Paradise Lost

By Laird Stevens

Early in the first chapter of Paradise Lost, twelve-year-old Lewis discovers something essential about adults: "However much posturing they did, however they might pretend otherwise, however indignantly they might defend themselves, I knew that adults were fallible." They will believe anything: that sex is bad, that God exists, that God doesn't exist, that patriotism is good, that virginity is good, that girls are inferior to boys--they will believe anything that other people believe.
Lewis cuts through that with an axe. "If you had an opinion of some kind, I wanted the reasons for it, and I didn’t want them hidden away: I wanted them right there, in your hand, marshalled and battle-ready." He will not believe without evidence. He is a firm agnostic. He would love to believe in God, and he would love not to believe in God, but there is no evidence that compels him either way. So he makes up his own ethical system, and in that system, pleasure is good (if it doesn't hurt others) and condemnation of pleasure is stupid. What matters most is being free to find one's own sources of pleasure.
The novel goes everywhere Milton goes, but never has the same answer. God is irrelevant. Women are in every sense equal to men, and in terms of their courage and strength, usually superior to men, because they are the ones who give birth to children. Sexual desire is normal, healthy and good for both women and men. Evil is not a Satanic plot, but the result of people believing in their own infallibility. We don’t need God, because we ourselves are powerful gods, creating our own lives, but we must realize that our powers are limited, and we must be humble gods. Paradise is neither a place irrevocably lost nor an eternal destination. Paradise is life itself.
But paradise is nevertheless easily lost. People are damaged by circumstances, by each other, and by their own lack of self-awareness. Their lives become the opposite of paradise. Paradise is lost, too, when people turn away from life, and seek something greater. And finally, paradise is lost when we fail to preserve the past. Our paradise then fades into nothingness.
However, if we recognize that life is the ultimate goal, and value the present above everything else, and keep the past alive as best we can, then paradise is something that can be regained.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Laird Stevens
• Release date: Oct 24, 2012
• ISBN: 9780986706639

Laird Stevens

THEMATIC BIO Laird Stevens My life–at least, the part of it that I still carry with me today–began with music. My father played the piano by ear. He played, and I wrapped myself in the sound. He was my earliest God. One evening, when my mother put me to bed, she said that I would soon begin piano lessons, and the thought was so electric that I stayed awake until morning. Seven years later, my beautiful world–impossibly intricate, and shamelessly cerebral–was destroyed in a flood of hormones. There were a few survivors, but the shadow of sex was on them all. To make sex pretty, I called it “love” (as I had been trained to do), but it wasn’t love, and it didn’t become anything like love until a few years later. Certainly, it had to do with love, but the walk from sex to love was long and difficult to understand. After that, there was literature. At fifteen or sixteen, I developed an incomprehensible thirst for other people’s stories. My story, which was both new and exciting, was not yet connected to anything else. Reading Dickens and Dostoevski and D.H. Lawrence, I found a place to fit in. And then, finally, there was philosophy. Descartes showed me that nothing I knew was certain. At sixteen, it was easy to agree. I knew that music and love were guiding my life. I didn’t even presume to ask why. I knew that if I ever made sense of my life, it would be in terms of the stories that I now read compulsively. But after reading Descartes, I started caring about something quite different. I started caring more about questions than I did about answers. I would get my answers in due time, once I started asking the right questions. And the right questions were the ones that cut deepest into my belief system, the belief system that I, like Descartes, had patched together uncritically from childhood to the present. Much later (I was twenty-two at the time), I was reading Plato and discovered what he called “the divine madnesses.” These were things that we did that made us feel like Gods. But, and this was an insurmountable ‘but,’ we were not Gods, and could never do these things unless we had the help of the Gods. The four divine madnesses were music, love, poetry and philosophy. Music was possible only if a God took over our bodies and wrote it for us. The same was true of poetry. Love (and I had no trouble believing this) was a gift of madness from the Gods, and so–unparadoxically–was philosophy: the reasoning of a God was simply madness to a person unpossessed. So said Plato, at any rate. But whatever issues you may have with Plato, remember that no one since has had any better ideas. We still talk about how musicians and poets are “inspired” when they write: they breathe something in, and this allows them to create. Science has nothing useful to say about love, and I have no good answer to the question, “Where do ideas come from?” They gallop into my consciousness like wild things, and if I manage to catch the good ones and let the bad ones go, my day is nothing less than extraordinary. My commitment to the idea of divine madness varies, but it is the most useful one I have ever found when it comes to defining my own life. It is one that I would recommend everyone try on for size.

Book preview

The novel offers an impressively detailed, deep look at life.

Intimate, reflective and worthy of a thoughtful read; don’t rush this one.

