430
PARTISAN REVIEW
city that has been polished
lO
a high sheen, somewhat like a vast
outdoor museum, beautiful but a little soulless, where the food and
wine are as good as ever and the Metro runs better than ever and the
streets are still relatively clean and safe. Administratively, Paris is a
great success, an evolving organism but also an elegant showcase of
what the city once was .
In
the fonies when the French were poor the philosophers were
writing about
le vide, le neant,
and
l'absurde.
Today the message of
Paris is more banal:
malgre tout,
Life Is Good. As philosophy this was
already discredited by Voltaire, but it seems to retain its allure in the
less theoretical realm of everyday life. It's sti ll a city easy
to
live in and
very hard to leave.
February 1981
