Like the protagonist who dreams of Manderley in Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, last night I dreamt I went to Paris again. Snippets of the day scrambled in my subconscious, reshuffled, and distilled into a sort of grotesque whole. It’s not the first time it’s happened. In fact, it happens often. Each time, I wake and am awash in the disquiet of my dreams. Disquieting because they are dreams of unpreparedness: I’m on a plane and forgot sanitizer; someone near me isn’t wearing a mask; I have no luggage; a friend who recently moved away grins at me across a too-brightly lit aisle. And I am trying to contact my landlord in Paris who does not know I’m en route.
None of this is a surprise. Apparently, weird dreams are common now as our brains work overtime to make sense of things for which we have no frame of reference. For my part, I spend a great deal of waking time engaged in myriad ways in Paris or France or French, providing ample fodder for sleep.
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It’s an unusually warm day for December and I walk around the lake that’s maybe a hundred yards from my house. Some days I walk with brisk purpose, to breathe in deeply the fresh air, to exercise. But not this particular day. Paris has taught me to see, to understand the difference between looking and seeing. Today all I want is to see and try to capture the light. It’s better, more interesting, off the walking path where the ground feels spongy under my feet, not yet frozen. Here and there at the water’s edge bits of green cling to life amid the dead brush that’s already hunkered down against the snow and harsh weather yet to come. In several places the water level is lower than usual, laying bare a muddy bottom. This reminds me that the lake was originally a marais—a swamp—like le Marais, the neighborhood where I live in Paris. The lake, I think to myself, is a place marker both for where I am and where I am not.
I photograph the light and that night dream of Paris.
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It’s early one Sunday morning and I’m live-streaming a friend’s walk in Paris, where it’s a drizzly gray afternoon. Seeing through Patrick’s eyes from his phone’s camera pointed onto the familiar Parisian streets, I’m taken aback by the unfamiliar view. From the parvis of Notre-Dame, across le Petit Pont, down rue de la Huchette, and across le Pont Saint-Michel toward La Conciergerie, Paris in the throes of a second lockdown looks nothing like Instagram would have you believe. It mirrors what other friends have described and proves that sometimes words, no matter how descriptive, lack the gut-punch of a single image. That night I dream again of Paris.
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On a recent Friday afternoon, I watch a concert en direct, live. Pianist Martha Argerich performs Prokofiev’s Concerto No. 3 with the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France. At the end of the piece, she springs to her feet and bows to the orchestra. They applaud. The Paris Philharmonie’s Grande Salle Pierre Boulez is empty except for the musicians distanced on stage and those recording the concert. It’s eight o’clock in the evening in Paris and all, many hundreds, are there like me, virtually. This is the silver lining of life in the time of Covid. Ironically, last February I almost bought a ticket to this concert. But I hesitated, uncertain I’d be there in early December, and glimpsed the wings of my guardian angel.
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We’re all itching to go places again. I know I am, if I believe my dreams and my heart. And there’s hope now for the light at the end of the tunnel. But so much is changed. We are changed. Two very different letters crossed my desk illustrating this. In my inbox there was this from the U.S. editor of a large, multinational publisher of, among other things, a travel magazine. We have “been denied the ability to travel the way we want for much too long,” he declared. Well, yes; but I found his expression off-putting, a little tone deaf. Then I flipped through a big, glossy print magazine filled with articles and advertisements for a life of luxury, and read the editor’s letter. I saved it. In 275 elegant words filled with compassion and thought-provoking wisdom, he framed the global pandemic as a great reset of our lives yielding opportunity. The opportunity to let go of FOMO—fear of missing out—and embrace a quieter contentment; to pursue, compete, and consume less; to ask ourselves tough, candid questions and then hold ourselves to honest answers. “May we have the wisdom to reimagine new directions,” he concludes, “and the courage to make changes for a better future.”
My walks in Paris and elsewhere show me that small changes can make a big impact: Walking clockwise around a lake instead of counterclockwise reveals a different perspective entirely. And provides a whole new set of dreams.
Joyeuses Fêtes!