And the outskirts it was. Gone were the beautiful, old buildings that define the collective vision of Paris. Gone were the famous sights of the Eiffel Tower, Arc de Triomphe, and Le Grand Palais. What replaced them were drab buildings, graffiti-laden bridges, and people either asking you for money or trying to sell you a fake watch.
Contrary to how one should have felt arriving in such an area, a wave of pleasant surprise hit me as I took in this newfound scenery of Paris. In the center of Paris, you feel like you're in a completely different world. A modern lifestyle set against a backdrop of classic, elegant architecture, a surreal blend of honoring the historic and embracing the innovative. Something that you just don't see in the U.S.
But here, in this somewhat rundown, urban neighborhood, Paris was grounded. To discover that such an iconically beautiful city had a slightly unpleasant side made the city feel more real, which I guess is why I wasn't put off by it.
Emmy led us underneath a bridge completely covered in French graffiti. Not really the Impressionist style France is known for. We were greeted by multiple alleyways of booths with fake luxury purses, jeans, leather jackets, fare that you would find along Canal Street in New York City. Emmy, acting as a fearless all-knowing leader turned down a tiny alleyway off the beaten path. As I turned the corner myself, I entered a completely different world.
Now I'm not trying to over-dramatize this experience or anything, this is actually what happened. The sound of traffic and creepy men trying to hock fack D&G wallets faded away as a series of twisting pathways lay ahead of me.
Lining these pathways were ivy-covered shops, tiny booths and semi-permanaent huts and enclosures all filled with a vast array of items. Furniture, statues, busts, hand-blown glass vases, paintings, photos. The list goes on and on. Across all genres of items. It didn't really hit me how cool this all was until we each began to make little discoveries. Emmy, having a real affinity for old antique knick-knacks, entered every shop with the air of a little kid jumping into a pile of leaves in autumn. She found little mint boxes with tiny figurines in them. Old bottlecaps from drinks long since imbibed. One of my favorite things was a bench carved out of a huge piece of petrified wood.
The more we found, the further we were pulled in, eager to make new discoveries. I'll warn you now, I'm making a Harry Potter reference, but I felt like I was sifting through the Room of Requirement, a room piled with things Hogwarts students across the ages had left behind. In real life, the market simply looked like this.
But to my overactive imagination, it looked like this.
We stumbled upon a little shop of trinkets that looked incredibly old. After picking through the piles, I found an old leather case with a pair of binoculars inside. Emmy immediately fell in love with them. After asking the French shopkeeper the binoculars' age, we learned that they dated back to the early 1800s.
Nearly 200 years old these binoculars were. It suddenly hit me how many people had probably looked through these in the last 200 years. Amazing how one little pair of binoculars have probably seen so much. All kinds of people with all kinds of perspectives on life have looked thorough these. Not to be all deep and philosophical, but it was a really cool feeling to look through these and throw my perspective on the world into the history of perspectives these binoculars have probably witnessed. The realization I got from this little experience is the idea that we as people are all connected. Not just with people alive now but with people that were alive across the ages. We walk the same streets, we breathe the same air, we even look through the same binoculars. I was in the middle of a maze of stories, stories of people that had once lived but were now gone. Stories that I could discover if I just delved deep enough. We came to a little hut with stacks of postcards and photos. After sifting through a few of them, I found this.
A post card from 1938. A woman vacationing in the south of France, writing to a friend in Paris, simply telling her where she's been eating lunch and her other daily activities. A tiny story she never thought would be known 74 years in the future.
I guess this little experience kinda taught me that each person's life may seem small in the grand perspective of the universe. But the fact that a postcard can be read over 70 years in the future or this blog could be read by people hundreds of years in the future shows that each of our lives, however small, have a permanence on this Earth.
So I'm gonna make sure I live mine to the fullest.
Well said bro!
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