Donc Voila, Oh Yea, Comme Ca; Silence, Music, Laughter, and Cookies Part 2

I hustle on the left side of the moving sidewalk in the metro station, eager to make up for the time lost to a late train and I pass a couple planted on the right confusing their limbs around their bodies, their mouths open to each other. They are kissing amidst hundreds of hurrying people in a subway station in Paris. I walk by and notice them without changing my pace and smile to myself at the cliche quality of each description of that moment. I try to ground it in the possibilities of a living reality: maybe he's preoccupied, thinking about his laundry, or she has a nagging sense of her stockings falling down beneath her skirt, his stubble eats away at the intimacy of the moment, or despite the sweet reminder of love for the rest of us in the subway they are actually a bit self-conscious, too.

I love how wide the sidewalk is on the Pont Saint-Michel, the bridge I cross over the Seine to make my way towards the Quartier Latin for the weekly conversation group at Shakespeare & Co. There is a kind of nascent mist in the air, and a dark, dark sky. I catch a glimpse beyond several large buildings and at least several kilometers in the distance, of the Eiffel Tower lit up, scanning the sky with projector searchlights, and my hand goes to my chest in satisfaction. But then my spirits fall slightly because I know that the best way to enjoy the Tower is from a distance. I shrug, and look for a bar with the Bougogne Nouveau which debuts tonight.

[Let me make this perfectly clear: none of this is because of anything in particular. It's all because I gave myself permission. A kiss in the subway in Paris, or a glimpse of the Eiffel Tower are only out of reach because we put them there and keep them out of the realm of our reality. When we bring them close up, and see their pores and wrinkles, we have to resist the urge to push it away. All of the glory of these pictures and ideals lie within the regular of your day if you can bear to see, and to love the mundane in the romance. I made it so, so, sweetheart, stop saying my life is incredible as if yours isn't; it's begging you to be. This is a reminder to a later me as much as it is to you right now. Everything is everywhere.]

I slip through the bookshelves and narrow passages to the back corner and up the spiral staircase, nearly trip, and make my stumbling entrance into the rare book room with the window with a view of Notre Dame for the conversation group. Tonight I am the only Native English-speaker, so they are glad to see me.

Virginia Woolf writes in her discussion of a British and generally Western obsession with Greek literature,

"To laugh instantly it is almost necessary... to laugh in English. Humour, after all, is closely bound up with a sense of the body. When we laugh at the humour of Wycherley, we are laughing with the body of that burly rustic who was our common ancestor on the village green. The French, the Italians, the Americans, who derive physically from so different a stock, pause, as we pause in reading Homer, to make sure that they are laughing in the right place, and the pause is fatal. Thus humour is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue..."

 I remember how cathartic a laugh I had throughout my reading of Orlando, of Candide, the sweet chuckles at Hugo's poetry, and of laughing with the little girls when the lego blocks fall, or when Eugenie plays with the speech aspect of Google translation. We yielded unbounded laughter at the computerized Brittish English soliciting her impersonation and gesticulation and her beckoning me to share the American accent. We laugh. Perhaps it is true that we are laughing at different sides of the same door, as undoubtedly our perspectives shine a funny light on what is uncommon between us, which stands in relief. The body, too is a language, a material half-shared half-foreign. Sometimes that is the funniest thing.

And I feel myself grabbing onto whole pieces of the language, saying, "donc, et voila," as if it meant anything to me. I see the way it sits unselfconsciously in people's pockets like pennies being dropped and tossed without thought. I can recognize and appreciate how ingrained, how much a friend this phrase is for people, but I cannot feign well a friendship with a stranger. I am given away in my stale attempt at swallowing this foreignness, and so I spit it out whole, trying again like a dog.

Eugenie asks me how we say "ouai" in English. She doesn't ask how to say "oui," she knows that is yes, she wants to know that Americans say "yeah." She laughs at the sound when I tell her.

And on saying how such and such a thing was, "comme ca," I know I am half avoiding further description, and half attempting to speak as a casual Parisienne would, but I am also just allowing myself to feel again how it was, knowing that they have no hibernating memory of the thing as I have to awaken. We allow this for each other. We grant conversation as a selfish opportunity also, to grant permission to enjoy our own thoughts, and we sometimes waive our own desire to understand for the sake of witnessing someone else's inner dialogue.