En Attendant Godot

Life in France often feels a little like Waiting For Godot. By that, I mean, surreal and uncertain (if you want examples, see every other blog I’ve ever written). I think it’s no accident that Beckett wrote this play in French. The caprices of the French bureaucracy, for example, usually have a Beckettian logic (meaning none at all, really) about them. You also tend to wait in line in Paris all the time—to go to the movies, exit Chatelet, get into any museum, get a table at a restaurant, buy your groceries, etc. The latest in French bureaucratic surrealism: my friend Angela recently went to a bar where they asked patrons to make a deposit if they ordered a certain kind of beer called Kwak because apparently you have to drink it in a special glass that is expensive. Seriously—you purchase beer, but it’s like you’re renting the glass you drink it in and you have to pay a “caution.” This is the same word you use for the deposit you make on your apartment when you move in. You probably also have to wait in line to make your beer glass deposit.

Lately for me in France, there’s this perpetual longing that makes me feel a bit like I’m waiting for an impossible Godot-like miracle, which would be, in my case, a sign that moving to Paris was the right thing to do, that I fit in here, I can make a life and long-term plans here, rather than just going from year to year, and that I have many important and convincing reasons for staying. Maybe it’s restlessness brought on by spring, or the fact that I’m on vacation and so I now have plenty of free time to worry about the future, but lately, I feel like I’m waiting for the future to start. I’m moving in a week, the semester ends 2 weeks after spring vacation, and I’ll have the summer off. I’ll visit my family in the states and I’ll celebrate my 30^th birthday (gulp) in Paris in August, I’ll have the same job at the university next year and hopefully it’ll be easier the second time around. But like the Bruce Springsteen song goes (it’s off his new album, Magic), we’re livin’ in the future and none of this has happened yet.

I’m also waiting for more impossible things that the future might or might not hold—like the perfect job at an NGO so that I can speak French and save the world simultaneously—or for my current job suddenly to become more satisfying, or the discovery of some well-hidden talent that chooses to reveal itself in Paris, like cinematography, writing or oil-painting that would make my life fulfilling and would remove all my doubts about everything, or, finally, the perfect relationship-- which would more or less do that same thing. To some extent everyone lives in the future and hopes for things like these and this is the human condition— just ask Samuel Beckett. But this phenomenon suddenly seems way more intense in a foreign country where you live with more uncertainty in your life than you did back home and you’re culturally more on the periphery (or péripherique) of Parisian life looking for the right exit to get into town, and not in the center of the city where all the museums, theaters and restaurants and clubs are.

There’s this Portishead song that I love (Glorybox off the Dummy album) and it goes: “give me a reason to love you…” and I feel like the lyrics should be: “give me a reason to stay in France.” I want France to convince me to stay forever. I want feel like I belong here. Guess I’ll have to wait for that song to be released. And then they’ll probably want a deposit before you buy the album.