AU PETIT FER À CHEVAL . . .

This is the third of four “feuilletons” that I wrote for The Milton Times.  (This one appeared on May 23rd under the headline “Finding ‘Your Place’ in Paris, the City of Lights.”)

Recently, I’ve been thinking about an essay written by inveterate and intrepid globetrotter Pico Iyer.  First published on the salon.com website in 2000, “Why We Travel” lives up to its title, as Iyer offers a variety of reasons why we pack our bags and head off to far corners of the earth.  Some of us, he suggests, travel to feel humbled—to acknowledge, and thus to broaden, the narrowness of our personal knowledge of the world.  Some of us travel to feel ennobled—to leave some impression of ourselves behind in a foreign place.  One of my favorite reasons that he gives is really quite whimsical: “we travel, in essence, to become young fools again—to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more.”

What Iyer means is that travel allows us to step out of our familiar lives, to step away from the daily patterns and habits that define us and confine us: even if we can’t fully reinvent ourselves, he hints, perhaps we can at least re-imagine ourselves.  And perhaps some element of that re-imagining will endure beyond the time of travel.  There is more than a whiff of reality behind that old song popular at the end of World War I: “How ’Ya Gonna Keep ’Em Down on the Farm? (After They’ve Seen Paree).”

Or perhaps it will quicken us just for the moment.  In his book The Art of Travel, Alain de Botton describes a phenomenon that I think most travelers experience at some point.  The personal example that he gives is set in Amsterdam: “In one street lined with uniform apartment buildings, I stopped by a red front door and felt an intense longing to spend the rest of my life there.”  He then goes on to imagine in wonderfully specific detail the lasting contentment he could find behind that alluring door.

My own most recent example is set in Le Marais, a hip district of Paris with streets lined by cafés, brasseries, boulangeries, and boutiques.  De Botton also writes about how simply seeing signs in another language begins the process of transformation that travel enacts on us: the “exoticism” of signage “offers the first conclusive evidence of my having arrived elsewhere.”  When I saw the name over a small bar on the rue Vieille du Temple, I was drawn in as if by a magnet: AU PETIT FER À CHEVAL translates literally as “the little iron of a horse” . . . but somehow I knew that it really meant THE LITTLE HORSESHOE.  Sometimes translation seems as magical as alchemy!

And it was perfectly named.  The epitome of “a hole in a wall,” Au Petit Fer à Cheval amounted to a small horseshoe-shaped bar with a half-dozen stools snuggled against it and a pair of low café tables, each with four chairs, squeezed up against the long windows on either side of the doorway.  Outside, four more tables crowded the sidewalk underneath the awning.  The moment we stepped inside, I felt that we had crossed some sort of psychic border.  My wife ordered a pastis—a refreshing anise-flavored liqueur.  I ordered a Leffe, a Belgian beer.

Pico Iyer explains what crossing geographic and cultural borders can do to us: “Abroad is the place where we stay up late, follow impulse and find ourselves as wide open as when we are in love.  We live without a past or future, for a moment at least, and are ourselves up for grabs and open to interpretation.”  Inside Au Petit Fer à Cheval an old clock jutted out from the wall.  Perched at the horseshoe-shaped bar, I took a sip of my Leffe.  Time stood still.

FOU DE LA TOUR EIFFEL . . .

I am posting here the second of four pieces that I wrote “freelance” for The Milton Times.  (This piece appeared in the newspaper on May 16th under the headline “The Eiffel Tower: C’est Magnifique!”)

Waiting in the taxi line at Charles de Gaulle Airport, my wife and I rehearsed the directions to our rental apartment in Paris that we would need to give to our driver: Numéro cinq, rue de José Maria de Heredia, le septième arrondissement.  Very easy.  Très facile.  Well, fortunately we had an iPhone 5 with a GPS, as our driver turned out to be Chinese, with French almost as unseasoned as ours.  He had no English whatsoever.

Yet, the first successful conversation in French that I engaged in after we landed was with that driver.  It was very simple and completely one-sided, but it worked.  It involved me asking: “Qu’est-ce que c’est?”  (What’s that?)  We were in the heart of Paris, less than five minutes from our apartment.  I was pointing at the Eiffel Tower.  The driver looked at me in the mirror like I was crazy—and then he realized I was kidding him, and he laughed and so did I.  My wife rolled her eyes.

I thought of that “conversation” every day for two months when I stepped out the front door of our apartment building and glanced to my right and every evening when I returned via the Metro and, rounding our corner, looked straight at the Eiffel Tower.  Could I ever get used to seeing such an iconic edifice on a daily basis, multiple times each day?  I hoped not.

In his essay “The Loss of the Creature,” well-known American novelist Walker Percy describes the difficulty of ever seeing someplace universally familiar in a unique or original way.  He explains how “picture postcard, geography book, tourist folders” and even the familiar name of the familiar site create a “package” that prevents the individual from experiencing a “sovereign discovery”: how can you ever just stumble upon THE EIFFEL TOWER or THE GRAND CANYON (one of Percy’s examples) or THE SISTINE CHAPEL?  How can you avoid feeling the anxiety that your experience might not be “measuring up” to the expectations created by the packaging that probably put that site on your travel itinerary in the first place?

Percy offers several stratagems or hypothetical scenarios that would allow the traveler to have the “sovereignty” of a discoverer—that is, to have a uniquely personal experience.  Some of them are practical: for instance, you could go off the beaten track.  Some of them are extreme—even apocalyptic: yes, you would see everything anew in the wake of a natural disaster! 

But the real-life scenario that I found most effective with the Eiffel Tower was simply to allow it to stand there in its own light at every different hour of the day.  I jogged past it in the morning.  I stood on the Champs de Mars at midnight with my wife, watching its flashing lights ignite the sky like a Fourth of July sparkler.  I walked between its arching legs on my way to someplace else.  I caught glimpses of it from side streets and between buildings.  I even took on the assignment of photographing it from a variety of random angles for a friend’s daughter’s school project.  I never saw it as a postcard, and I never saw it the same way twice.

Of course, I was afforded those multiple perspectives by virtue of living in its shadow (almost literally) every day for two months.  But Walker Percy seems not to take into account how even what we take for granted can still catch us off guard the way that the Eiffel Tower did the very first time I saw it.  That was six years ago.  Arriving in Paris late at night, exhausted after a long flight, I was utterly stunned to see its illuminated grandeur through the windshield of an airport shuttle bus.  I shouted at the driver: “THE EIFFEL TOWER!”  He looked at me like I was crazy.