Escaping History

Isaac Cui
- Oct 14, 2021
- 6 min read

On Loneliness

A few weeks ago, the sermon delivered at the church was on the topic of loneliness. “Why,” the vicar asked, “do people feel lonely in a city like London?”

The question, I think, takes some motivation, because it doesn’t seem all that surprising to me that people in big cities feel lonely. The argument, I suppose, is that there are so many people in this city, so many things to do and explore, that one surely doesn’t have the space, physical and metaphorical, to feel lonely. But there are some telling statistics, he suggested: that some half of Londoners find the city to be lonely and that people living in cities tend to feel more lonely than those living outside them.

I don’t necessarily have a good answer to the vicar’s question, but I thought I would write about two potential answers. First, I think loneliness might be thought of primarily in terms of purpose. London is a place with purpose. It is bustling, its people hustling and hurrying. People walk and act with purpose, for they know what they are here to do. And I think for those who don’t have that purpose, the sense that others have found their mission can be alienating.

We might think of purpose as tying to another aspect of London’s liveliness. It is a noisy city. It’s hard to find a second, even out in Greenwich, of silence. I think silence is instinctually lonely, but it seems to me equally true that constant noise can also induce a kind of loneliness. The noise in London is directed: it’s the drilling of jackhammers, the rush of cars and busses, the chatter of people video-calling while riding a bike. Again, it’s people whose efforts are directed. You feel trapped in your own head as you see others drawn into the world.

A second possibility: loneliness is actually about freedom. That is, what separates loneliness from the state of being alone is its sentimentality, possible only in moments of reflection. The precondition of loneliness is time spent alone doing little of substantive value. In that sense, then, loneliness is what’s left when we have genuine freedom and are unable to use it in a way that seems to us fulfilling; it’s a byproduct of failing to decide how to use your time when you’re left undirected by some external force. The psychoanalytic writer, Adam Phillips, writes,

If I'm not invited to the party, I may have to consider what else I want: the risk is that being invited to the party does my wanting for me, that I might delegate my desire to other people's invitations. Already knowing, or thinking we know, what we want is the way we manage our fear of freedom.

To fully believe this view would lead one to think that loneliness is entirely manufactured by our mindset — that we can internally “think” our way, so to speak, out of feeling lonely. In contrast, the idea that loneliness is tied to purpose is linked to an external stimulus — it’s about how others are perceived to be.

That said, these two explanations converge in a sense that loneliness is about counterfactual scenarios. To be lonely, when thinking of loneliness in terms of purpose, is to be left out of others’ experiences of purposeful life. To be lonely, when thinking about loneliness in terms of freedom, is to be left out of all the potential experiences one might have if one were to use their time differently. And those counterfactuals, it should be clear, are imaginations. In that sense, loneliness is conjured by our wistful understanding of the world.

I don’t want this argument to be taken too far, for there is a danger in interpreting loneliness as exclusively a function of the mind. Certainly how society is organized and how people interact shape one’s feelings of loneliness. Loneliness is a sociological problem — or perhaps even an economic one — as well as a psychological one. But if either of the models noted earlier are right, then an implication is that one should feel less lonely in a place like London when one feels (1) a sense of purpose, or calling, to one’s life; and (2) a sense of intention when exercising their freedom. (One might respond to this conclusion, though, with Vapnik’s Razor: to solve a problem, do not solve a more difficult problem as an intermediate step.)

* * * * *

Rose: I’ve been reading a book on London’s history, and it’s helped me be more conscientious when exploring London. I went to visit the Guildhall, the City of London’s traditional mercantile and assembly space, where there are also the ruins of a Roman amphitheatre. The Guildhall's art gallery also had an original copy of Magna Carta (1297 issuance).

I used to live in a community called Clerkenwell, and I ended up visiting the well (Clerk’s Well) that the area is named after; it’s an ancient well, but it blends right into the road unless you look for it. As I’ve spent the last year learning, you can find a lot in London if you just know where to look. I also ran into Friday Street, where the fishmongers used to do business (the Friday Fast meant that many didn’t eat meat on Fridays), and I spent a decent amount of time exploring the Inns of Court, the historic lawyers guilds (there are four: the Inner Temple, the Middle Temple, Gray’s Inn, and Lincoln’s Inn; they are all basically adjacent to LSE).

