Paris To The Moon

by Adam Gopnik

  The vast, windswept plaza, with the four towers at its corners, is so vast that it creates what one would have thought would be a perfectly predictable wind tunnel effect. This not only means that you walk with your head down against the gusts, even in the middle of July, but also means that all the bushes and shrubbery that were meant to "humanize" the wooden plaza had to be put inside vertical cages of mesh, which in turn are placed between white bunkers. Left out on their own, the shrubs would just die in the wind. It looks like a bad conceptual art installation about the domination of nature by man. (This is the Foucaultian part.) A stray piece of foliage peeks out forlornly from some of the enclosures, like Hans's fingers from the witch's cage. Looking across the platform toward the tiny and impossibly steep steps, you cannot see the stairs at all; it simply looks like a platform from which one could leap, suicidally, gratefully.

  Downstairs you wait at the accueil for your card. This is done with the usual French functionary hospitality: Who are you, what do you want, what makes you think, etc.? Finally, after an hour, you may get a card. First you visit the desk of one severely disciplinary young lady, who takes your coordinates and enters them into the single-overseeing computer system that was intended as the glory of the place. You are now sent to another young woman, who reenters and corrects all the information the first girl entered, and then asks if you are ready for your picture. (This is the Jacques Tati part.) You nod and rise, looking for the photo booth. She shakes her head gravely and tells you just to sit back. A camera, mounted to your right and above, swivels, moves down on its track, and gawks at you, musing in and out. Don't move; your hostess has just become Annie Leibovitz, she is the photographer. She clicks her mouse forward onto the next screen of her computer, and there you are: The photo system is computerized too. She waits, thoughtfully for the moment of maximum exhaustion, and snaps your picture. You can, if you crane your head a bit, see a thousand images of yourself on the screen, being entered into the system.

  When you at last have your card, you begin your descent into the vast underground caverns, the sous-sol, where the reading rooms are. (The books are, famously, all up in the towers.) First you go to a kind of master computer terminal and enter your request for a seat. The computer lets you know that there is no room for you in L, M, and disdainfully awards you your number, the new you: N-51. You repeat your name to yourself.

  You insert your card into a turnstile; it takes its time and then lets you pass into a tiny space with a spiked metal floor, which leads in turn toward two immense two-story-high brushed metal doors. There is no signage or any indication of where you are going—because where you are going is into another turnstile, another spiked metal floor, and another pair of vast metal doors. Windows and sunlight have been left far behind. Once you are through those, you get on an escalator for a ten-story descent into the basement; there are concrete pillars around the escalators, winsomely decorated with iron-mesh hangings, that in the context look like chintz.

  When you come to the end of the escalator, there are two more turnstiles and two more windowless metal doors to pass through. Now you are into the entrance to the reading rooms, and you see that the reading rooms are built around a grass court, which opens to the sky, high, high above. In the glassed-in court is a bizarre amenity, a garden—no, a small forest of immense trees, pines and evergreens mostly, all planted close together in tight rows, in the shallow green center block of grass. Their grass base is surrounded by a margin of concrete. The trees are so shallowly rooted, though—or else, according to other people, the wind sweeping down from above is so strong—that they have all had to be chained to the concrete floor. Each one has at least two guy wires leading down to stakes in the ground, crisscrossing diagonal lines of black and steel cable. The bushes above in cages, the trees below in chains.

  Step up three or four shallow steps from the glass wall enclosing the trees and wires—it is absolutely forbidden, by the way, for anyone to pass through the seamless glass walls and into the garden—and you are in the main reading room: dark, gloomy, and at once terrifyingly vast without being compensatingly magnificent. It is just one huge horizontal space, broken by discreet letter indicators telling you that you have passed from N to M and onward. Searching, at last you find your seat, N-51, which is simply a single space at a vast table with several hundred such spots marked. You feel more like an ant than an archivist.

