Summer, 2006

“The morning, 16 October 1832, I found myself at San Pietro in Montorio, on the Janiculum Hill in Rome; it was gloriously sunny. A light, barely perceptible sirocco was causing a few small white clouds to float above Monte Albano, the air was filled with a delightful warmth; I was happy to be alive.” (Stendhal, The Life of Henry Brulard).

It is, as I begin to write, late evening in New York; we are in the final days of November. This past week was Thanksgiving. On Monday I will return to my law classes, this coming weekend I will be at Ft. Dix shooting machine-guns. The Thursday of next week I have my first exam, on Contracts. The sun sets everyday before 1700, the hours for photography, or exercise in daylight, are few. I am not miserable, and although I will have to pay the tab for it, I am thankful that my life is so full. As the saying goes, pressure is a privilege. I am not happy either, though, and time to think is scarce. I cannot help but feel suffocated by the repetition of my schedule and my atmosphere.

I remember in High School, Professor Donadio, who taught me 20th Century World History, once discussed how one “cooks a frog.” The idea was that if you threw a frog into boiling-hot water, it would immediately jump out. But if you dropped it into lukewarm water, and then only slowly raised the temperature, the frog would fall asleep, and wouldn’t notice when the temperature became hot enough to kill it. Well, I cannot help but feel that, getting older, society is simply trying to cook my life and soul away in the same manner used on the frog. Steadily the “responsibilities” (which are really the necessities of others, not your own) increase, the expectations come along with promises of some kind of power, sense of status– the trap is baited. One day you wake up chained to a desk, a stump of a man. The ability to dream and feel satisfied by television and the short vacation, and you are miserable but content with the mere hum-drum of daily life. Then– after a few silly years of a retirement where one tries to do what one cannot do or enjoy at that age anyway– death.

The point I am trying to make, perhaps another man made better:
“Looking for work in order to be paid: in civilized countries today almost all men are at one in doing that. For all of them work is a means and not an end in itself. Hence they are not very refined in their choice of work, if only it pays well. But there are, if only rarely, men who would rather perish than work without any pleasure in their work. They are choosy, hard to satisfy, and do not care for ample rewards, if the work itself is not the reward of rewards. Artists and contemplative men of all kinds belong to this rare breed, but so do even those men of leisure who spend their lives hunting, traveling, or in love affairs and adventures. All of these desire work and misery if only it is associated with pleasure, and the hardest, most difficult work if necessary. Otherwise, their idleness is resolute, even if it spells impoverishment, dishonor, and danger to life and limb. They do not fear boredom as much as work without pleasure; they actually require a lot of boredom if their work is to succeed. For thinkers and all sensitive spirits, boredom is that disagreeable “windless calm” of the soul that precedes a happy voyage and cheerful winds. They have to bear it and must wait for its effect on them. Precisely this is what lesser natures cannot achieve by any means. To ward off boredom at any cost is vulgar, no less than work without pleasure.”
(The Gay Science, Book II, 42, “Work and Boredom”. Nietzsche).

And here, it seems, even Plato agrees:
“Then,” I said, “to the extent that the work of the guardians is more important, it would require more leisure time than the other tasks as well as greater art and diligence.”
(The Republic, Plato).

Leisure is a form of education. I used to distinguish “leisure” with “entertainment”. The idea was that “leisure” requires some activity, involvement, or exertion. “Entertainment”, on the other hand, did not require exertion, but was only thin illusion of activity. Television, the movie theater, “going out for drinks”– the person, passive throughout, is the same before as they are after the experience. I no longer find that distinction is very strong, or true. After all, perhaps some television or film is educational and valuable, and one can learn something from a good conversation with friends– even Socrates drinks in the Symposium. Staring at a landscape might appear the most passive activity in the world. The thoughts and thinking it can stimulate in a person, though, may make it as much an exertion as it was to reach that view. The problem with leisure is that how educative that free-time becomes is dependent on the person using it. When done right, though, I consider it essential to the growth of one’s mind, will, and character. The person who is always at work, always distracted with urgent, practical matters– that person cannot reach the depths of introspection, digest life experiences, and blossom into new ways of perceiving the world. Like an industrious caterpillar too busy thinking of the next leaf to eat, they have forgotten to stop, build the cocoon, and wait.

I do not want to get too much into the discussion of the great merits of leisure (and the difficulty of finding it in today’s world). The point I want to make for now is different. At a moment in my life where the temperature in the pot is rising, and now that “it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul”– my thoughts turn to a period of my life when it was, in fact, June, then July, then August, a summer of my life when I was free, with few cares, but much innocence. The Summer of 2006 was in many ways months spent in the cocoon. I did not learn to fly, the years that passed and the days that still come are proof of enough of that. The human soul, unfortunately, must spend many turns as a caterpillar before it flowers. But each length of time spent in the cocoon reveals some secrets of the butterfly– and so it was for me, that summer.

It’s now past midnight, December 09. I am looking at a map of the Paris Metro.