Kirkus Reviews

Paradise Lost

By Laird Stevens

Paradise Lost

By Laird Stevens

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Copyright 2012 by Laird Stevens

All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

eBook edition by Paris Press Inc., Montreal, Quebec, Canada.

eBook edition ISBN 978-0-9867066-3-9

Table of Contents

Paris

Montreal

London

Cambridge

Return to Montreal

Return to Paris

Paris

I was born in Paris at the age of twelve. I did not spring forth, fully grown like Athena, but had a long and incremented birth, a series of beginnings I connected only later on. The whole process lasted roughly a year, and every day I made the same discovery, one that filled me with both shame and exhilaration: until that moment, I had been living in a cave.

I remember one of those beginnings with startling vividness. My mother was driving our new Renault Quatre, a white metal box with miniature wheels. And the metal was thin. I was convinced that if I stamped my foot on the floor it stood a good chance of going right through. I was also convinced that my mother had shown no judgment in buying the car, or worse, that she had been swindled outright. However, there was one thing I knew with Cartesian clarity and conviction: my mother was incapable of driving a stick shift.

This baffled me. When I thought about adults, which was rarely, I conceived of them as beings who had each acquired a vast array of skills. I also thought that all adults mastered the same set of skills, just as children at school all learned the same subjects. At some point, I reasoned, adults became saturated with knowledge, and then they left childhood forever and began to do whatever adults did. I was incapable of foreseeing this point in my own future, and had no real idea as to the extent of these activities, but I did know that every adult I had ever met could drive a car effortlessly.

My mother, however, could not. Her feet seemed not to be joined to the same body. One was always too slow, so the engine either screamed like a ghost, or coughed like an old man and promptly died. It is true that she got along quite well if she could sail /down the road in a single gear and didn’t have to stop, but this happened infrequently.

The only way I could make sense of this character flaw was by analogy to former classmates. Some could not ingest the curriculum; they stayed behind while the rest of us moved up a grade. For the first time, then, I saw my mother as somehow deficient, a sort of failed adult. This gave the world an utterly new face. My mother had always known everything. There was no part of life that had escaped her. She knew about the Canadian fur trade; she knew what was involved in the manufacture of soap. She knew about the Romans, the mating habits of bees, the different types of clouds; in short, there was nothing I learned at school that she didn’t already know. On top of that, she knew where to buy trousers, how to bake bread, when to plant tulips, how to both assemble and fly a kite, and why a rainbow forms after the rain.

Even more spectacular was her ability to read a newspaper to find out where a movie was playing, or decode a set of instructions and then successfully use a new appliance. I read, of course. But I wasn’t yet adept at changes in context. I wanted my stories to be linear; the jumbled mosaic of a newspaper defeated me. I could recognize a box score–could see it as a box score–but an index was just a meaningless list of words.

My mother, though, had made the mysterious meaningful. She had been my passkey to the gates of the world. Until now, at least. Now, she had unmasked herself; now, she was someone who couldn’t drive a car. This was made worse by the fact that she had recently made me the car navigator. I directed, and she drove. This created a relationship of equals; we both sat in the front seat, the driver and the navigator. But the driver wasn’t doing her job, and so at the same time that she was elevating me to the position of adult, I was demoting her direct the other way.

But there was nothing damning in the demotion. It seemed she would never learn the use of the clutch, but I had been conditioned to tolerate that. Indeed, I had been taught that the proper response to frailty, weakness and stupidity was not just tolerance, but indulgence. For weeks, then, I absorbed myself in other things. This was my first experience of maps, for instance.

At first, I didn’t trust them. I had always found my way by sight and feeling. I had chosen from the manifold those pictures that were relevant to me. The pictures were rich in information, and therefore served as reliable cues. I followed my eyes, as it were. But a map was an analog, and the analogy was difficult to grasp. It contained none of the cues I relied upon: no mossy walls, no zinc rooves, no golden domes. I still don’t understand how a numerical code becomes an electrical impulse that vibrates a membrane that punches the air that we then hear as music. When I was twelve, I didn’t understand how the map related meaningfully to the city, how this could possibly signify that.

On the other hand, what makes a map useful is precisely how informationally poor it is. A map is a god’s eye view of the earth, but a view that has been purged of interest. All that remain are name and direction. But this bowdlerization of experience has a happy consequence: maps allow us to make predictions. If the Plan de Paris par Arrondissement says that after rue de Vaugirard intersects with rue Madame, it will reach the northwest corner of the Jardin du Luxembourg, you can put money on this happening. Maps work.