  Then you search, among consoles set off near the walls, for an empty, operating computer terminal on which to make your book requests. Most of the terminals are out of order, and when you insert your identity card, they sigh and say that they are initializing. After fifteen minutes you give up and walk up and down the great hall, looking for a terminal that works. When you find one, you can penetrate the catalog fairly quickly; then you claim the page and demand the book; the computer registers that you have made the demand and tells you to go sit back down. The entire library is, in principle, served by, or subject to, the same vast, single computer system, which knows who you are, where you are, what you're doing, and what you want, can track you from visit to visit, and anticipate your interests, etc. This of course means in practice that any tiny bug in one part of the system destroys the entire operation of the library. The latest bugs are posted on photocopied sheets Scotch-taped to the terminals: Please, don't ask to "resee" your list, they say, just ask to "revise" it, etc.

  Now comes the part that transcends ordinary functionary fiendishness to touch the high, misty edge of French bureaucratic-sadistic genius. The keyboard on the computer terminals is almost, but not exactly, an ordinary keyboard. It looks like an ordinary QWERTY keyboard—it doesn't just have some entirely new, Pierre Boulez—inspired keyboard, so that you're warned in advance to watch your step, or finger—but three characters have been moved. Q is exchanged with A, and the comma with the period, and, I think, the E with the O. This means that if you are a touch, or just a plain, mildly experienced, typist, you feel exactly as if you were having a stroke, since you have to interrupt the flow of typing each time you make a tiny error, and pretty soon you are so scared that you stop trying to maintain your normal speed and begin to hunt and peck.

  On the desks there is a single red light that is supposed to illuminate when your books arrive, but these lights have never been known to work. Or, rather, they have been occasionally known to work. So you have to get up regularly and check your computer terminal again, to see what's up. The light may be off because the books haven't arrived yet, and it may be off because it's not working. This means that if you go to the main desk, thirty yards away, to check, and the books aren't there, everyone will be annoyed at you for taking up a place in the line. There is usually at least an hourlong wait for books and a sharp limit (eight, right now) on how many you can take out. Guess wrong, and you've wasted a day. There is no cafeteria, only an appalling, gloomy little cafe near the subterranean entrance, with a view of the gagged and bound trees straining toward the invisible sky. Americans working there have taken to sitting on the steps that run down toward the atrium, where there is at least some light, though of course, it is also extremely hot; given the underground location and the abundance of plate glass, you are always either freezing or baking. But clerks come to shush them. "After the shock of the first few days, you get used to it," someone says.

  It is not cheap-looking, God knows, very much not. It is in the style of Totalitarian Luxe, which was the Mitterrand trademark. The materials are rich: brushed steel, mesh curtains, thick carpet. The trees alone, their purchase and upkeep, must have run into the millions of dollars. The floor on the concourse is made of teak. You see the production values but worry about the production. It is the largest and most depressing of all the monuments of pompous official French culture that have been produced in France since the war, the administration's ultimate revenge on the individual. All that French wit, all that charm, all that gaiety, all that somber pessimism, even all that intelligent despair sunk deep into the earth like a missil
e installation, with bad sandwiches and a chained and bound garden. I ordered a book by Blondin and a picture book on Trenet, just to recall that there was something gayer in Paris, up there above, where the light was.

  When I left at last and saw, on the quai, with the cars rushing by, a typically French beauty poster—this one for Lancaster sun cream: a perfect girl's bottom, bare and in full color, five times normal scale, with a gold sheen in the summer light—I was pathetically grateful for the sight of something humanly beautiful, curved and soft to the eye. French civilization is all the more a miracle, given the obstacles the French put in its way.

  ***

  The curious thing about all of Mitterrand's grands projets—the Bastille Opera, the pyramid of the Louvre, above all, this library—is that though they are big, they don't feel big. They don't feel big the way the dinosaur museum feels big, the way the Parisian monuments of the last century still do, even when those old monuments are actually smaller than the new ones. The new grands projets don't feel big so much as claustrophobic and confusing and stifling—emotionally trivial, small. The grands projets of the last century were either the biggest of their kind or else a kind unto themselves. The Eiffel Tower maintains its aura of height partly because it really is tall and big and partly because there is still nothing like it anywhere else. (The radio masts and post office towers and skyscrapers that have been built since and that in some ways resemble it really don't, since its form is uniquely feminine—not phallus into sky, but skirt into bodice into long throat.) The pyramid of the Louvre, though, looks like a shopping center, a mall, because that kind of Plexiglas and aluminum architecture has been done so much bigger elsewhere.

