Paris in Spring

I had an opportunity to visit Paris over the last couple of days. It was beautiful. The sun shined, and the weather hinted at the coming of spring. People walked the streets without heavy coats, they mingled in cafes, and the first sight of flowers in bloom gave a glimpse of the colors to come.

Thanks to Rodney Priestly, the dean of Princeton’s graduate school, I was invited to deliver a lecture for Princeton alumni in Paris celebrating the 125th anniversary of the school at the École Normale Superieure. I am still full of wonder when I come to the city of lights. Amazed that a country boy from Mississippi gets the chance to walk around Paris, to be unburdened by the realities that menace me in this country and to allow myself, if for a moment, to take in the romance of a place with, to say the least, a complicated history.

Paris in spring. I never imagined such an experience growing up on the gulf coast with its saltwater air and the accents that roll off the tongue rarely mistaken as a language of love.

But this time in Paris felt different. As I stepped off the plane, a weight fell off my shoulders. I do not mean by this some sense of weightlessness as Milan Kundera meant it, but something akin to lightness without leaving behind responsibility. A reprieve from the madness of American politics. Not so much from the reality of it all, but relief from the weight of a required witness, the absence of a feeling of dread that makes the blood thick and heavy.

Of course, the war with Iran was all over the news in Paris. I found myself at times doom scrolling. Searching and sorting for information about what was happening. Reading about the dead American soldiers returning home. Seeing images of Trump in his blue suit and red tie and white baseball cap with USA emblazoned with gold letters, as he stood tall while the coffins of dead soldiers passed him by, wondering if this man has any sense of decency at all. Does he even know how to grieve or does he even care?

But these moments were fleeting. They didn’t weigh my shoulders down as they do at home.

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There is a cost to living daily with madness. Americans already experience the burden of growing old in a society that requires a daily grind. Life gets reduced to the manic pursuit of success and security. Many Americans are barely keeping their noses above water. Worried about bills, they try to raise their children. They work hard to keep a roof over their heads and food on the table. Panic-stricken about getting sick and worried about taking care of aging loved ones.

Many are failing no matter how hard they try as they watch the super-rich hoard and rig the rules.

Alexis de Tocqueville wrote about the melancholy that soaks this place. That those who fail here amid the illusion of unbounded abundance experience the weight of their failures differently.

Among democratic nations, men easily attain a certain equality of condition, but they can never attain as much as they desire…. At every moment they think they are about to grasp it; it escapes at every moment from their hold. They are near enough to see its charms, but too far off to enjoy them; and before they have fully tasted its delights, they die.

That is the reason for the strange melancholy that haunts inhabitants of democratic countries in the midst of abundance.

To work hard and fail here sours everything. The gift of life, with its constant toil and disappointment, feels like God’s punishment for something we have done.

Americans are siloed. Locked in their terrors. Melancholy and loneliness shadow our steps. Fantasy and illusion become our safe house.

Isolated and tired of the grind we try to find moments amid it all to smile, laugh, love and to find joy. But it is hard, especially when the leader of the country demands your attention like a rotten child. 24-hour news cycles cover him and his doings. Algorithms keep us enraged. We drown in lies and grift. All of it, along with the persistent demand to consume and to achieve, assault our attention.

As Marvin Gaye sang, “It makes you want to holler and throw up my hands.”

For a few days, with the hint of a Paris spring, I was able to breathe outside of the pressure cooker that is America, U.S.A. I turned my attention to the country, my country, from another place, and saw the sickness that consumes. I needed the distance, a moment of reprieve to catch my breath, because the weight of America, in this hour, sits on my chest like a forged-steel anvil.

I am back. The bombs explode, still. Politicians lie and grift, still. All of it grinds the spirit. And we all keep grinding daily because that is the American way. The blood thickens. The shoulders feel heavy, again. We are all so tired. Bone tired.

You must snatch a moment, no matter how you do it, to take a break from this. To be sure, we cannot ignore what is happening around us. That would be a sin against the Holy Ghost. But we don’t have to give ourselves over to it. We do not have to be consumed by the lies and the hatred, the cruelty and the death. Refuse. Draw the line and scream, No. No. No!

And, just maybe, that personal refusal can ground the possibility of a political refusal: that we simply don’t want to live like this anymore.

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