I found myself entranced. If the world were ten thousand times smaller, I could lay this grid on the ground and match the city’s skeleton exactly. On top of that, I could use the map to gain information about places I’d never been before. I could travel around the neighbourhood, find my way home from Au Bon Marché, revisit the basin in the Luxembourg. I could see how far it was to the river and plot dozens of ways to get there.

The day finally arrived, however, when it was no longer possible to ignore my mother’s misadventures with the clutch. We were at a crossroads and had sat through two green lights without once getting into first gear. I looked at my mother with increasing alarm, and was puzzled by her apparent serenity. Then I realized, as though I had woken up in a cold shower, that my mother was simply pretending! She was pretending that the last several minutes hadn’t happened! She was pretending she knew how to drive!

I was stung by the shamelessness of the lie. She might as well have pretended to be invisible. And then it occurred to me to wonder, what else might she be pretending about? She had certainly pretended that Paris was an appropriate place to learn about gearshifts. I was incensed. Incompetence was one thing; pretense was quite another. I threw myself out of the car and stormed away.

It is here in the story that my mother likes to say, "And do you know he found his way home all by himself? Lewis was such an intelligent child." But this is not the ending that my story has. It’s true that I had lived in Paris for only a month, and that I spoke no French, and that I had no map. However, I had been pouring over the Plan de Paris for weeks and had travelled much further by map than by car. Much of it I had memorized unconsciously. Furthermore, we did not as yet travel far outside the sixth arrondissement. (The Louvre was merely a bridge away.) Finding my way home wasn’t quite the Odyssey my mother claims it was.

But something momentous did happen on that day. That was the day I discovered adults were fallible. In those early, heady days of being born, I would not have generalized in this way. But a flag had been set, and I never again took an adult’s word on faith. However much posturing they did, however they might pretend otherwise, however indignantly they might defend themselves, I knew that adults were fallible.

* * * * *

Home was rue du Cherche-Midi, and everything about it was alien. The double doors to the building were made not of glass, as they would have been in North America, but of wood, as most doors in Paris are. They were thick and heavy, like doors to a vault, seemingly designed to keep strangers out and preserve the treasures within. The ornamental wrought-iron grill on each of the doors added to this illusion. In the centre of the grill was a dancing angel, naked and evidently fond of food. She was smiling, perhaps even laughing. Perhaps she was laughing at any heathens who might be thinking of storming the building.

The doors were always locked from the inside, and so the building seemed impenetrable, even to those who lived there. However, there was a doorbell to the right of the doors that solved this problem. It wasn’t a doorbell in the sense that it rang a bell somewhere inside the building; it simply released the lock and allowed entry. In other words, the doors were ornamental; they were merely a show of strength, and had no substance.

Inside, the corridor was dark, lit only by the light in the office of the concierge. The concierge was an old woman who wore many layers of clothing and spent her day huddled over an ancient black sewing machine. The minute-light was equipped with low wattage bulbs so it was never more than twilight on the spiral staircase, even on the brightest of days. We lived on the third floor, if you count from zero, as the French do.

I remember that the apartment stood in pleasant contrast to the stairs; it was brightly lit from one wall to the next. But as to the layout and the rooms themselves, I have retained little. I have no memory of ever entering the bedrooms of either my brother or my mother. I think they were at the back of the apartment, behind the dining room. Of the dining room itself, I remember only the wallpaper. It was yellow, but an almost offensively anemic yellow, on which was laid a pattern of gold ridges. I always felt like a visitor in the dining room.

I believe the kitchen was cramped, the fridge tiny. But we soon accommodated to this. The French have a healthy obsession about food, and that is that it must be fresh. Nothing is frozen, nothing is packaged, nothing is bought for tomorrow–so nothing needs to be kept in the fridge. There is no centralized system of shopping for food in Paris; everything is local. Within two hundred feet of our front door, there were three bakeries, a butcher and a greengrocer. In a few days I knew the schedules at the bakeries, and so our bread was not just fresh, but always hot.

Our toilet was in a small closet by the stairs. The closet’s left wall followed the curve of the stairs, making the road to the toilet much narrower than the toilet area itself. We had to approach it sideways. My grandfather, who was large but not especially heavy, had a hard time squeezing through. His visit was a short one.

The bathroom had a bidet, which I simply assumed was a toilet for girls. I’m not sure why I made this assumption. However, I had for the longest time considered girls a superior stock to boys. There was something quite nasty about boys. Boys belonged to the body. They liked to push, and if possible inflict pain. They took a vulgar delight in bodily excreta of all varieties. They were mean, they were rude, they were thuggish. But girls–there was something very fine about girls. It was always a relief to be allowed into their company. Girls were in control of themselves. They were patient. They knew interesting things. They were clean, polite and pleasant, and usually fair-minded. Boys were chained to the earth; girls were like visible music.