In the top-right, I see “Aeroport Charles de Gaulle,” next to it a blue B marks the RER B Line. In 2004, 2005, and, I think, 2006, and 2010– I entered Paris on this line. I follow it towards the city; the names pop into sight: “Porte de la Chapelle”, “Porte de Clignancourt”, “Gare du Nord”, the “Funiculaire de Montmartre”, “Abbesses”. Abbesses, was that my first exit into Paris from the Metro in 2004? It was not. It was the pretty station, though, with the exit near Saint-Jean-de-Montmartre, the murals in the stairwells, and the art nouveau entrance by Guimard. No– the first surface into Paris was at Saint-Georges. The green line. Then, I walked northwest on Rue Notre-Dame de Lorette, north on Rue Henry Monnier, finally east on Rue Navarin. Towards the end of the street, on 8 Rue de Navarin, was the Hotel Navarin Angleterre.

I remember before the trip, in Naples, looking for lodging on the internet with my aunt. I don’t remember the name of the other hotel or hostel that I was considering going to– but I remember the name of the metro station: Goncourt, on the brown line. Later in that trip, on 20040325 (March 25th, 2004), I was in the area. Walking by Place de la Republique, I stopped to have my first crepe, with sugar. In 200503 (March, 2005), with MST, we surfaced into Paris at Grands Boulevards. To this day, when I think of MST, the contrasting colors of lilac and olive (of the 8 and 9 Lines, which both stop at that station) come to mind. We walked west on Boulevard Poissonniere, north on Rue du Faub. Montmartre, then east on Rue Bergere. The hotel was the Hotel Bergere. In 2006 I took the lilac 8 Line down to its penultimate station in the left bank: Lourmel. For a few days I was with family friends there, on Rue Lourmel 164.

It was foggy and cold for May; I think I was sick and slept a lot. When I was better, I moved southwest one stop, the terminal station of the 8 Line, Balard. I spent the rest of my month in Paris in the XVth arrondissement, a 27-square-meter flat on Rue Balard 102, rented from a Mr. Kortas. I was a stone’s throw away from the Parc Andre Citroen. I would go to the Franprix on Rue de Lourmel for my groceries, and often to a copy shop on Avenue Felix Faure to access the internet, often cursing to myself about the French keyboard. In my first few days I think I purchased my SFR SIM card for mobile phone access.

On most weekdays, I would take the 8 Line to La Motte Picquet/Grenelle, switch to the overpass light-green 6 Line, and exit at Raspail. I took a French course offered by the Sorbonne, but I don’t remember the exact address of the building. I passed by the Montparnasse Cemetery every weekday I went to class. Sometimes, in my descents to the Catacombs, I would be exactly beneath– by some 20 meters– both Boulevard Raspail and the cemetery.

These photographs were taken on 20060531 (May 31st, 2006). They are my first photographs of that summer; all of them are of the Montparnasse Cemetery in Paris. Either that day or the day prior I had bought the memory card for the camera; perhaps somewhere I still have the receipt. The camera itself, a Canon Powershot A610, I bought earlier in the month, before leaving New York.

Now I resume writing on Christmas. Reading over what I have already written, I realize many things have changed in these few weeks. I’m in Italy now, at my grandmother’s home in Naples. On December 16th I finished my last exam. In the week following I was busy planning and preparing for this present journey, showing my cousins around New York City, and catching up on a little backlog with the photography. It was very hectic, and I was tired, and the transition from law school, in terms of activity, was invisible. Then on the 22nd there was the flight, on the 23rd I went up to MAR’s place, and now– after a run in the Tuscan countryside, the view of Naples from San Martino, and the joyous liveliness of my family over the festive dinners– my soul is again in cool water and swimming freely. In a few days I will be in Paris again– though only briefly. Still, the feeling is one of anticipation, like one awaits the strike of the last bell, when one already knows the hour the clocktower announces. Every return to Paris is always an echo of the first visit.

Reading over what I’ve written, I cannot help but feel that the writing is distracted, without structure, often venturing into my recollections without giving any body to the memories which remain, even on paper, vivid only to myself.

I wanted to talk at some point of my love of Parisian Metro stations and of maps in general. The idea of the first, being mostly that, except perhaps to a numerologist, the street numbers of New York contain no ideas, but in Paris even the Metro stations recall an idea, a spirit. In Paris one wonders how Richelieu is connected to Lafayette, how Stalingrad and Pont-Neuf are on the same line, how one enters in what honors a chemist, the discoverer of Bromine, changes at a station named after an admiral, and exits with the station of a biologist who brought cell theory forward, and then became a politician. In one’s daily journey one lives the connection between ideas almost physically. I could discuss this in further detail, but I think it would work better in a separate entry. The same goes with my love for maps, which came to mind when writing of the Metro stations, but which really is a little too much of a digression even here. The gist of it is that I find maps very beautiful, a combination of the practical and aesthetic, the physical representation of knowledge, and in many cases dictating the sum of civilization’s knowledge in a certain field. I would never collect art, which always ought to return to the public, but if I did I would collect maps.

