Travelers' Tales Paris (2 page)

We are all outsiders when we travel. Whether we go abroad or roam about our own city or country, we often enter territory so unfamiliar that our frames of reference become inadequate. We need advice not just to avoid offense and danger, but to make our experiences richer, deeper, and more fun.

Traditionally, travel guides have answered the basic questions: what, when, where, how, and how much. A good guidebook is indispensable for all the practical matters that demand attention. More recently, many guidebooks have added bits of experiential insight to their standard fare, but something important is still missing: guidebooks don't really prepare
you
, the individual with feelings and fears, hopes and dreams, goals.

This kind of preparation is best achieved through travelers' tales, for we get our inner landmarks more from anecdote than information. Nothing can replace listening to the experience of others, to the war stories that come out after a few drinks, to the memories that linger and beguile. For millennia it's been this way: at watering holes and wayside inns, the experienced traveler tells those nearby what lies ahead on the ever-mysterious road. Stories stoke the imagination, inspire, frighten, and teach. In stories we see more clearly the urges that bring us to wander, whether it's hunger for change, adventure, self-knowledge, love, curiosity, sorrow, or even something as prosaic as a job assignment or two weeks off.

But travelers' accounts, while profuse, can be hard to track down. Many are simply doomed in a throwaway publishing world. And few of us have the time anyway to read more than one or two books, or the odd pearl found by chance in the Sunday travel section. Wanderers for years, we've often faced this issue. We've always
told ourselves when we got home that we would prepare better for the next trip—read more, study more, talk to more people—but life always seems to interfere and we've rarely managed to do so to our satisfaction. That is one reason for this series. We needed a kind of experiential primer that guidebooks don't offer.

Another path that led us to
Travelers' Tales
has been seeing the enormous changes in travel and communications over the last two decades. It is no longer unusual to have ridden a pony across Mongolia, to have celebrated an auspicious birthday on Mt. Kilimanjaro, or honeymooned on the Loire. The one-world monoculture has risen with daunting swiftness, weaving a new cross-cultural rug: no longer is it surprising to encounter former head-hunters watching
All-Star Wrestling
on their satellite feed, no longer is it shocking to find the last guy at the end of the earth wearing a Harvard t-shirt and asking if you know Michael Jordan. The global village exists in a rudimentary fashion, but it is real.

In 1980, Paul Fussell wrote in
Abroad: British Literary Traveling Between the Wars
a cranky but wonderful epitaph for travel as it was once known, in which he concluded that “we are all tourists now, and there is no escape.” Tourism is one of the world's largest industries; which is horrifying indeed—hordes of us hunting for places that have not been trod on by the rest of us!

Fussell's words have the painful ring of truth, but this is still our world, and it is worth seeing and will be worth seeing next year, or in 50 years, simply because it will always be worth meeting others who continue to see life in different terms than we do despite the best efforts of telecommunication and advertising talents. No amount of creeping homogeneity can quell the endless variation of humanity, and travel in the end is about people, not places. Places only provide different venues, as it were, for life, in which we are all pilgrims who need to talk to each other.

There are also many places around the world where intercultural friction and outright xenophobia is increasing. And the very fact that travel endangers cultures and pristine places more quickly than it used to calls for extraordinary care on the part of today's traveler, a keener sense of personal responsibility. The world is not
our private zoo or theme park; we need to be better prepared before we go, so that we might become honored guests and not vilified intruders.

In
Travelers' Tales
, we collect useful and memorable anecdotes to produce the kind of sampler we've always wanted to read before setting out. These stories will show you some of the spectrum of experiences to be had or avoided in each country. The authors come from many walks of life: some are teachers, some are musicians, some are entrepreneurs, all are wanderers with a story to tell. Their stories won't help you be an insider as so many travel books promise—but they will help you to deepen and enrich the experience that you will have as an outsider. Where we've excerpted books, we urge you to go out and read the full work, because no selection can ever do an author justice.

Our selection of stories in each
Travelers' Tales
is by no means comprehensive, but we are confident it will prime your pump, and make your use of regular guidebooks much more meaningful. No longer do you have to go to dozens of sources to map the personal side of your journey. You can reach for
Travelers' Tales
, and truly prepare yourself before you go.

