impressions. first night in Paris.

The softness of Paris tonight as I walk the crowded streets along the Seine, orange beige of dawn like a fallen cloud illuminated by gentle neon’s and candle-colored cafes— red reflections off the wine glass—so silent for such immensity, still, almost, even as people, Parisians with legs crossed sophisticated and sweaters around their shoulders like Ivy League, and tall Africans, and Asians and Spanish and Americans, and Italians sipping in cafes and watching the street like theatre—and owners outside the restaurant in the busy alley beckoning tourists and me inside—and the great modern barge floating down the dark-teal Seine overflowing with tourists snapping pictures of students and lovers perched on the walkway with wine or sitting on the gray steps that climb to Notre Dame.

I walk watching, absorbing the comfort of this busy silence, to Shakespeare and Company’s bookstore where Hemingway was loaned books on credit and good faith—and the books! the books! so many volumes one would die to try—Rimbaud, Kerouac, Baudelaire, Hemingway, Ginsberg, Joyce—literary magazines and philosophy and art—everything and everyone under the moon and all sorts of hidden volumes poking their heads out from busy shelves—and English readers perusing muttering things like “this is a great bookstore,” and “I think Hemingway came here”—and a room upstairs with a piano and a young Frenchman and his girl, and he begins to play while a pretty brunette opens the dusty-cover of some ancient volume in a corner chair and begins reading, and I want to ask her what she’s reading, or how she manages to read with all this commotion and all these books around! but I don’t.

—I walk down the busy alley, footpath of crepes and neon mist–passed expensive restaurants I can’t afford with tourists and lovers and well-dressed, casual and enjoying——I wander into Taschen Books and flip through photos of Mohammed Ali in a massive book almost a meter long—with colored pictures and black and whites and wonderful quotes and sweat dripping off the chin of some fallen foe so real I taste salt—and Frida and Van Gogh over in the corner for another night— All this at 10 pm. Literature and art alive in the drunken night.

—Paris! One couldn’t tire of falling in love here under the vestige of an orange-beige twilight on a summer night with all the books and wine and art and beautiful lonely eyes peering like moonlight through the back-alley shadows that any fool could ever want.