Here comes the fear again
And where the joy endures
The Paris grey set in on Tuesday, and it didn’t lift, even a glimmer, until the weekend. No rain, no sun, just a sullen weight, the world huddled in brace position. Pathetic fallacy. My kid is coughing at night like a tubercular heiress, but all the 4am Googles tell me it’s probably fine, and anyway, we can take him to the doctor without waiting for weeks or paying some unspecified amount of money. Small mercies. We’re in the process of renewing our visas, and thinking about ways to secure our roots here in Paris. I’m spending all my time reading and writing about this evolving experience of deracination, expatriation, home and abroad, here and there. It’s the subject of the book I’m writing, but also increasingly the subject of my life, and this newsletter, wherever it goes.
That said, I don’t want to talk about, read about, think about the election. My first as a citizen! (Sorry, I did my best.) Not yet. There is plenty to say, plenty to panic about, lament, and fight. What has been helping me this week is silence and, paradoxically, music. Silence* to walk, to think and reflect, to write (*actually, rumbly-ruffly white noise, since there’s still drilling going on in the building next door.) It’s been forever since I’ve walked or run outside without some loud confident voices in my ear, arguing, analyzing, prognosticating, and it’s been a relief to turn them off, to simply walk under those metal cold skies and hear my own thoughts for a change. And notice when the sun comes out.
So silence, but also music: music to mark the evenings, the weekends, to make the house feel warm and alive. I’m using a basic little Bluetooth speaker and mostly Spotify playlists made by other people or the algorithm, and it’s perfectly fine. I’ve also been comfort-listening to Pulp’s 1998 album This is Hardcore, which might be my enduring favorite, although I seem to remember critics hating it at the time. To me it’s always been a perfect and intriguing little short-story collection about masculinity, vignettes soaked in tenderness and bitterness and rage. This is our music from the bachelor’s den / The sound of loneliness turned up to ten. It’s felt, oh I don’t know, relevant this week. Here’s Jarvis being incredibly Jarvis with “The Fear” on Jools Holland some number of lifetimes ago.
Other small mercies this week: the decorations are going up around town - we have this week to order our Christmas tree via the school as a fundraiser - and while it’s this dark and dank, I’ll take all the lights and festive color I can. Do people still complain that it’s too soon? Too soon, sure, if you love the grey nothingness of November, leavened only—in this country, anyway—by a day mourning the war dead? Put some damn twinkle lights in the window. Here’s an enormous sparkling stag in front of the strange shiny mall/spaceship around the corner from our place, a slightly sinister herald. I hope wherever you are there is a little light.
