Road to Elsewhere, Excerpt #32*: The Journey, Not the Arrival, Matters. (Unless You're in a Train Station in Paris.)
Rewriting T.S. Eliot's rule, with wine bottle in hand.
I STOLE HALF OF THAT HEADLINE FROM T.S. ELIOT, plus a lot of other Big Heads who said more or less the same thing (Leonard Woolf, Joseph Conrad, et al). But what do they know? It certainly isn’t true in Paris, where the train stations are either the best part of the journey, or a reason not to go anywhere else at all.
In his painting “Chemin de Fer,” Edouard Manet painted his lover outside the Gare St. Lazare, at the same time he and his pal Claude Monet were busy inventing impressionism and painting the shit out of that particular station.
A long-gone generation of commuters stepped around M. Manet outside the Gare Austerlitz, and M. Monet inside, and they’ve long ago reached their final destination. Monet and Manet are at the vanishing point as well, however immortal their paintings. This station currently processes 450,000 travelers a day, many of them stampeding unawares through a space that has spawned half a billion dollars worth of artwork.
The Gare Austerlitz is also important if you really need to be in Bordeaux for some reason. Like, if you’re thirsty, or sober. In the depths of World War II, this station was the shipping point for French Jews to Germany. Not Vichy France’s best moment. But then, did Vichy have any good moments? Oh, right: Surrendering to the Allies on August 14th, 1944. That, and when you uncork Vichy water. Pshhhhhht!
The Gare de Lyon is touted as Paris’ prettiest train station, a destination in its own right. That might actually be bad for its transport business. Upon arrival, why leave? Inside the Gare de Lyon you can take Le Train Bleu to dinner (it’s a restaurant), and finish off your day with drinks and endless saxophone honking next door, at the Montreux Jazz Cafe.
My favorite train station in Paris is one currently without train service.
The Gare d’Orsay opened in 1900, in time for the Exposition Universelle, just like the Paris Metro. It was a relatively short run. The station was closed in 1939 because its platforms were too short for modern trains. But that liberated it for a much better use as the Musee D’Orsay, which opened a quick half-century later, in 1986. Three enormous clock-faces preside over the deathless art, and help art enthusiasts who wonder if it’s lunch/tea/cocktail time yet.
On a visit, many years later, I discovered my two favorite impressionist paintings, by Monet: Woman with a Parasol Turned Left
and Woman with a Parasol Turned Right.
Among the many indicators of Monet’s genius: Producing separate masterpieces simply by rotating his model 90 degrees.
Of course, there’s nothing simple about it. The moment is all.
D’Orsay was mostly rat habitat when I was in Paris in the late 1970s, so my drinking buddy Seamus and I failed to become intoxicated within. But the rest of the stations were fair game, and provided perfect locations to pass the bottle and regard the mobile masses.
Is there a better stage than a train platform to regard the human condition? Isn’t life just a complex hairball of coming entangled with going, coughed up by god? Seamus and I studied the anticipation of the newly arrived, scanning the platform for a welcoming face, a reconnection. Along with arrivals that looked more like a negation of all that was left behind, with emptiness ahead to fill.
We closely observed the travelers scanning departure boards, sweating because they hadn’t been able to disentangle themselves from here and now in time to reach there and then. They fumbled with tickets in front of impassive railroad agents, as indifferent to panic as obstetricians. They dragged too much baggage, listened to the pre-trembling of the doors that may mechanically foreclose their future. There was no “next train,” only the present one that threatened to exclude them.
And in the midst of all this, Seamus, age 18, and me, sniffing at twenty-two, were as remote from the commuter rush as we were from time’s passage. Or so we imagined. We condescended to passengers slogging through their daily ruts, our hourglass an emptying wine bottle. Nobody cared if we showed up here, there, or anywhere. That freedom was its own burden, of course, because it could convince you that you, your life, your future, wouldn’t matter at all, to anybody. Even, ultimately, to us.
*On weekends I run excerpts from The Road to Elsewhere, my coming-of-age-travel-memoir-with-funny-drawings. (The first entry is here. Most recent one is here. Or dive in here, here, or even here.) It details the story of my road through Paris, London, and god help me, Zagreb, in search of the ultimate destination: a life worth living. The story so far: Young Peter has arrived in Paris, occupied a dorm room at the Alliance Française language school, tiptoed out onto the Boulevard Raspail and the Paris Metro, and made the first steps on the road to elsewhere. If it’s too much to read, just look at the illustrations. They’re my favorite part, too.
Loved this, Peter. Fun to remember those priceless days.
So fun to revisit Paris through your experiences.