Parisistible
Olivia Dean
Column III
I’ve always wished that I were better at taking photos. Not just aesthetically or technically: I have enough ear piercings and chunky dad trainers to at least look like I should be artistic behind the camera, which is half the struggle I tend to think. My penchant for mini bags and feeble memory prevent me from carrying a camera, leaving me with a camera roll of scarce grainy iPhone snaps and screenshots of government attestations from my 1 hour of permitted daily exercise. At indiscriminate points, I realise that in the abstract future I will have little to constitute a material memory of my past life, bereft of the solidity of a well-kept photo album. The fluid footage in my head doesn’t quite capture the poignancy of one singular frame of vision, and for that I will always lament my forgetfulness.
Illustration Credit: Nir Stern
I’m moving out of my apartment on Île Saint-Louis in a month or so; my flatmate is going to study in Montpellier, and I can’t support the extortionate rent, however much I may want to try. Another friend and I are searching for new apartments, but given the lockdown, we can’t view anything physically without the threat of being chased by the profuse armed police. Relying on flattering descriptions, phone calls and photographs, it falls to us to locate a suitable backdrop for pending memories to take place against, with two double bedrooms to boot.
It has to be admitted that said extortionate rent on the apartment I live in now affords a certain luxury of visual idealism. Without wanting to sound like an estate agent, we’re on the tiny little-sister island of that on which Notre Dame’s carcass stands, so if you were to stick your head out of the living room window, you would see the Seine on both sides, as well as the church Marius and Cosette get married in Les Misérables, if that can be called a claim to fame. The building is a postcard-Parisian Haussmann dream, complete with beams, a grand staircase, and a view over the roofs towards the Eiffel Tower. For the immaterial abstract realm of Instagram, and pictures sent to family and friends, it’s perfection, and I will be truly sad to leave it as undocumented as I have.
Credit: Photo by Isaiah Bekkers on Unsplash
If it’s too good to be true as is said, it probably is, and it’s what we choose not to photograph in our apartment that will in all likelihood stick more firmly in my memory than the photogenic aspects. The permanent headache, for instance, will be a fond memory: at a couple of inches shy of 6 foot, I was not designed for a top floor Paris flat, where the ceilings at best flatten the top of my hair and at worst force me to hunch over like our fabled neighbour Quasimodo. Five hefty flights of stairs bring you up to the flat, having been built well before the invention of the lift. On arrival, you may be hindered by the front door which doesn’t open when the temperature isn’t perfectly ambient and, if you are strong enough (you will be after a few weeks of the stairs, but disproportionately, as if you’ve only done leg days - I speak from experience) to kick the door down, you may be greeted by the mouse that runs across the living room floor. If you’re hungry, you can make exclusively wet or cold food, as we don’t have an oven, and it’s a two-man job to extract the microwave from its shelf behind one of the massive wooden beams, which will probably concuss you in the process. The hob acts as a de facto flamethrower, but if you want to run some cold water on your burns and make a cup of tea to calm yourself, you’re in luck, as all of the taps run only freezing or boiling water.
I’ve discussed the expectation-vs-reality dichotomy at length before. Life here is physically beautiful, but the facets of daily life which slip past unphotographed are what I wish I could document with the same singularity as a photo of the Seine. The reality of trying to host 15 friends for dinner in a 50 square metre apartment, with no dining table, and 7 chairs, can’t be remembered entirely through a photograph, nor can the test of keeping the noise down after a passive-aggressive note addressed to ‘the tourists’ was left in our staircase. Everyone thinks that living in Paris is idyllic, which it is: I’m not so much of a brat that I can’t see the immense privilege I have in being able to live here, supported, and without much real responsibility, for a year. But living as a student or intern in Paris is not nearly as glamourous as it seems, and to be frank I wouldn’t like it if it were. What we choose to capture in the permanence of a photograph is so often that which is immediately, conformingly beautiful, extracted from the reality of the moment through unnatural posing, lighting, and angles, when it is the moment itself that forms the memory worth keeping. Perhaps we should all go Proustian and rediscover our pasts through small French cakes.