On the other hand, there are places where I was surprised to see so much history erased. The book discussed the area of St. Giles, which is in the West End (think of the most touristy, high culture areas of London). But historically, it was an extremely impoverished area; for centuries, it was one of England’s most notorious slums. In the middle of the nineteenth century, the city plowed through the community to create New Oxford Street, a street that I routinely used to get to Chinatown from where I used to live. So I went around the area to look for signs of St. Giles’s history — and I couldn’t find anything. It was surprising, because I feel like this is a city that usually does a very good job of preserving its history with monuments, plaques, and so on.

Last week, I went to my first pub quiz, which was kind of fun, although I was quite bad at it. Most of the questions had to do with 1990s culture — music, movies, and so on. But it was nice to spend time with good people.

I’ve also recently had the opportunity to meet lots of interesting people. I’ve become friends with a guy in my program from Wales, and he’s given me a lot of interesting perspectives. I met a master’s student in the sibling program to mine (the Department of Methodology has two master’s programs: applied social data science, which is what I’m in, and social research methods) who is from Manchester and lives in a warehouse; she was fascinating to talk to. Another person in my program is from Spain, and we spent half an hour at the gym talking about Catalonian independence. Like I noted in my last post, there’s a kind of vibrancy at this school, just like a Pomona, that feels so much more fulfilling than last year, when I didn’t really get to meet anyone.

Bud: I’m going to Oxford this weekend, and I’m excited to see the university. Also, in a true sign of my nerdery, I’m going to a legal history lecture on John Selden next Tuesday, which will be quite fun. My friend from church is delivering the sermon this Sunday; we spent our last two lunches talking about what he’s going to say, so I’m eager to see him finally preach it. Also, I’m going to start reading Gilgamesh with a friend, which I’m really excited for. She’s very thoughtful and insightful, plus I remember really being moved by Gilgamesh back in ninth grade (eight years ago at this point!).

Thorn: I don’t have much to complain about right now, to be honest. One thing that I have started noticing, though, is supply chain problems. Thankfully, it hasn’t really affected me, in the sense that I have not had to modify my buying habits due to shortages. But my local grocery store looked like this the other day:

Gratitude: A friend made me a “Taylor adjacent songs” playlist to try to get me to branch out in terms of my music. I am very grateful for the kind gesture.

Future Topic: corporate rights!

Isaac Cui
- Sep 30, 2021
- 13 min read

To Be Made Free

The Autobiography of Malcolm X

By Malcolm X, with the assistance of Alex Haley, foreword by Gary Younge. 2007. London: Penguin Books. ISBN: 978-0-141-03272-6.

No One Is Talking About This

By Patricia Lockwood. 2021. London: Bloomsbury Circus. ISBN: 978-1-5266-2976-0.

Malcolm X’s reputation precedes him. Without having heard directly from or read him, most will have a gut judgment about him — his character, his cause, his tactics. His book probably doesn’t help. We’re told never to judge a book by its cover, but of course we often do. In big red font, the back starts: “They called him the ‘ANGRIEST BLACK MAN IN AMERICA’ . . .”

One could describe Malcolm in many ways, just as he was called many different names. He was born as Malcolm Little in Omaha, Nebraska, to a Baptist minister and his Grenadan-immigrant wife. His early life was scarred by racial violence: white people burned down his family’s house in Omaha when he was four (81), leading the family to relocate to East Lansing, Michigan; at six, his father was killed (“Negroes in Lansing have always whispered that he was attacked, and then laid across some tracks for a streetcar to run over him. His body was cut almost in half,” 89); and his mother, eventually, suffered a mental breakdown, leading the state to split him and his siblings up (99–101).

Malcolm went to school in Lansing, where he was top of his class academically and elected class president in the seventh grade (112), but he grew disillusioned with being one of a few Black students in a white, Northern school. It was the paternalism of the white liberal, for Malcolm, that was so frustrating. He describes a conversation with his eighth grade English teacher, where, when asked about a future career, Malcolm said he wanted to be a lawyer. The response:

“Malcolm, one of life’s first needs is for us to be realistic. Don’t misunderstand me, now. We all here like you, you know that. But you’ve got to be realistic about being a nigger. A lawyer — that’s no realistic goal for a nigger. You need to think about something you can be.” (118)

One reason why Malcolm’s views were regarded as so controversial was that he was deeply critical of the Northern liberal. He writes:

The white Southerner, you can say one thing — he is honest. He bares his teeth to the black man; he tells the black man, to his face, that Southern whites never will accept phony “integration.” . . . But the Northern white man, he grins with his teeth, and his mouth has always been full of tricks and lies of “equality” and “integration.” When one day all over America, a black hand touched the white man’s shoulder, and the white man turned, and there stood the Negro saying “Me, too …,” why, that Northern liberal shrank from that black man with as much guilt and dread as any Southern white man. (377)

It’s not hard to see where that perspective comes from: his childhood fleeing the Midwest due to racial violence and his routinely degrading treatment at a Northern school that led him, as he later put it, to “try[ ] so hard, in every way I could, to be white” (112).