Small wonder, then, that I thought the bidet was a toilet for girls. The thing looked like a toilet, and so undoubtedly was one. I knew it wasn’t for boys: boys were messy and loud. Girls, on the other hand, were so adroit that they could easily converse with the person in the bath and use the toilet simultaneously. I didn’t know why they would want to do this, but felt sure that if I asked, an explanation would be provided.

Another startling feature in the bathroom was that it was equipped with both eau potable and eau non-potable. I was alarmed by the fact that eau non-potable was even a possibility. What if you made a mistake, as surely was conceivable if your head was hazy and the morning dark? What if someone had hooked up the pipes incorrectly? What if you fell asleep in the bath and swallowed some of the bath water by accident? For a while, these questions perturbed me greatly. Then, when none of us died or got even a little sick–in other words, when habit had wreaked its magic–my mind beset itself with other issues.

All I remember about the living room is my piano. It dominated the room, or it did from my perspective at least. It made me feel important, because I alone played. I was the reason we had a piano. At the same time, I found it somewhat daunting. The rental cost was high, and I practised hard to justify the expense. (It was a baby grand Erard, the piano-makers favoured by Liszt.)

The only room that I recall with any precision was my bedroom. My bedroom was my temple to myself, the place where I was fully autonomous, the place where freedom began. Especially in the first few months, I would lie in my bed in the dark, and listen to the heart of the city. My bed was like Odysseus’s bed, carved from a root that anchored it to the ground. But my root led to the deepest part of Paris, and from there somehow connected to every other building, every other apartment, every other room for miles around. Never before had I felt this way, as though I were a piece of something much larger, as though I were listening to the very act of living. It was like a hum with no sound, a pulse inside a mountain.

Sometimes I would lie in bed, and I couldn’t find the pulse in the mountain, and then I would think about the past and how little sense I could make of it anymore. I had been a cub, and then a boy scout. What gain was there in that, for either my parents or me? Was I going to be a sailor, that I should know so many knots? Why teach me how to survive in the wild when my life would be spent in a city? Why sing silly songs, and pretend we were having fun, when no one present had any real idea of what fun was?

I had played baseball and hockey for years, and played them not as a game but as a possible future profession. What gain was there in that? When my career choices were three (for there was also a chance I would be a concert pianist), it made sense to throw my entire soul into these sports. But here in Paris, no one played either baseball or hockey, and a year away from either sport would destroy any skill I might have acquired. Furthermore, now that I was away from sport, I was glad. My parents thought I liked to play hockey, but I saw now how little they understood. Apparently, someone had told them that boys liked hockey; wishing to please me, they had pushed me into the game. I went willingly, because they were adults, and adults knew everything, especially everything children liked to do, whereas I was only a child and had no such knowledge. And I had liked it, but mostly because I thought I should. My goal had been to please them, and my compliance achieved this completely.

This was typical of my whole gestation period, which is how I now thought of my childhood. Nothing meant anything beyond itself. History did not exist. When my parents bought their house, it was not yet built, and the road that ran in front not yet paved. The house was made of brick, as were the identical houses on either side and across the park. They were its first tenants; I was the first child born.

My life was a succession of moments, a chronicle of days. Each day was a new piece of music, each moment a separate photograph. But although my mind was clear, and I could retrieve the past at will, my memories were sorted alphabetically, as it were. Things had happened to me, and I had filed my experiences, but I was not yet a participant in my own life. Events had meaning only inasmuch as adults blessed them with their approval.

Then came Paris. In Paris, every moment was tinged by something pointing beyond it. History was inescapable. To get to my piano lessons at Cité Internationale des Arts, I had to walk behind Notre Dame Cathedral, construction of which began in 1163, or nearly five hundred years before the founding of Montreal in 1642. I had no point of comparison for Notre Dame. In a shock of recognition, I realized that I was experiencing beauty for the first time. Here it was: simple, modest, restrained, but powerful and starkly splendid. Here it was.

I would lie in my bed at night, wondering if I had a place in all of this. I felt like I was standing on the edge of a story, but a story I wanted to create myself. And the story I would tell would be would a real story, a story that revealed its own significance when told. I felt the city reach into my room to draw me out. And beauty was everywhere I looked, after that.

* * * * *

I didn’t know what to think of all the churches. At first, I felt like I was trespassing: I felt ashamed. It was the sort of shame I had felt only once before. When I was seven, and willing to read most anything, I had picked up our family copy of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. Like most children, I enjoyed reading about creatures who were smaller than I was. I had just finished Stuart Little by E.B. White and The Water Babies by Charles Kingsley, and my expectation was that the little women in question would live under a mushroom, be able to turn themselves into birds, and triumph over creatures as unusual as they were. When I realized that the story was about the lives of four human sisters, I was mortified. This was a book for girls! I had somehow stumbled onto forbidden ground, where the secret ways of women were laid bare. I quickly snapped the book shut and returned it to the shelf, hoping no one had seen.

