crowd is the veneer of modernity that covers the old-ness of the
city. Without their fast-paced deal-making do-or-die presence the
age of the city and it's haughty calmness in the face of so much
chaos is obvious. Every stone in the street, every wrought iron
balcony shouts this message--a message of arrogant calm and stability
that mocks the self importance of all the wheeler-dealers hustling
to survive in the streets. They won't survive. They will never outlive
the carved-in-stone stability of the city itself. The city that's
role in history is more important than any individual or government
that ever lived in it.
The demonstrations, the militance. The
desperation, the cynicism. The harshness of the Right and the police
asking every Arab for papers, the trendiness of the slogan solutions
provided by the Left and the newspapers for the homeless.
The only answer is found in the obliteration
offered by the nightlife.
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