The Best American Travel Writing 2014 (15 page)

Some sadness, all right.

And that summer I thought about my friend so much. I continued to walk in the evening and, needless to add, ended up where I did go repeatedly, climbing the winding stone steps again to that place where I somehow definitely had to be, there behind the Gare de l'Est.

 

Actually, maybe it's time now to turn to what I mentioned earlier, the writers who have offered their own input on what I'm trying to get at, this key idea of a voice calling you to a particular location, which probably often happens while traveling. And it seems I should address Borges first.

The essential book of Borges in English translation is certainly the popular miscellany of his work,
Labyrinths,
a paperback published in 1962 by New Directions and reprinted who knows how many times. If you thumb toward the latter pages of the book, you will come to, on page 217, what has always been for me Borges's most powerful essay. Titled, as I said earlier, “A New Refutation of Time,” it's presented as a two-part affair (a tricky configuration, with several textual reversals that in themselves challenge chronology), and in it, through dazzling verbal legerdemain, Borges examines many of those from the long string of philosophical idealists who questioned the very reality of the supposed reality of existence, all descended from dreamy-minded Father Plato (who begat Berkeley, who begat Hume, who begat Schopenhauer, etc.). Borges even includes a consideration of Twain's Huck, as he, Borges, shows how time and also space are not the geometric, rigidly enforced concepts we often too readily believe they are, re-creating a scene from the Twain novel to reinforce how a strange and inexplicable feeling is possibly more befitting than any reasonable understanding of time and space being what actually defines experience:

 

During one of his nights on the Mississippi, Huckleberry Finn awakens; the raft, lost in partial darkness, continues downstream; it is perhaps a bit cold. Huckleberry Finn recognizes the soft indefatigable sound of the water; he negligently opens his eyes; he sees a vague number of stars, an indistinct line of trees; then, he sinks back into his immemorable sleep as into the dark waters.

 

With that reference and a pile of others, Borges eventually establishes the fragile nature of reality as we know it, just a glimpse of something fleeting and never clearly defined, there amid another more important psychic territory altogether. All the while, Borges is moving toward a detailed personal illustration of what he means. He describes how on an evening in 1928, while strolling in Buenos Aires, he found himself in a locale where he did seem to have gotten free of time and space as they are commonly accepted to be, had entered into that something larger, which, never being explained, possessed him with a quiet and true intimation of a state akin to maybe Huck's deeper sleep indeed. Listen to how Borges, again most beautifully, tells of it, a walk in the moonlight to the neighborhood of Barracas; it's an old and pleasantly leafy quarter of Buenos Aires (I once wandered around there myself) on the other side of the wide Plaza de Mayo esplanade and its aptly named and very pink presidential palace, the Casa Rosada:

 

The evening had no destiny at all; since it was clear, I went out to take a walk and to recollect after dinner. I did not want to determine a route for my stroll; I tried to attain a maximum of probabilities in order not to fatigue my expectation with the necessary foresight of any one of them. I managed, to the imperfect degree of possibility, to do what is called walking at random; I accepted with no other conscious prejudice on my walk than that of avoiding the wider avenues or streets, the most obscure invitations of chance. However, a kind of familiar gravitation led me farther on, in the direction of a certain neighborhood, the names of which I have every desire to recall and which dictate reverence to my heart. I do not mean by this my own neighborhood, the precise surroundings of my childhood, but rather its still mysterious environs: an area I have possessed often in words but seldom in reality, immediate and at the same time mythical . . . My progress brought me to a corner. I breathed in the night, in a most supreme holiday from thought. The view, not all that complex, seemed simplified by my tiredness. It was made unreal by its very typicality. The street was one of low houses and though its first meaning was one of poverty, its second was certainly one of contentment. It was humble and enchanting as anything could be. None of the houses dared open itself to the street; the fig tree darkened over the corner; the little arched doorways—higher than the walls—seemed wrought from the same infinite substance of the night.

