Today, for some reason I can't quite put my finger on, I find myself in this cafe in Paris thinking about time.
Slippery stuff, time. You know, in that Einsteinian sense in which sitting on a hot stove seems like eternity, but sitting for hours talking to a beautiful woman seems like a moment. Science has recently confirmed that our human perception of time is not fixed to an immutable scale -- time really *does* slow down and speed up for us. Time plays weird tricks with memory, too. Your first kiss seems like only yesterday, but try to remember what you had for lunch only yesterday. Anyway, I'm sitting here flashing back to some of my time here in Paris. I first came here when I was 15 or so, on a vacation with my family. We were living in Morocco at the time, having spent our years before Morocco living in America's Deep South. My mother had never traveled to Europe before, my father had only been "overseas" once, and that, too had been in Morocco. We knew nuthin'. My brothers were younger, but I was old enough to have my mind blown by Morocco. It was like stepping into a Whole Other Reality. Very little of what I had been taught that life was like was what life was like in Morocco. Very Third World, and very eye-opening. It jumpstarted my previously-asleep American brain and got me thinkin'. Been thinkin' ever since, and I genuinely thank the U.S. Air Force for providing me with that opportunity. But Paris! Seeing it for the first time was WAY eye-opening and awakening, in every sense of the word. And in ways that had to do with time. I had experienced fleeting moments of "time-slippage" before, in the deserts of Morocco, but in Paris the odd "past-life flashbacks" really started happening. Even though I was with my parents and two younger brothers, I'd catch a glimpse of an older neighborhood in Paris and just "flash back" for a moment or two. I had no idea what it was (and still do not today), but it was as if for a moment some part of me had "time-slipped" and gotten a peek into the events of another life, in another time. The same thing has happened to me many times in Paris since. It happened again last night. I went to a bistro that has a fairly interesting history, having been a favorite "writing cafe" of Charles Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud, and François Villon. http://www.lavenusnoire.fr/a-propos/ <http://www.lavenusnoire.fr/a-propos/> la Vénus Noire is a literal "caveau," its walls carved out of the original limestone that forms the foundation of Paris. And sitting there listening to quiet jazz and chatting with other people, I had a few of those momentary flashbacks again. One instant I'd be there Here And Now, in a room full of Parisians in modern dress talking about modern things, and then Zap! the scene would change to the same room, with everyone dressed as they would have been in the Belle Epoque. None of these flashes lasted more than a couple of seconds, and I can't give you any meaningful insights I gained from the experience, but it was fun. Very "Midnight In Paris."