After deciding to leave Lansing as a teenager, Malcolm went to Boston, where he worked and took part in a vibrant Black nightlife scene, spending his nights both shoeshining and dancing away in his zoot suits (one was “just wild: sky-blue pants thirty inches in the knee and angle-narrowed down to twelve inches at the bottom, and a long coat that pinched my waist and flared out below my knees,” 135). He began drinking and smoking. He met women. And he eventually found his way to Harlem, where he was known as “Detroit Red” (partly a misunderstanding about where he was from and partly in reference to his hair color). By the age of eighteen, he was dealing drugs, gambling, pimping, and eventually engaging in armed robbery. It’s clear that Malcolm always was strong-willed, but he shows his nerves of steel when planning robberies, at one point playing Russian roulette just to prove a point to his collaborators. “‘I’m doing this, showing you I’m not afraid to die,’ I told them. ‘Never cross a man not afraid to die’” (235).

Throughout the Autobiography, Malcolm describes himself as living on borrowed time. Certainly as a hustler that would be expected. The “jungle” of Harlem hustler circles, as he calls it, is a dangerous place. “Deep down,” he reflects, “I actually believed that after living as fully as humanly possible, one should then die violently. I expected then, as I still expect today, to die at any time” (229). His life of crime ended not with death, though, but with spiritual rebirth in a prison cell.

Malcolm spent over half a decade behind bars, where he was initially known as “Satan” for his fervent anti-religiosity. But prison ends up being fundamental to his development, leading him to a completely different life trajectory. It is where he teaches himself to read and write (“the streets had erased everything I’d ever learned in school; I didn’t know a verb from a house,” 247). It is where he discovers philosophy (of Schopenhauer, Kant, and Nietzsche: “they are always arguing about something useless,” 275). It is where he famously begins to debate (“my baptism into public speaking,” 277). And it is where he learns of what he called the “true knowledge” (256) of the Nation of Islam.

The leader of the Nation of Islam, whom Malcolm refers to as Mr. (or The Honorable) Elijah Muhammad, taught that history had been “whitened” to erase the violence committed by Europeans on the rest of the world. He taught that Africans trafficked through the Atlantic slave trade were culturally killed, their languages, religions, and histories erased and flattened into a singular Black race in the Americas (256). His followers talk of “the devil white man” and “the brainwashed black man” (254), and they place blame on Christianity as taught to the Black descendants of slaves and colonized peoples:

This religion taught the “Negro” that black was a curse. It taught him to hate everything black, including himself. It taught him that everything white was good, to be admired, respected and loved. It brainwashed this “Negro” to think he was superior if his complexion showed more of the white pollution of the slavemaster. This white man’s Christian religion further deceived and brainwashed this “Negro” to always turn the other cheek, and grin, and scrape, and bow, and be humble, and to sing, and to pray and to take whatever was dished out by the devilish white man; and to look for his pie in the sky, and for his heaven in the hereafter, while right here on earth the slavemaster white man enjoyed his heaven. (257)

The target especially is on hypocritical Christian notions of afterlife: “No heaven was in the sky,” Malcolm attributes to Wallace Fard Muhammad, who was Elijah Muhammad’s teacher, “and no hell was in the ground. Instead, both heaven and hell were conditions in which people lived right here on this planet Earth” (306). For, as Malcolm says repeatedly, “The white man is the devil” (278).

In joining the Nation of Islam, Malcolm Little, Detroit Red, Satan — all would die. He became known as Malcolm X, the X signifying “the true African family name that he never could know” (296). He was a religious zealot, working to expand the Nation of Islam and preaching the teachings of Elijah Muhammad. He argued for “complete separation” between Black and white people in the United States (348), gathering massive (Black-only) crowds to emphasize self-dependence on the part of Black communities (358–61). He was harshly critical of the civil rights protestors, describing the March on Washington in 1963 as a “monumental farce,” “an outing,” “a picnic,” “a status symbol” for liberal whites and bourgeois Black people (387–88).