 

And there he does find a certain sense of timelessness, unexplained because, again, it can't be explained. Nevertheless, this state of mind is very true, even to the point of being what he calls a “feeling in death,” not in any frightening way but instead in some underlyingly perceptive way, revelatory, with a personal deliverance beyond the trivialities of the mundane; it's as if his own everyday life, like that of Huck on the raft, has been fragile and illusory, a mere glimpse, until he finds himself easing out of it and delivered back into a realm of those deeper waters, returning at last into an ultimate essence, if you will.

The other writer I spoke of earlier, Louis Aragon, builds on this kind of experience and explores it in depth with 200 pages of probing meditation in his 1926
Le Paysan de Paris
(Paris peasant). For my own purposes here,
Le Paysan de Paris
might bring the argument into better focus, as it takes it back to the Paris that I myself have been thinking about. In fact, my time there that summer was spent mostly in the same part of the city that had provided a territory for considerable thoughtful exploration by the surrealists of the 1920s, including Aragon and also André Breton, the latter in what is today surely the best-known surrealist prose text of the period,
Nadja;
intensely autobiographical, Breton's novel has the protagonist, the author himself, repeatedly gravitating in his frequent long walks toward the Grands Boulevards and, more specifically (and a little spookily for me), to the very neighborhood where I was living: “Meanwhile, you can be sure of meeting me in Paris, of not spending more than three days without seeing me pass, toward the end of the afternoon, along the Boulevard de Bonne-Nouvelle between the
Matin
printing office and the Boulevard de Strasbourg.”

Early on in his own thoroughly mesmerizing book, Aragon wonders if reality is but “a delirium of interpretation,” and in the subsequent chapters he sets out on more or less a mission of exploring the Grands Boulevards that also attract Breton; he does so with a concentration on his favorite of the old
passages
(ancient shopping arcades) in the area, the Passage de l'Opéra, which, with its roof of cast iron and milky glass filtering the midafternoon sunlight, exists in an almost subaqueous glow for him, suitably oneiric. He approaches the whole project as if wandering through some foreign land, taking in everything with heightened perception at last, and in his repeated visits he responds to various enterprises housed within the mazelike and usually empty Passage de l'Opéra (a shop for ornate walking canes, another for trusses, a rundown café, even a “massage parlor” that appears to be only a ruse for outright hookerdom) with an awareness that declares transcendence is near, that he might eventually find himself at an exact place where it seems he was meant to be all along, perhaps has been all along, and valid insight almost beyond life—or better yet, an enhancement of life—is about to transpire; the impact of it all can render anything taken for granted in life suddenly in the category of the definitely mythic. Here's a borrowing from the original translation of
Le Paysan de Paris
by Simon Watson Taylor that the brave little publisher Exact Change used for its 2004 reprinting; Aragon's prose is appropriately lyrical as he senses a primal, even Edenic quality to it all:

 

It is you, metaphysical entity of places, who lull children to sleep, it is you who people their dreams. These shores of the unknown, sands shivering with anguish and anticipation, are fringed by the substance of our minds . . . [It was] this sensation of strangeness which filled me when I was still a creature of pure wonder, in a setting where I first became aware of the presence of a coherence for which I could not account but which sent its roots deep into my heart.

 

Lovely stuff, no?

 

And it echoes Borges's feeling in Barracas. And in a way, both writers with their own aimless walking are travelers, too, granting that it is foot travel they speak of and in their own cities. And aren't we all travelers in our dreams, wandering alone and solitary, constantly being drawn to a place where we
should
be, for the larger perception we
should
have, a voice often urging us on, as described? In my case the voice was nearly a distinct whispering heard as my own 25-buck, black-and-white nylon Reeboks shuffled over the sidewalks of Paris in the warm evenings of summer 2011, where despite all that sadness and also, and often, too much time on my hands in Paris to think about everything I had messed up in my life over the years, I did what I did.

I inevitably ended up
there
again.