JAMES O
'
REILLY AND LARRY HABEGGER

Series Editors

Imagine leaving this world without ever having seen Paris. For those who have been there, the thought is unthinkable. For those who haven't yet had the chance, the thought is a reminder that their lives will be impoverished until they go, for Paris is the center of the civilized universe, the capital of the Western world, a city of transcendent beauty which belongs to everyone.

It is one of a handful of cities on earth one should endeavor to know over the course of a lifetime, not just in one or two or even a half-dozen visits. Paris—or Parisians—may rebuff you from time to time, but then, that is one of its duties, one of its perverse pleasures. Paris is not lightly seduced, not to be trifled with.

There are those who say darkly that Paris isn't what it used to be; that hordes of visitors have irrevocably changed it for the worse; that in pandering to the needs of tourism the city has become a parody of itself, nothing more than a cultural amusement park. And of course, there is truth to the lament of the cynical, to those weary of slack-jawed foreigners who spout a kind of French which bears more resemblance to the gibberings of the Neolithic than it does the language of Molière and Victor Hugo. But Paris is such a mighty archetype that these things ultimately do not matter.

The images of Paris are familiar to all: barges on the Seine; the Eiffel Tower poking into a summer sunset; the Cathedral of Notre Dame standing stoutly on its island in the middle of the river; the Pei Pyramid glowing before the classical lines of the Louvre; the Basilica of Sacré-Couer stark white above the streets of Montmartre; the Arc de Triomphe dominating the chaotic roundabout of Le Étoile, an architectural key to the Champs Elysées and the grand obelisk at Place de la Concorde, site of the horrors of the French
Revolution; lovers embracing in the Tuileries; the famed headstones of Père-Lachaise cemetery; the ubiquitous cafés and well-dressed Parisians and coiffed dogs; arresting new architecture and the fabulous Métro; the list goes on and on.

There may be no city more uplifting to the human spirit. It is a place to explore the dimensions of yourself or those of someone you love—to walk and talk, to argue about life, to sit and contemplate the events of human history which have played themselves out here on these streets, on the banks of this river.

And yet as heavy with tradition and culture as it is, the City of Light has bestowed on countless millions the gift of the incandescent present, an image, an experience or moment into which all life is condensed, to be reflected upon for years to come. Paris is a place to feel especially alive, and it's here now, waiting for you to come, sample its treasures, and make it yours.

 

THOM ELKJER

 

I
N
P
ARIS, MEN AND WOMEN LOVE WITH THEIR INTELLECT AS MUCH
as their emotions. This is in fact a deeply romantic approach to love, one that sees the lover as the most worthy adversary in the world, worthy even of trying to persuade. Of course we are talking about Paris, so the persuasion involves panache, aplomb, and attitude—plenty of attitude.

A young couple enters the Café St-Germain on a November afternoon. His leather jacket is open over a white t-shirt; her heavy gold sweater sets off a mane of black hair. They are beautiful to look at, and clearly in love. They sit, smoke, and drink coffee in a room of spidery mirrored walls and brown marble tables. In fact they sit at the next table and the café is not crowded, so their discussion quickly becomes more interesting than the afternoon newspaper. Love in public is public love,
n'est-ce pas?

It turns out the young woman is attempting to convince the young man that their relationship should proceed to the ultimate intimacy more or less immediately. Not tomorrow, not tonight, but today, now. The young man sits back in his chair and listens, which means he is resting, marshaling his own arguments for the rebuttal to come. It is a tender scene of young love, in Paris.

There is a famous photo of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, who shared one of the great romances of this century, in Paris or anywhere else. They are sitting at the table in La Coupole where they dined daily for many years. She looks off to the side with a half smile on her lips, he looks down reflectively. What discussions they must have had, I always thought. One day it dawned on me that they didn't go to the same café for 40 years to agree with each other. They went to discuss, to disagree, to
argue
. In fact, their lifelong agreement on where to go for dinner saved invaluable energy for what happened when they got there.