Eventually, with Malcolm’s rise to national prominence as a leader in the Nation of Islam, there was internal strife. Malcolm lost faith in Elijah Muhammad as an ethical leader, and Elijah Muhammad ordered Malcolm silenced (405–16). Malcolm suggests that Elijah Muhammad even called for Malcolm’s assassination. A distraught and disillusioned Malcolm converts to mainstream Islam (the Nation of Islam is not regarded by most Muslims as a legitimate form of Islam) and goes on the Hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca.

The final portions of the Autobiography describe Malcolm’s experiences on the Hajj and how it changed his worldview. It is on the Hajj that Malcolm changes his name one last time (to El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz) and recants many of his previously held ideas. He writes in a public letter,

Throughout my travels in the Muslim world, I have met, talked to, and even eaten with people who in America would have been considered ‘white’ - but the ‘white’ attitude was removed from their minds by the religion of Islam. I have never before seen sincere and true brotherhood practiced by all colors together, irrespective of their color. (454)

His political philosophy toward the end of his life is one of Black Nationalism, where Black people were to work within their own communities to develop economic self-sufficiency and where well-meaning whites were to work with other whites on their own racial prejudices (493–95). And though he maintains his harsh criticism of the role of Christianity in anti-Black racism (“what is the greatest single reason for this Christian church’s failure? It is its failure to combat racism. . . . The Christian church sowed racism — blasphemously; now it reaps racism,” 497) and emphasizes a need for all Americans, especially Black Americans, to turn toward Islam (486), he does call for interfaith solidarity in response to racism (493).

One way to read Malcolm’s story is as a kind of Augustinian conversion story, one where a depraved man eventually finds solace in religion. I once was lost, one imagines Malcolm writing, but now am found; was blind, but now I see. But for the hymn’s Christian background, its story is structurally similar to Malcolm’s: the redemptive arc of a man who committed grievous crimes (for Malcolm, the life of the hustler, about which he would call himself “the personification of evil,” 264 ; for John Newton, the writer of “Amazing Grace,” the much more condemnable life of a slave trader) but, through the spirit of their god, was reformed and called to a life in service of justice. The Autobiography is a Whig story more than a factual retelling of Malcolm’s life, for it is obvious throughout that he is reflecting from his then-current perspective as a member of the Nation of Islam and later as El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz.

The Autobiography can also be read as a sociological text, one that is rich with Malcolm’s observations of life in Harlem, Boston, and so on. He is perceptive. His instincts, like Tocqueville’s, are to categorize and rationalize human behavior. But while Tocqueville saw cultural attitudes of equality everywhere, Malcolm saw caste (and its periodic transgression) as the defining characteristic of social organization. Thus Malcolm points to the sexual preferences of white New York elites, the role of hair styling among Black youths (his discussion of conking his hair, 136–39, is fascinating), or the attitudes of school teachers toward him as the lone Black kid in an otherwise white school, just as Tocqueville noticed rules about inheritance, extra-political associational life, and the restiveness of pioneering frontiersmen. One could take a modern social scientific approach to dissecting both books (what is their research question? what is their theoretical framework?) and come away modestly satisfied.

There is a third way of thinking about the Autobiography, though, which I think is both more honest to its author and that places it in conversation with Patricia Lockwood’s new book, No One Is Talking About This. They are both books about love.

* *

No One Is Talking About This, told from the perspective of an unnamed narrator, is a facially about illness. The opening half of the book depicts the frenetic thoughts of a narrator addicted to the “portal” — social media (presumably Twitter). The portal not only shapes her thinking but engulfs her personality: She owns a cat named “Dr. Butthole” (21); orders “the worst thing on the menu on purpose, to be funny” (26); and is famous for a post that reads, “Can a dog be twins?” (13).

Written in short sections often approaching the length of a tweet, No One Is Talking About This in both form and content depicts what it is to be on the internet today. There’s the absurd politics (“Slowly, slowly, she found herself moving toward a position so philosophical even Jesus couldn’t have held it: that she must hate capitalism while at the same time loving film montages set in department stores,” 4). There’s the drug-like addiction (“When something of hers sparked and spread in the portal, it blazed away the morning and afternoon, it blazed like the new California, which we had come to accept as being always on fire. She ran back and forth in the flames, not eating or drinking, emitting a high-pitched sound most humans couldn’t hear,” 59). There’s also the internet’s undeniable, incredible ability to connect people. This book will make very little sense to people who are not on Twitter, but to those who are, the references to the “causcasianblink.gif” (53) or the “incest commercial” (the sister and brother who “consume a mug of hot black FOLGERS”) (73) are eerily, damningly understandable. For such people, there is truly something special about knowing someone who gets your internet references: “They kept raising their hands excitedly to high-five, for they had discovered something even better than being soulmates: that they were exactly, and happily, and hopelessly, the same amount of online” (118).