It would happen on any one of those evenings. And just to look up between the rows of mansard-roofed buildings, as Rue Saint-Martin became Rue du Faubourg Saint-Martin, was to see at the far-off top of the slope the imposing Gare de l'Est—very white and showing new red awnings for its many repeated rectangular windows flanking a massive fan-shaped window, airily delicate and almost as high as the building itself—which meant I knew again where I was going to, had my cue, so to speak. And I started up that slight hill of Rue du Faubourg Saint-Martin leading me to the place, heading that way.

Early evening in Paris.

 

Yes, early evening in Paris, and it's balmy summer, the daylight still remaining but softened.

 

A wide cobbled plaza with taxi stands spreads in front of the station. Right beside it is a narrow street, Rue d'Alsace, which offers still more taxi stands; there's a long line of double doors to the station here, always open in summer, so you can look within to see all those people, shadowy and with the many destinations they have, moving across the polished terrazzo floor, almost like a glassy lake they're magically walking on this way and that, the news kiosks and coffee counters busy. A dim street, Rue d'Alsace is an odd one, too, in that it abruptly dead-ends—or in this case is interrupted—at a stairway with a double set of steep white stone steps that must date back to the mid-19th century, when the station was built. The steps, with sculpted banister rails, ascend curvingly on each side of a
very
odd little platform enclave about halfway up of weeds and litter and an arched, rusty iron door; that door looks more like an entryway to a burial vault than anything else, even if it actually leads to maybe some kind of functional utilities tunnel. The individual slabs of the steps are as worn as old bars of soap, and in the steep climb you begin to feel it in your calves, agreeably so, while the stairway continues to take you higher, finally to another level altogether, quite far above the station.

At the top, a true other world altogether suddenly opens up, because as the narrow Rue d'Alsace resumes again now on this higher level, you're not only well above Paris, it seems, but in a wide-open space removed enough from everything else in the clutter of the city that it can feel as if you aren't even in the city of Paris below.

There are ramshackle shops and cafés along one side of Rue d'Alsace, and on the other open side, across the street's sticky summer asphalt, is a low stone wall, graffiti-splattered, that looks out over the sizable expanse of the railway yards below, leading into the rear of the station. Now deserted, the long platforms go on for probably a quarter mile, and the rails atop the rusted roadbed are as shiny as liquid mercury, the crisscrossing overhead wires for the electrified trains a complicated, uneven dark mesh; announcements from the station play on the speakers, soft and warbly at this distance, and the chime music repeating its little truncated song of a few notes—the trademark jingle in all Paris train stations to signal announcements—is even softer and more warbly, nice. Or it's all so nice, in fact, that it could be
rare,
in that this is one of the infrequent places in the city where, without the clutter of trees or buildings, you are in a space open enough that the sky itself seems to dominate. And to make it better in Paris in July and August, that huge sky at the end of a summer day can go all unheard-of shades of rich color, orange and purple and even full-fledged scarlet, sometimes big gilded clouds thrown into the panorama to render everything more striking still. Men in grimy clothes congregate in packs along the wall in the evening and drink tall cans of beer, talking low, laughing low, Indian or African and delivered at last, surely, from labor at the end of a long day. Across from the wall, back on the other side of the street, the very first shop in the row of marginal enterprises—those shabby cafés, a couple of cramped Internet and overseas-phoning nooks, a tiny old hotel with nothing more for identification than the standard blue-on-white plastic
HOTEL
sign glowing—is a bookshop called Librairie la Balustrade, which is wonderful and strangely intriguing in itself. Its façade is painted a bright cream color, hopeful among the surrounding sooty buildings, with a small hand-scrawled card hung behind the glass on the front door giving the limited hours each week the shop is open; the books displayed in the windows are usually left-wing fare (ecology manifestoes, political manifestoes) or philosophical fare (anything from Kant clear through to Derrida) or mysteriously spiritual fare (meditation texts, narratives on the visionary), entirely intriguing. The bookshop seems suitable indeed for the mood of this particular enclave of Paris, to the point that you can't help but jot down in a pocket notebook every time you go there the titles of some of the latest arrivals displayed; such titles make for nearly little prayers in themselves and are often metaphysical in intent, no doubt, sometimes directly so, to cause you to linger on the sidewalk and, well, ponder: