Ok, so at first glance this title may seem like a justification of my lack of posts for the past several months (which now that you mention it, I guess it is) but it's also a genuine life lesson and truism I've found to be remarkably fresh and true in my Parisian life.
People are always ready to tell me what I'm like and what I like for the reason that I'm American. Everything from 50 shades of Gray to peanuts to being racist to being puritanical. You see one Fox news report or one episode of How I Met Your Mother and you think you know me. That's fine. But that's not actually why I brought this up. My point is that my reference point, the things that I find to be genuinely different from my American life, are not at all what people tell me is different. Variety and choice are actually the most marked differences for me.
When I buy something in the U.S. I'm accustomed to having nothing but options. Peanut butter, you say? Here are 7 national brands plus a store brand each porting 3 to 5 sizes and bottle styles with a minimum of crunchy and creamy, but likely to include other varieties like all natural, low sodium, and reduced fat. It's almost insane. I mean, we have a whole aisle for cereal. Is that really necessary? Someone asked me, "but how? There aren't that many cereals..." And when I thought about it, I also wasn't really sure.
In Paris, the most international city in France, if you want peanut butter you have one choice to make: yes or no.
I know this seems like a bad example, because France is historically on the wrong side of peanut butter history, but it really clearly illustrates their approach to choice and variety. In the U.S. if you're selling anything, you're selling at least two brands, two varieties, two sizes, two something! There is always a choice to be made.
Living without this call to decide has been working fine by me. I eat less. I buy less. I waste less. And not just with food, but with everything. It is liberating to just choose yes or no without the million gradations between black and white.
Speaking of which, I can't help but feel that the international adoration of those black and white portraits of Paris are an extension of this philosophy. To simplify, to reduce an image to its barest emotions, to its purest sense, is to tap at something bigger and more universal. I don't need to know the color of her dress or the contrast of his tie to know that their kiss is passionate and willful. I don't need the color or an outrageous size or some trick, I just need the people, in their purest form.
My sister was visiting this past week and I finally made it to the catacombs, which had been on my list for a while but which I had been putting off for some time. But they were incredible, and an ultimate test of this less is more philosophy. If you don't know, during the 19the century bones were dug up from all over Paris and relocated to this nameless crypt. Skulls and femers are piled up into patterns of various intricacy, with hips and fingers piled up behind, filling out these damp underground caves. In French fashion, historical and literary quotes in the meaning of life and death mark these nameless tombs.
At first glance, these piles of bones may seem grotesque, crude, inhuman. But for me they were something different. These nameless Parisians would be underground either way, without name or marker to signify their life to future generations. But here, in this sort of art, they rest together, building patterns in the walls with their own heads and arms and legs. They are contributing to something bigger with what is left, and they are calling out to future generations, to us, "we have lived! And you should too!" It's direct and powerful and true. It doesn't get much simpler than that.
