Paris Irrealis

On Places Real and Imagined

A Sunday on La Grande Jatte — Georges Seurat (1884)

Imagine an early morning in Paris. The Seine shimmers gently as it slides under stone bridges. A breeze rustles the horse chestnuts lining the wide boulevards. A soft morning glow begins to reclaim the city from the shadows while a waitress arranges wooden tables outside a café. A bell tinkles as the first customer of the day opens the door of a pâtisserie, releasing the smell of freshly-baked pastry. Slightly stooped and shuffling, a white-haired man navigates the miniature hillocks and canyons of a cobbled road, morning paper clutched tightly under his arm, the lapels of his tweed jacket pulled askew but still clinging to a singular, unsurrendering horn-button. Slanting rays glint off wrought-iron balconies. A young man in a white tee and black oxfords leans over his window-box, lit cigarette dangling from his lips as he surveys the street below.

I have never been to Paris. Even so, in my mind’s eye I can conjure vivid images of its streets, of its architecture, of its monuments. More than that, I can imagine a mood, a feeling, a sense of being that feels distinctly Parisian. This is not Paris as it really is, but Paris Irrealis - a place I don’t know exists, but still hope to find, even though I suspect I never will, and continually put off finding out.

Where does this fantasy Paris come from? Novels, movies, music. Photographs, art, stories. Monet, Renoir, Manet. Balzac, Hugo, Dumas. Moulin Rouge, Pink Panther, Ratatouille. A kaleidoscopic array of glimpses at a city called Paris, slowly percolating through memory and experience to bring forth a Platonic ideal of Paris. A shadow Paris, cast upon the cave wall by the dancing flames of our shared cultural inheritance.

I’m fascinated by the concept of place, with art, literature, and history - and how the latter three reflect upon and lend meaning to the former. How place can evoke certain moods, how it can impress upon how we think, shaping our sense of the world and our place in it. So much so I write a newsletter about it!

There are few cities as bound up in art, literature, and history as Paris. There are fewer places still that can so easily awake our imagination.

Why then, have I never been?

Recently, I’ve been reading Homo Irrealis, a collection of essays by André Aciman. The uniting theme among the various stories and analysis is an idea hidden within what linguists call ‘irrealis moods’. The term refers to a set of grammatical moods that indicate a certain event or situation that is not known to have happened as the speaker is talking. They deal not with the present or the past or the future; they deal with the might-have been, the might-still-be. The irrealis lie outside of time.

"I was toying with a might-have-been that hadn’t happened yet but wasn't unreal for not happening and might still happen, though I feared it never would and sometimes wished it wouldn’t happen just yet."

— André Aciman

On reading these lines I was gripped by that familiar sensation —so peculiar to the written word— of recognising a thought I’ve groped at, but never fully articulated or understood, until I’ve seen it written in another’s hand.

For many years now I could have visited Paris. I lived in London, a short train ride away. I never went. I now travel around Europe full-time and yet still I put it off. We’re even heading to France on our next stop — but not to Paris.

I would like to, love to, even dream about, visiting Paris. I’ve done so for years. So why haven’t I? What’s holding me back?

I used to put it down to its nearness. Paris was so close and so available that a visit could be arranged anytime and so could always be postponed. But Aciman’s words made me realise there’s more to it than that. There’s an extra layer I’ve been avoiding.

As Aciman writes:

“Visiting a place is not necessarily the experience of it. The real experience is the resonance, the “pre-image,” the after-image, the interpretation of experience, the distortion of experience, the struggle to experience the experience.”

This, I think, is at the crux of my reluctance to visit the city. I have been cultivating my pre-image of Paris, my shadow Paris, for so long that it’s now so vivid, so dear to me, that I’m reluctant to relinquish it. The fear is that in experiencing the real Paris I will lose this pre-image — my Paris Irrealis.

This past week I’ve been playing around with an old film camera I bought secondhand. The first couple of rolls have come back from the lab and have all the hallmark mistakes of a novice - camera shake, light leaks, bad focussing, and so on. At one stage, I must not have pulled the film advance lever around fully as I managed to double expose a frame by mistake. Two ghostly images were thus overlaid atop one another. This technique can produce interesting results in the hands of someone who knows what they’re doing, but in my case the overlay has resulted in the photographs’ loss.

This is my fear with Paris. Like poorly wound film, I worry an experience of the real will overlay the top of the irreal, spoiling both. As long as I don’t visit, my Paris Irrealis remains in tact. The possibility of the city being exactly as I imagine survives.

But is preservation of imagination worth the forfeit of real experience? As Aciman alludes in the excerpt above, every place we visit, every memory we form, evolves in our minds over time. The real Paris may alter, morph, change my Paris Irrealis, but it’s this very dynamism that makes a place so confounding, so enigmatic, so interesting.

To experience a place is to shoot a reel of film, not a single frame. All I have now is the opening shot.

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