I felt the same way about the churches. First of all, they were Catholic churches. I had no idea what the words meant, but I did know that my school was a Protestant school, and that my church was a Protestant church. I also knew that there was a rupture of some sort between Protestants and Catholics, although this rupture in no way prevented me from being friends with Catholic children, and the substance of the rupture was unknown to me.

Also, my parents were not just Protestants, but Unitarians, and Unitarians have odd beliefs. For instance, they don’t believe in religious instruction for children. Church for me was therefore more of a club. They do believe in tolerance, however, and themselves tolerated a number of atheists among our congregation. As a consequence, I gradually grew to think of God as belonging more to the Catholic side of things than ours.

For a while, then, it was difficult to escape the feeling that God was waiting for me at the top of the church, and waiting with a raised fist. However, it wasn’t long before this trepidation passed. God had not punished me for anything, as far as I could tell.

Another thing about churches was the problem of God. God wasn’t part of my family life at all. When I found out about God’s existence, I was shocked. This changed everything. This was so central, so basic a piece of knowledge that I wondered why no one had told me about it before. For weeks, I wore my Sunday best in case He should want to meet me. I didn’t play, and everything I did seemed wrong. My parents’ wilful refusal to pray before dinner now alarmed me. I desperately wanted to pray at night, but didn’t know the words to any prayers.

But then: time passed. Life went on as before. For a while, I thought God might be a kind of adult hoax, like Santa Claus. But that wasn’t possible: everyone took God very seriously. I puzzled about this for a long time, and at the end of that time, I realized something: adding God to the world had changed nothing.

Since then, I had thought about God a good deal more, and other questions had occurred to me. How did anyone know, for instance, that God had created the universe? If He had, then nothing was alive prior to Creation, so no one could have witnessed Creation. What grounds, then, did anyone have for believing it? Another thing: it seemed beyond debate that there was evil in the world. If God was good, which seemed unquestionably the case, and if God was powerful enough to create a universe, why didn’t God put a stop to it? Didn’t He want to? And if He didn’t, why on earth not?

Then there was the problem of knowledge. In my experience, the difference between right and wrong was often quite subtle, and often changed from one authority figure to the next. A person who knew the difference between right and wrong would escape all punishment and be loved by everyone. And yet the one fruit banned by God was from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. This made no sense to me at all.

Later on at Lycée Montaigne, these problems would deepen as I learned for the first time in history class about ancient religions. Try as I might, I couldn’t think of the sun as a god. I couldn’t believe there were many gods. I laughed nervously when sibling gods got married. I thought it was a joke. This was not religion; it was insanity. The question that arose immediately was the obvious one: would some future people laugh at our religion? I had no answer to any of these questions, and so shelved them. Besides, I was much more interested in this life than anything that lay beyond it.

Be that as it may, my mother had to do something with us during the months before school started. There were churches almost on every block, and they were open all the time, and they were free. Sometimes, it seemed as though our trip to France had only one purpose: to visit as many churches as possible. However, once I had separated the house from its owner, I quite enjoyed the visits. The churches reminded me of the cave in the story about Ali Baba. They were massive, strangely cold, and breathlessly quiet. Far above, the stained-glass windows pulsed like enchanted paintings, and the light that filtered through them was thin and pale and made everything glow, as if by magic.

Apart from Notre Dame, the church I liked best was Saint Sulpice. It was the church nearest our apartment. Like Notre Dame, it was a black, hulking giant. Unlike Notre Dame, which was impossible to see unless it was right there in front of you, Saint Sulpice sprang up unexpectedly all over the place. However, it was always the south tower that was visible. From most parts of the Luxembourg it was hidden, but then suddenly came into view above the roof of the Petit Luxembourg. Down the length of Vieux Colombier from Cherche-Midi, it looked like a rising whale crashing through the rooves of the buildings surrounding it.

From Place Saint Sulpice itself, the church is grand, stately and symmetrical, apart from the towers. Some days it seems aloof; on others, it is oddly welcoming, like a great stone mother. I have a composite memory of Saint Sulpice, one that has been forged from countless approaches and countless shades of light. But there is an image that always superimposes itself on this memory. That summer, before school began, we had gone to Place Saint Sulpice for ice cream and lemonade. In a line skirting the church were perhaps a hundred young girls, dressed all in white, their hair like polished metal, their eyes excited. Today was the day of their confirmation.

