Walking is one of my very favorite things to do. Paris is an exceptional city to walk through. It is dense enough that like New York, San Francisco, or Chicago it has not only neighborhoods but micro-neighborhoods. Each city block has its own character. The Marais, where we’re staying, changes from block-to-block. Moving through the city at night, wandering back from dinner with an old friend who lives here, I passed through densely packed streets filled with bistros, almost empty plazas where perhaps a half-dozen people lingered over a dinner at an oyster bar, and a bookstore prominently displaying the works of English speaking anarchists translated into French (Emma Goldman, Kenneth Rexroth, and one or two others). There were also massive billboards advertising upcoming plays, many many closed wine shops, a quality comic book shop, and a cheese shop that had won the Meilleur Ouvrier de France (thus signifying it had some of the best cheese in the country).
The people watching was wonderful and, at the same time, not a little disheartening. Mixed among the vibrant couples out for a stroll, the beautiful groups gathered for dinner, the jazz aficionados seeking the best club, the confused tourists trying not to lose their way, were those who have found themselves at society’s margins: prostitutes gathering along the Rue de Saint-Denis, where they have gathered for generations; an African street vendor grilling corn over a wood fire in the impossible heat; and too many people trying to sleep in the streets.
This was what I love about walking. It makes it difficult to ignore the broader social reality—inequality, stratification, the multi-cultures of the city piled upon each other… When I am in a car traveling from place-to-place it is possible to remain oblivious to human worlds other than mine. When I walk I must, on some level, perhaps only briefly, perhaps for just a fraction of minute, engage the humanity that surrounds me and of which I am a part.