To be addicted to the internet is not simply to have a grotesquely ironic form of humor. It is also to be occupied with trivial issues. Our narrator’s job, we are told, is to travel the world talking about internet culture, debating “why it was objectively funnier to spell it sneazing” (14). But even more traditionally important political questions — such as debates over economics or policing — are distorted on the internet. A “woke” internet proceeds by conventional wisdoms and assumptions, drawing lines between in- and out-groups, rather than seeking to persuade others: “Inside the portal, a man who three years ago only ever posted things like ‘I’m a retard with butt aids’ was now exhorting people to open their eyes to the power of socialism, which suddenly did seem the only way” (10). And it breeds a politics that is performative and insular rather than collective and broad-based: when the narrator is distraught, “she would tug her phone off the bedside table, post the words eat the police in the portal, wait for it to get sixty-nine likes, then delete it” (133). Hardly the stuff of political legend.

To read the Lockwood’s book for its politics, though, would miss the central drama of the book. The illness of the narrator’s mind — that addiction to the dark corners of the internet — is juxtaposed with a brutal physical illness revealed around two-thirds of the way through the book. The family discovers that the narrator’s sister will give birth to a baby girl with proteus syndrome (136), a rare disease characterized by the uncontrollable growth of parts of the body. The baby is unlikely to survive for more than a few months. And it is that unenviable reality that pulls our narrator out of her stupor, that grounds her. For when the baby is born, just holding her is a miracle that flushes the mumbo-jumbo out of her mind:

All the worries about what a mind was fell away as soon as the baby was placed in her arms. A mind was merely something trying to make it in the world. The baby, like a soft pink machete, swung and chopped her way through the living leaves. A path was a path was a path was a path. A path was a person and a path was a mind, walk, chop, walk, chop. (143)

The precious child, whose time is counting down, clarifies and purifies our narrator’s life. “It was a marvel how cleanly and completely this lifted her out of the stream of regular life,” the narrator reflects. “She wanted to stop people on the street and say, ‘Do you know about this? You should know about this. No one is talking about this!’” (145).

* * *

As I have portrayed them, there is a simplicity, an elegance, to both Malcolm’s and our narrator’s arcs. It is in finding Allah in prison or in facing the impending death of a baby girl that one gains perspective on the important things in life. There’s a sense of awakening, of finding truth, that animates their progress. Malcolm often describes people, including his former self, as “mentally dead” or brainwashed (324). But by turning to the teachings of Elijah Muhammad, and then later to more orthodox Islam, Malcolm was awakened.

The analogy in No One Is Talking About This is Lockwood’s depiction of the portal’s effect on the mind: it had “once been the place where you sounded like yourself,” but “[g]radually it had become the place where we sounded like each other, through some erosion of wind or water on a self not nearly as firm as stone” (72). Part of Lockwood’s genius is that fully understanding its esoteric references implies that the reader’s own mind has been eroded to a certain degree. But our narrator is freed from that trap as her life begins to revolve not around silly internet debates about spelling but around a living, breathing, struggling baby. Walk, chop, walk, chop — perhaps not just the baby forging a path through life, but also the narrator through the dense jungle of internet haze.

Nevertheless, the animating principle here isn’t about redemption or perspective. It’s about love. Both Malcolm’s and our narrator’s growth are accompanied by love and vulnerability. Malcolm finds his way to Boston in part inspired by his older sister Ella, whose self-love and confidence (she was “the first really proud black woman I had ever seen in my life”) were “unheard of among Negroes in those days, especially in Lansing” (114). His conversion to the Nation of Islam while imprisoned was only through the continual urging and coaxing of his family, as well as his prolific correspondence with Elijah Muhammad himself. And of course, his final experiences on his Hajj were of profound corporate love:

There were tens of thousands of pilgrims . . . of all colors, from blue-eyed blonds to black-skinned Africans. But we were all participating in the same ritual, displaying a spirit of unity and brotherhood that my experiences in America had led me to believe never could exist between the white and the non-white. (454)

Equally, in each experience, Malcolm faces precarity: the indignities of living with paternalistic racists as a tween; the cruelty of the prison cell; the loneliness of being in a new context surrounded by people who were unfamiliar and who could not communicate with him. In moments of helplessness, he was shown love. And those moments in turn became pivotal for who he was.