I found myself moved by the spectacle. They were so beautiful, so innocent–so real. I felt a sudden desire to go with them, into the church, and listen to the organ and share the joy they felt this day, this long awaited day, that had finally arrived when they, and their friends too, would become full members of the Catholic church. But instead, I took a picture, and went back home.

* * * * *

Before moving to Cherche-Midi, we stayed in a small hotel about half a kilometer away, just across the road from the Luxembourg Gardens. It was the Hotel des Principautés Unis at 26 Servandoni. It was a very grand name for such a modest hotel.

The opposite was true of the Luxembourg Gardens. The Luxembourg is nothing if not majestic. (It was built by the wife of a king, after all.) The principle underlying its construction is that life is a chaos to be tamed. The garden is a monument to symmetry. At the north end stands the palace. Stretching south are four great lawns that surround a hexagonal basin of water, the whole in the shape of an immense southward fleur-de-lis. From the top of the fleur-de-lis to the southernmost tip of the park there are rows of sculpted trees, their sides and tops cut square. To the right of this there is a tree nursery where trees are constrained to grow in the shape of candelabra.

Around each lawn in the fleur-de-lis runs a rail about six inches high. I found this strange. It hardly seemed an effective way to keep people off the lawn, but I couldn’t imagine what other use it had. Similarly, there were hundreds of green metal chairs neatly arranged all around the lawns, but no spectacle to look at, nothing on display but the park itself. It was like the room that Beauty finds in the Beast’s castle, the one with eight chairs, each facing a curtained window. When Beauty sits, the curtain is magically drawn. I didn’t see that happening here, however.

I had never thought of a sail boat as a toy before, but French children evidently did, for the basin was always full of them. The pleasure in it escaped me: you put the boat in the water and then–you watched it float around. Where was the skill? Where was the engagement? Nevertheless, my mother bought a boat for my brother, and he sometimes looked as though he was enjoying himself.

I had no boat to distract me, so I explored the park. I was interested in the statues of naked women, because this was my first experience of naked women. However, my interest was academic. I reflected merely on how different their shape was from my own. After all, they were women, and hence adults, and so of passing interest only. I did wonder, though, why so many of them were naked while the men, for the most part, were wearing clothes.

There was one statue I found especially attractive. It was the one by the Medici Fountain. A woman and a man were embracing; even then, still swaddled in immaturity, I felt the power of this woman’s eroticism. Above the pair was a much larger man who seemed to be angry. Later I discovered the lovers were Acis and Galatea, and that the giant was Polyphemus, the Cyclops who eventually lost his eye to Odysseus. Polyphemus was enthralled by Galatea, a Nereid, but she was repulsed by him, and in any case in love with Acis, who was more her size. One day, the giant discovered the pair huddling in each other’s arms, and in a rage, tried to crush them both with a rock. Galatea survived but Acis was killed. The statue depicts the moment immediately before their discovery.

I wonder if the sculptor intended this irony, that in the whole of the Luxembourg Gardens, this is the only piece of raw, unchained desire that has escaped the heavy hands of the artificer. The angry god is poised to unroot it, but the sculptor has frozen time: Acis lives, and Galatea loves. Everywhere else in the garden, reason is in control. But here, although its destruction is imminent, pleasure reigns.

* * * * *

Walking in Paris is an art. This is not something you will notice right away. If you are a tourist, it may escape your attention altogether. That is because you will visit areas that are crowded with other tourists, none of whom walk the way Parisians do. But if you live there, and go to school there, and especially if you are so young that everything you do stands a chance of being wrong, you will eventually notice that the only person bumping into things is you.

Parisians have a knack of knowing the full circle of their surroundings. They do not suddenly stop in the middle of the sidewalk unless no one is walking behind them. If someone is behind, they know this and step to the side. They never back up unless there is no one behind them. They don’t turn around unless there is room to turn around. They never, on any account, collide. This remains true even when it’s raining and everyone is carrying an umbrella. The umbrellas seem to be dancing, even choreographed, as they tilt varying degrees of left and right, and rise and fall in precise, rhythmic gradations. If someone’s umbrella won’t fit, then that person will often abandon the sidewalk for the street rather than interrupt the flow of the traffic.

This sort of behaviour is so widespread and so automatic it seems absurd to think it could have arisen naturally. And yet, if absurdity can be thought of as a range, then surely it is more absurd to think that Parisians–alone, of all the people in the world–are trained to be hyperattentive when they walk.

