Paris, I Love You, But You're Bringing Me Down
“Feed the starving writers.” A middle-aged couple stared at those words adorning a glass- domed collection box on the floor. Shuffling past the sea of customers, they browsed the bookstore’s fiction tables and voiced their excitement in energetic Spanish. “A la velda que esta tienda es in-cre-íble.” It was unmistakably Puerto Rican Spanish—an accent I hadn’t heard since arriving in Paris three months prior. Perched atop a wooden ladder, I broke my cool professionalism and let myself be serenaded by the familiar sounds. This was my first day volunteering at Shakespeare and Company.
A semester before and across the Atlantic, Harvard’s hallowed halls had me restless. Bouncing back from the socio-linguistic trauma that was freshman fall, I learned to play the Harvard game and was, technically, winning. Semesters cycled by: class, lather, formal, hookup, rinse, coffee break, meeting, repeat. More often than not, friends of mine and I saw that simple formula result in a phenomenon called the Duck Syndrome. Coined by students at Stanford University, the term refers to students who appear to glide effortlessly through college life. Underneath the surface, they’re paddling frenetically to stay afloat. I refused to turn into that caricature and decided that it was time for a break. Paris will be different, I told myself.
When it wasn’t, I felt like crying, but never did. I went to Paris wearing a red peacoat, convinced that the city’s monochromatic madames et monsieurs were an overblown American myth. I rubied my lips for good measure. My delineated Cupid’s bow awed a grand total of two people: myself (easily impressed) and the one creepy guy who dubbed me a bitchy bouche rouge when I didn’t flash a smile at him as I passed him on the street (easily dismissed).
The city wanted me to pick and choose my raison d’être, a decidedly Parisian persona. I lacked the look, the cultural cues, and the subdued strut with which Parisians boasted about their freedoms. Too often, those freedoms were tethered to grandiose ideas of a faded empire. They also cost exorbitant amounts of money. My culture-shocked mind clicked upon recalling the French word “bourgeois.” With no structure to catch my fall, I drifted through the city, watching Parisians seamlessly exist.
One of those wistful treks led me to a beeline of people that curled by the Seine and into the welcoming glow of 37 Rue de la Bûcherie, Shakespeare and Company’s headquarters. Inside the pale yellow and forest green façade, a crowd cramped around writer Joanna Walsh, who conversed with one of the shop’s managers about her work. Walsh’s collection of short stories, “Fractals,” is laced with judgmental voyeurism. Her wit cracks like a whip. After reading a selection of her book aloud, Walsh mused about Paris’s cultural aversion to tourists, suspecting that it had something to do with their way of dress. Wearing unflattering hats, chest- dangling cameras, and walking shoes is their honest way of admitting that they don’t fit in, she explained. They simply dress appropriately for the occasion: a holiday from the self.
The self I had created at Harvard longed for a Moment, the kind no Instagram filter could ever pretend to capture. I assumed that, by default, Study Abroad in Paris let you pick a Moment like the pesticized fruit at your local, homegrown Whole Foods. The problem with Paris was that every imaginable moment had already been turned into a film-themed café or a commemorative tote bag. My holiday from my Harvard self seemed cheap and inescapably cliché. I couldn’t possess anything that wasn’t an obvious, nostalgic yearning for the Lost Generation, the Beat poets, or the student-driven May ’68 protests. Their stories, beloved by so many, barely applied to my experience, but maybe that was the charm of their aesthetic.
Shakespeare and Company, despite its proximity to the selfie stick magnet of Notre- Dame, retained an authentic, inimitable air to it. Tumbleweeds, a code name for writers and intellectuals that the shop shelters as guests, shared their living quarters with volunteers and staff between work shifts. The bookshop—with books for wallpaper, housing seemingly disparate aspects of my personality—soon became my nerdy, Anglophone haven. Organizing books and moving chairs around for events thrilled me. My friends, rightly so, were a little concerned about my levels of enthusiasm. “You went all the way to Paris to shelve dusty books?” some scoffed playfully. There was something about the shop that made me too happy to retort.
A week into the gig, I sat with a group of fellow volunteers next to the banks of the Seine. We brought bottles of red wine and rolling papers to season our conversations about Paris. Most of us ended up there in search of photogenic pastries, inspiration, and inklings of romance. “Improving French proficiency,” however, was the primordial official reason. I chuckled internally when I found myself taking a drag of another volunteer’s cigarette, admiring his ability to blow smoke rings. I’d forgotten what a Moment felt like.
I came back from Paris bare-lipped, but cat-eyed. My Harvard Moment hadn’t come yet, but I could tell it was incredibly close.