Café à L’Americain
I remember returning home to New York
two summers ago, after my year abroad at the Sorbonne Nouvelle. Eager
to discuss my travels with my family, I was quickly disillusioned to
find both mother and sister typing busily away on wireless Internet
connections, satellite television blaring in the background. In France,
such technology was unheard of, and regarded, at least in the
conservative home of my host family, as a disruption (most unwelcome)
to familial life. The shock of the wireless world would prove the first
of many radical differences I faced as I re-acclimated to la vie
américaine.The second disparity between life in Paris and life in New York was as simple as coffee. New York, for me, had always lacked the opulent café ambiance of Paris, where one could mull for hours over the tiniest of espressos. New Yorkers invariably preferred a latte on the go to a coffee that promised to be both time and energy consuming. Imagine all the reflection inherent in the five minutes taken to sit down with a coffee! In New York, consumption, without reflection, is the order of the day. Though I should not have been surprised, I was utterly forlorn when I noticed my old favorite restaurants and bars in the neighborhood had united under one, unmistakable name: Starbucks.
* * *
Returning to Paris this past week, I found the city much as I had left it a year and a half ago. Every pastry remained glued in place; every schoolgirl still toted a Vanessa Bruno bag and Converse sneakers. There was, in the timeless city, a sense of perfection that I greeted with joy and reconnaissance. It was as if I were truly returning home. But this “perfection,” was not without an air of unsettling conformity.
Blaring back at me from the taxi window, at the left of the Odeon Metro, I found the symbol of commodity itself: a Starbucks of Manhattan proportions. There is another I come across at Montparnasse. God knows where else they are being conceived, or already lurking.
Suddenly, I envisioned a city of clones: those very schoolgirls in matching shoes and bags now bearing Starbucks coffee cups, the perfect new fashion accessory. In an upturned, Orwellian universe, Parisians would soon be toting their laptops (with wireless internet, of course) to the neighborhood Starbucks, ordering their coffees to go.
* * *
The beauty of New York lies in its ravenous hunger for change, while that of Paris lies in renunciation. In Paris, antiquity is revered, time preserved; in New York, it is reinvented at light speed. Strangely, New York’s visible effort to anticipate the future and Paris’ more subtle effort to preserve the past equate to the same sum product: ubiquity. A Paris of old does not allow for diversity of fashion or taste (or even, one could argue, race or creed), while New York’s
dystopian dream is that of a giant, technological power in which the
diversity it once championed is obsolete and all miscellaneous parts
assimilated.
Editor's note: this article was uploaded from a WiFi connection in, you guessed it, Starbucks on the Avenue de l'Opera.
Lucinda Blumenfeld, originally from New York, has just finished her final year at McGill University in Montreal. A self-proclaimed francophile ever since her first visit to France at the age of 12, Lucinda recently finished a year of studies in literature and cinema at The Sorbonne Nouvelle, and is glad to be back in Paris.