Perhaps the streets themselves force this habit on its people. Something surely does, for they all have the habit. Furthermore, it is a habit that is useful for more than just preventing collisions. Before I arrived in Paris, walking was not something I enjoyed for its own sake. When it had to be done, I did it, but my mind was always elsewhere. I quickly discovered that this approach to walking was no longer suitable. Even when paying fiercely close attention, you could easily lose your way from one block to the next. It defied explanation. You could cross the road, walk fifty feet, turn around, and the street behind would be unrecognizable. It was smaller, it had different shops, it had a new name. It was magic. There were times when I honestly thought the streets were alive.

Maps help, but not as much as you would think. The streets don’t seem all that complicated, and so you tend to rely on your sense of direction. (I later discovered that no Parisian makes this error. All rely on the Plan de Paris.) Then after you get lost, and peer in bewilderment at the map, and trace your way back to where you made your mistake, it will seem self-evident to you that the streets on the map are wildly different from the actual streets you are trying to negotiate. One of the reasons for this is that streets in Paris are not subject to logic. A street is the same as itself only on a map. In reality, it is two different streets. Going down, it is one thing; going up, it is another thing entirely. For instance, from Notre-Dame des Champs, if you walk east on along Vavin, it will seem airy and spacious because it opens on the southwest corner of the Luxembourg Gardens. If you turn around and walk back to Notre-Dame des Champs, it will feel like you and the street are a very tight fit, because now Vavin seems to be a cul-de-sac. And Vavin is merely one example of this. The same phenomenon occurs throughout Paris, and it is doubly true of the older sections of the city. Every building, every square, every church, every aspect of the city, changes shape, changes size, changes demeanour, changes mood, all depending on how you approach it. Or perhaps the streets really are alive.

They are not alive for motorists, however. It’s ridiculous to own a car in Paris, but everybody does. It’s ridiculous because the streets were built with horses in mind. On most streets, there is only one lane for traffic. If someone wants to park, a traffic jam inevitably occurs. It’s ridiculous to own a car because there is nowhere to store it. On wider streets, the outer lanes are for parking. On narrower streets, cars park on the sidewalk.

At the time I lived in Paris, every second car was a deux-chevaux. This was absolutely as it should have been. They were cheap and they were easy to fix. (For instance, you could buy a bumper, or a door, or a mudguard and install it yourself.) Once you found a spot, parking your car would often take ten to twenty minutes. You would gently rock the car back and forth, each time bumping the cars between which you were gradually inching. It took perseverance, patience and skill. But it also took its toll on bumpers, and meant they had to be replaced regularly.

When we drove, we always took our Plan de Paris. But we rarely did so when we went for a walk, especially in the first several months. As a consequence, we got lost a lot, and as a consequence of that, we were always asking for directions. The answer was always the same. Oui, madame. Venez, madame. We were led from the store. The owner pointed down the street. C’est par là, madame. Allez tout droit. C’est tout droit. (Before I realized that tout droit meant Keep going straight, I thought it meant, Keep turning right. In a North American city, this would be silly: most often it would amount to merely squaring the block. But in Paris, there was a certain plausibility to it.) The great irony in this was that with the exception of rue de Rennes and boulevard Raspail, there wasn’t a single straight road in the whole neighbourhood.

We often walked in the evening on rue de Rennes or boulevard Raspail. We would walk down Cherche-Midi to boulevard Montparnasse, and then along Montparnasse to Raspail, crossing first Vaugirard and later rue de Rennes. I thought Raspail was a marvellous street. As well as being straight, it was big, and grand, and roomy, and it was comfortable. There were four lanes for traffic, the northbound separated from the southbound by a median which itself was two lanes wide. Cars could park on western sidewalk, but not on the eastern one. We walked on the median, uncrowded by the massive six-story buildings on each side, the buildings that were so typical of Paris, buildings made of cream-coloured stone, and with grey metal rooves and giant doors, buildings with black steel poles guarding the ground floor windows, and wrought-iron lattices like protective shields for the French windows on the floors above.

But the buildings were so far apart that the whole sky was spread out above us, not merely the small strip that some other streets afforded. And being away from the buildings meant that I could focus on smaller, worldly things. There were the fat round columns that my friend Gabriel later said were called kiosques. They advertized movies and plays, and I could see the point of that, but on top of every kiosque was perched a cupola that strongly resembled a Mongol warrior’s hat. There were decorative iron grates around each tree, as though someone were afraid that without such restraints, the trees might wander off during the night. There was the smell, unique to Paris, of the metro through a grate in the sidewalk. To me, it smelled like sweet, musty rubber.

Perhaps what I liked best about Raspail was that it was relatively quiet and straightforward. It wasn’t without puzzles, however. For instance, on boulevard Montparnasse, we had passed both Vaugirard and rue de Rennes–we had left them behind. But now, walking north on Raspail, we crossed them again! Not only that: the next corner was Cherche-Midi! I didn’t see how this was possible, but there was no denying it was true. No street could be more obviously straight than Raspail, and yet somehow it had circled us home.