  There is here a fundamental lesson from a thing, a leqons des choses. Architecture at its most successful passes from stuff (bricks and mortar and metal) through things (buildings) all the way to thats, single unforgettable objects, instantly recognizable, the thumbprints of the world. Their closed, permanent, pyramid-like thatness is its glory. Paris has perhaps more thats—the tower, the Louvre, the arch, the palace—than any city in the world, a greater concentration of distinctive monuments. Yet despite its best efforts, the grands projets fail to achieve the requisite thatness. They fail because of their comparative smallness, of course, when compared with other things in our mental library, but also because they lack something else, a kind of confidence in the things they enclose. The last thing the new Opera makes you think of is music; the last thing the new library makes you think of is books. The paleontology museum is at least a semi-that, so filled with stuff that has been dignified into things, animal dust made hard and significant, that it becomes a that by virtue of the immensity of the thingness it encloses. The new library, the Bibliotheque National, isn't even a thing, much less a that. It evokes, after you have experienced it, merely a huh? and, like all failed monuments, in the end resolves in memory merely into a vast and barren and echoing Why?

  I realized this year that the appeal of jazz in France, and the reason for its holding a place so much higher in the French estimation than in America, where it remains a cult enthusiasm, is the exact equivalent of the American appreciation of impressionism (which held, and to a degree—look at the way the pictures are shown at the Musee d'Orsay!—still holds a much higher place in the American estimation than in the French one).

  Jazz, like impressionism, gives dignity to comfort. Resting in an apparently artless myth of bourgeois pleasure—Gershwin and Kern melodies play the same role for the great jazzmen that the outdoor cafes in Argenteuil played for Renoir and Monet—jazz, like high impressionism, reaffirms the simple, physical basis of powerful emotion and removes it to a plane of personal expression that we recognize as art; it gives us a license to take pleasure in what really provides our pleasures. You play "All the Things You Are" and you are playing the beautiful tune, and you are playing more than the beautiful tune, in the same way that Manet is painting just the asparagus and more than the asparagus without venturing into asparagus symbols or the grand manner of the asparagus. But the tune is there, even if the more pretentious kind of jazz critic doesn't like to admit it, just as the asparagus is there, even if the more pretentious kind of art critic doesn't like to admit it. A Bill Evans playing "Someday My Prince Will Come," like Manet painting a lemon, is a stuff into things—into more than things, all the way into thats.

  In every period, every century, there is one art form or another that is able to combine simple affirmation of physical pleasure with a quality of plaintive longing, and this becomes the international art form of the time. Living abroad convinces you that just as French painting was the event of the nineteenth century and Italian painting of the fifteenth—the one universal language— American popular music is the cultural event of our time. It is the one common language, the source of the deepest emotions and the most ordinary ones too. The taxi driver hums the riff from "Hotel California," and the singer Johnny Hallyday, simply by impersonating Elvis, in some decent sense inhabits Elvis (just as Childe Hassam, impersonating Monet, at some decent level inhabited him too). Every epoch has an art form into which all the energies and faiths and beliefs and creative unselfconsciousness flows. What makes them matter is their ability not to be big but to be small meaningfully, to be little largely, to be grandly, or intensely, diminutive.

