Book Excerpt

This is an excerpt of the book I’m reading now, Paris to the Moon, it’s actually not a very good book, but I liked this paragraph. It’s about a family that moves to Paris for five years, and the experiences they have living as Americans in Paris.

“The things an American who is abroad for a very long time misses – or at least the things I missed – I was discovering, weren’t the things you were supposed to miss. We are supposed to come to Europe for leisure, sunshine, a more civilized pace, for slowness of various kinds. America we are supposed to miss for its speed, its friendliness, for the independence of its people and the individualism of their lives. Yet these were not the things I missed, and when I speak to Americans who have lived abroad, for a long time, those are not the things they seem to miss either. I didn’t miss cross-town traffic, New York taxicabs, talk radio or talk television, or the constant, appalling flow of opinion that spills out like dirty floodwater.
I didn’t miss American “independence” either. If anything, I missed its opposite, American obsequiousness, that yearning, beseeching tone of a salesman trying to sell something that you never hear … I found, to my surprise, that what I missed and longed for was the comforting loneliness of life in New York, a certain kind of scuffed-up soulfulness … It isn’t possible to just remove yourself from a friendship in Paris for a month or two, as you can in New York. (“What have you been doing?” “Working.” “Oh.”) … The things Americans miss tend to involve that kind of formlessness, small, casual, and solitary pleasures. A psychoanalyst misses walking up Lafayette Street in her tracksuit, sipping coffee from a cup with a lid with the little plastic piece that pops up. My wife, having been sent the carrot cake that she missed from New York, discovered that what she really missed was standing up at the counter and eating carrot cake in the company of strangers. I thought I missed reading Phil Mushnik in the sports pages of the Post; what I really missed was reading Phil Mushnik on the number 6 uptown train on a Monday morning around ten.
The consensual anonymity of men in crowds is what we are escaping when we leave, and then it is what we miss. You can be alone in [Honduras] a lot, but it is hard to be lonely; there is always another pair of eyes, not unfriendly, appraising you. You are a subject, not an object, and if this is part of the narrow, centuries-old happiness of life in [Honduras], it is also one of the things that narrow that happiness. Walk into Central Park to watch the sea lions, and you disappear from the world for a little while … in [Honduras] you are always conscious of the [things] leading you back the way you came ... We go to cities to become invisible, or to be invisible and visible by turns, and it is hard to be invisible in [Honduras] … What that American misses is the blues.”

It’s not exactly fitting for Peace Corps and Honduras, but I liked it enough when I was reading, and figured I copy it over for everyone else in the occasion that I haven’t written in a while and don’t really have the motivation to at this point either. I’ve got the Honduran blues.