And I am still only digressing, always only skirting around the actual details of my first days in Paris in 2006.

I have covered, in some sense, my arrival. I flew in, probably took the RER B, down to the house of family friends on Rue Lourmel. In the room where I slept, there was a poster with Kipling’s If, in French. I remember the fog and the cool weather and feeling feverish, the smell of the Franprix supermarket, M. Kortas white beard, the apartment I moved to on Rue Balard. I remember going to the Sorbonne to subscribe to the course, then to another place on a rainy day to take my placement exam. Then I remember the first lesson, the classroom, the faces of the other students and the teacher. After the first lesson, I think, I took these photographs in the Montparnasse Cemetery. Those were the first days, maybe four or five, at most.

I had made it a point in the past to visit the cemetery, mostly to see the graves of the persons I had studied so much in school. I think it was a very shallow romantic idea that inspired me, since really the graves say little of the bones that inhabit them, much less of the souls those bones once supported. The real graves of many of those persons are in the words or images they left behind, there their voices speak as fresh and alive as the day they wrote them. And of some others, perhaps, the words others have written of them, although even then– Boccaccio may have made Beatrice immortal, but it is really his perception of her which comes to us, her own voice we cannot hear. I think in 2006 that romantic motivation was still there, and I toured the cemetery a few times during the earlier days of the summer.

Like these visits to the cemetery, my stay in Paris was evocative of my education in general. In some sense I have been something like Don Quixote or Julien Sorel, allowing books and their contents to influence my life considerably. Learning was for me never something that ended with the schoolday; everything in my life I saw and see through the eyes of my education.

And now this writing and I have crossed into the new year. It is January 13th, a Friday, after 2300 in New York City.

It is interesting to return to all of this now: I am back in school, having just finished my first week of classes. I was very sick for most of my travels abroad– first with a high fever, then with diarrhea– it was not really a vacation that was enjoyed to its depths. Still, it was better than nothing, and I think it was very good for me– a little bit more time in the cocoon. I went to Paris again; eight years have passed since I first went on my own in 2004. I was in the Catacombs for New Year’s Eve, at one point right underneath the cemetery in these photographs. It’s now about five and half years since that first descent. I met again with Oxs, who has my guide– my Virgil through the labyrinths on that first night underground. My life echoes and rhymes.

The first week of school was a mixed-bag: some classes were actually quite interesting, others were excruciatingly boring and numbing. I am going forward with uncertain feelings about law school and the idea of a profession in the law: there are many things I like about the law, and perhaps many practical advantages to a legal education. But I hear a siren’s song of work that is more in accordance with my passions– I wonder whether I would be better off pursuing studies in philosophy (which is, I think, what I am really passionate about in the law anyway) and then teaching, or becoming a journalist and photojournalist, or otherwise dedicating myself in some form to photography. The Infantry always beckons, too. In the coming weeks I am going put a lot of thought and research into this problem.

I have to process, then scan, two rolls of Ilford FP4+. Otherwise, I’ve scanned all the 35mm film from these weeks abroad. Then I have to process two black and white 120 rolls– Ilford PanF+ and Kodak Tri-X. I have not scanned any 120 film yet, and I expect that work to take about another two weeks. I restocked and prepped another five liters of XTOL yesterday, but also bought some Diafine, which I will prep tomorrow. I think I will stick to FP4+ and Tri-X for everyday shooting, then develop in Diafine. XTOL (at 1+1) I will maintain for all other films. In the next few months, I hope to try my hand at C-41 color development with the Tetenal kit. Otherwise, I’ve been researching tripods and ballheads, as well as the RZ67 and the Contax T3– cameras that are on the opposite ends of the spectrum (in terms of size), but of which I could make good use of, for very different purposes. Of course, I cannot afford any of these things right now, save the Tetenal kit, which is $20.

All this has very little to do with Paris or the Summer of 2006. That’s fine. I’ve realized that what I am doing here is clearing the land for future writing– the journey hasn’t begun yet, but I begin to pack for it. I have been trying to write about my experiences of that summer since the late autumn of the same year– always abandoning the project at some point, never arriving at something conclusive. All of this is not very conclusive either but it is, maybe, overcoming inertia and the gathering of clouds. It has yet to rain, but things are in motion. And as for these digressions into talk of 2011 and 2012, perhaps they are necessary. After all, it is not the DWZ of 2006 who is speaking here– he wrote barely anything at all, in fact– but the DWRZ of now and yesterday who searches through his memory.

In general I have stayed silent out of a desire for unobtainable perfection. A voice is very critical of much of what has been written here– perhaps correctly. But I want to try, for a change, to be a little more light-hearted about things. At least as an experiment, to allow for a little imperfection in things, to apologize for it and hope for improvement but, finally, to speak of and not just think of things.

On June 3rd of 2006 I made my first descent into the forbidden passages of the Paris Catacombs. I took many photographs. Maybe I will write about that night next– or maybe about the first six months of that year– the long darkness which preceded the bright summer days.