* * * * *

During my stay in France, Sheila was my link to North America. We had lived in opposite halves of a semi-detached house, had played together, grown together, everything always together, together like twins. When her family moved to New Jersey, I felt for the first time that ugly mix of emotions that comes when the world has suddenly, and irrevocably, become a much worse place. I felt confused and alarmed: this was a catastrophe! Every aspect of my life was intertwined with Sheila. When I thought of our being separated, my chest became tight and painful with emptiness. The day she left I could hardly breathe, so suffocating was the weight of the sadness. And then my entire body became numb, as the horror of loss sank in. For weeks, I lived on the verge of tears, fretting like a stunned and battered animal, waiting impatiently for night to come, when I could creep into my bed and cry without restraint until my mind, finally, mercifully, was flooded with darkness.

I survived her absence in part because I believed, and had believed forever, that one day she and I would be married. It wasn’t something we had talked about; it just made sense. Better friends were unimaginable. I would rather have grown up beside her, but we were not free to make our own decisions. When both of us were finished school, and enjoyed the freedom possessed by adults, we would right past wrongs and begin our lives again.

Our families visited fairly often, especially during the summers, and so Sheila and I remained bonded. Sometimes it seemed that the substance of my life–the school, the sports, the music–was only a cover story I used to conceal my secret self, the person I would be when summer came. Then she and I would find each other again, down by the lake, kneeling face to face on the dock, holding hands, whispering wishes, exchanging souls.

Even as a child, she was wise. She knew something that took me years to learn, that life itself is the prize, and not merely a road to somewhere else. She rejoiced in the bare fact of her existence. It was enough, it was more than enough, it was all she wanted. And so she gave herself with abandon. Her enthusiasm was hard as rock, her smile an irresistible invitation. She saw good everywhere. The person I wanted to be, I saw in her. She was my sun, and I was her planet.

In the evenings we would often skip stones on the water. She went first, always first. This was not because she was a girl, or because she was younger, two months younger. This was because she liked to play the game, and played it well, and knew it, and knew I liked to watch her play, which excited her, and made her want to show off, because it pleased me to watch her do so, and it pleased her to please me. And we would skip stones on the lake, standing in the shadows while the sun set into the water, until the evening was gone and the sky was dark.

But we never wrote until an ocean sat between us. Her first letter was tentative, even formal. Was it tough to go to school in French? What were the people like? She was in seventh grade, she said, attended loads of parties and went roller-skating every Saturday. She was twelve years old, and nearly five feet tall. She ended, Bye for now. I wrote back immediately, and so did she. She was glad to hear that I was glad to hear from her, because she was glad to hear from me too.

I asked her to send me her picture. Did she know–did I know–what I was asking? A picture is a permanent visa allowing open intimate access to another person. With a picture, I could see her when I pleased, independent of her consent. I could trace the shape of her face with my finger. Would she feel it? Was there some sort of magic in the world that would let her know my spirit was brushing against hers?

She didn’t send her picture; she said she didn’t have one to send. However, she promised to include one the next time she wrote, and so the deeper question was answered: I merited a picture. To reinforce the point, she called me twice by name in the letter. I knew how thrilling it was to write her name on the page, not at the beginning, but in the middle, where it didn’t belong and wasn’t needed, as though I was calling to her, and by calling could somehow make her appear. I sensed she was doing the same to me.

But then she talked about her friends, and going out on dates. Suddenly, I sensed her hand beginning to withdraw, and felt the cold it left behind. Here was a subject of which I had no experience, the alien country of boy and girl relationships. Much as I longed to speak to some of the girls at school, I had not yet met a single one. I felt that Sheila was racing ahead of me on the road to adulthood. But then she reassured me: she had gone out just once "with one kid for one day. Never again, she said, would she date a boy unless she was sure she liked him very much. My faith in the future was restored, however, only when I saw that she had signed her letter, Love, Sheila."

One thing in the letter confused me, though: she wondered if I could send my picture to her. I didn’t see what that would accomplish. Pictures privileged appearance. The categories ‘pretty’ and ‘beautiful’ applied only to girls and women. The category ‘handsome’ was for men. But I knew of no word in either English or French that one could use to talk favourably about a boy’s appearance. They could be neat, but that didn’t mean they were attractive. Boys, by nature it seemed, were the opposite of attractive. Even if they had feminine features, this could never be captured in a photograph. They would twist up their mouths to look like pigs. Not that I would do that, but even so, I had never seen a picture of myself that pleased me. I always seemed to be blocking the view, standing in front of something much more interesting than me.