  The best lesson I have learned from a thing this year, perhaps in all my time in Paris, occurred on another afternoon this spring. I was sitting on the bench under the metal and glass porte-cochere at the playground at the Luxembourg Gardens, watching Luke climb up the sliding board, the "toboggan," the wrong way—glancing warily over his shoulder for the surveillant to whistle him down—when I looked down at the plastic-cupped cafe creme that I had bought at the little entrance shed a few moments before. About to unwrap the sugar cube, I saw that the little paper wrapping had a picture of the poet Mallarme on it—an odd, Benday-dot, unintentionally Lichtenstein-like portrait of him—while on the two other faces of the sugar cube there were quotes from his poems ("Et finisse I'echo par les celestes soirs, Extase des regards scintillements des nimbes!") and a brief, summary life ("LIBERTE SANS MESURE: STEPHANE MALLARME, POETE

  1842-1898"). The fourth face just had the name of the sugar company, Begin Say. The sugarcane had not only become a sugar cube, like the one in the Deyrolle poster, but been wrapped in a picture of a poet. I saved it to keep on my desk in my writing room and for once drank my coffee unsweetened. A lesson from a thing, and thrown in for the price of the coffee too.

  The Rookie

  I don't really remember how we first thought of the Rookie. I think it may have been right after I saw Luke, who had just turned three, playing with a soccer ball in the Luxembourg Gardens. It wasn't just the kicking that scared me but a kind of nonchalant bend-of-the-body European thing he did as he rose to meet the ball with his head. Next, he would be wearing those terrible shorts and bouncing the ball from foot to foot, improving his "skills." He had been born in New York, but he had no memory of it. Paris is the only home he knows. (Or, as he explained to a friend, in the third person he occasionally favors, like Bo Jackson or General de Gaulle, "He was born in New York, but then he moved to Paris and had a happy life.")

  "You want to have a catch?" I said, and he looked at me blankly.

  That night at bedtime I said, "Hey, I'll tell you about the Rookie." It was eight o'clock, but it was bright outside. Paris is a northern city, on a latitude with Newfoundland, as New York is a Mediterranean one, on a latitude with Naples, and so the light here in the hours between seven and nine at night is like the light in the hours between five and seven in New York. The sun is still out, but the sounds have become less purposeful—you hear smaller noises, high heels on the pavement—and though it is a pleasant time to lie in bed, it is not an easy time for a small boy to go to sleep.

  I had been drawing storytelling duty for a while and had made increasingly frantic efforts to find a hit. A story about a little boy who turned into a fish in Venice hadn'
t gone anywhere, and a remake of The Hobbit had done no box office at all. This story, though, rolled out easily. Every dad has one good bedtime story buried in him, and desperation will bring it out,

  The Rookie (I said) was a small boy in Anywhere, U.S.A., in the spring of 1908. Out walking with his mom one day, he discovered that he had an uncanny gift for throwing stones at things. He picked one up and threw it so hard that it knocked a robin off its perch a mile away, and then, after his mama chided him, he threw another one, just as far but so softly that it snuggled into the nest beside the bird without breaking an egg. His parents, a little sadly but with a sense of obligation, immediately sent him off on the train to New York, to try out for the New York Giants and their great manager, John J. McGraw. All he took with him was a suitcase that his mother had packed for him, filled with things, including his bottle, that she thought might be useful in case of an emergency. (At that point the contents of the suitcase were unparticularized, but they eventually included a complete dictionary of the animal languages, a saxophone, a design for the first car radio, compressed early rocket ship refueling pills, a map of Paris, a window defogger, a time machine, a Sherlock Holmes deerstalker, a map of a secret route to the South Pole, and reindeer medicine for Santa's team.)

  He got out at Grand Central, took a cab all the way uptown to the Polo Grounds—his mother had told him to take taxis in New York—and asked to see John J. McGraw. McGraw, staccato and impatient, was at first skeptical, but he finally agreed to watch while the kid threw, because he was so polite and the letter from his parents was so insistent and because, well, you never know. He called Big Six, the great Christy Mathewson, out of the dugout to watch, and Chief Meyers, the great American Indian catcher, to get behind the plate. The Chief came out, with a weary, crippled, long-suffering gait, and squatted. (I thought of the Chief as a creased veteran, though the real Chief was still in his twenties and not yet even a Giant.) The little guy walked to the mound, tugged at his cap—not a baseball cap, the cap of his knickers suit—and let fly.