So too with Lockwood’s narrator, who is exposed to and made vulnerable by a kind of unconditional love, described in terms of “[t]he great gift of the baby knowing their voices, contentless entirely except for love—how she turned so wildly to where the pouring and continuous element was, strained her limbs toward the human sunshine, would fight her way through anything to get there” (156). These are the things that move us. These are the things that change us. These are the things that make us free.

* * * * *

Rose: Last week was orientation week for my new program, and I’ve started classes this week. It’s really been nice to meet new people; LSE feels a lot more like Pomona now that I’m routinely seeing people again. There has also been a nice mix of seeing old friends, which has been absolutely wonderful. Also, I went to the British Library last week to see some archival material related to habeas. Here is a picture of a report of the Five Knights’ Case, a landmark case for habeas nerds like myself.

Sir Thomas Darnell's Case (i.e., the Five Knights' Case)!

Also, I’ve found London to be really beautiful recently.

Bud: I think all experiences of meeting a lot of new people segue into a stage of consolidation, where you figure out who you’ll end up being close friends with. I’m eager to figure that out.

Thorn: I spent all of last Saturday basically working on an R prep course, which was very boring. But hopefully it ends up being helpful, and I become fairly proficient at R.

Gratitude: My mom sent me mooncakes to celebrate the lunar festival with. They were delicious, and I am very grateful.

Isaac Cui
- Sep 22, 2021
- 9 min read

Paris and York

On September 13, 2020, I was on a plane to the UK. By a funny coincidence, I spent the morning of September 13, 2021, on the Eurostar, a high-speed train that connects London to Paris. Amazingly, the journey was only a bit over two hours long.

I left on a 7am train from Kings Cross (of Harry Potter fame). Since I moved out to Greenwich, I ended up having to take the first tube train that left from North Greenwich (which left at something like 5:12am!); I was surprised and sobered to see how many folks were waiting for that first train. I went to France with my friend from LSE, who has featured prominently on this blog previously. Here are some of the pictures of that morning, as well as our first (of many) croissants.

Our trip generally was meandering. My friend had been to France many times, and so while she wanted to show me the “must-see” aspects of the town, she didn’t feel a need to fit a bunch of stuff in. As for me, I have been socialized by my time in Britain to view the French with disdain. (I kid. Mostly. Really, it’s that I know very little about French history and society, so I didn’t have the same excitement seeing Paris as I did, say, the Tower of London.) Anyways, the result was that we were willing to wander a lot, and we spent a lot of time looking at more esoteric stuff than what I think you typically do on one’s first Paris trip.

We first saw Montmartre, a hill famous for its artsy vibes. Wikipedia tells me famous artists including Monet, Renoir, Degas, Mondrian, Picasso, and van Gogh all had studios or worked in the area. So that’s something. It felt rather touristy to me. The hill was nice, though, because you could see throughout Paris — a city that looked remarkably flat to me. Indeed, I was a bit disappointed with the skyline compared with that of the City of London or Canary Wharf. (I have marginal regrets, though, that I’m increasingly becoming a London snob.) Here are some pictures:

After Montmartre, we walked to the garden next to the Louvre (Jardin des Tuileries), where we had a picnic lunch. On the way there, we walked by the Saint-Lazare Station (Gare Saint-Lazare), of Monet fame, so I had to take a picture of it. (Funnily enough, we would end up at the train station two days later.) We also walked by the Arc de Triomphe (not the first arch we walked by), which was — in my view — disappointingly covered. (My brother observed that people were going to Paris to see the Arch covered as an art installation, so perhaps I got lucky.) I admit that the Jardin des Tuileries was gorgeous, although it was very carefully manicured, like Marston Quad, rather than having the rustic charm of many British parks, which feel a bit more wild.

Let me take a quick digression to talk a bit about the food we had. I was quite impressed, generally speaking, with the food we had. The croissants were absolutely amazing. (By the end, I had six croissants over the course of four days.) I found that what made French food generally so good was the fact that everything had butter in it. For example, the food I had in the Jardin des Tuileries was a ham and cheese sandwich, along with a sparkling lemon-wine and a canelé. The sandwich shouldn’t have been that good. But it was truly amazing, because they put butter in it. (I should note that we got the canelé because one of my friends had been gushing about them to me for like half an hour on a call. She told me she had never had one before, but was so eager to try one. My LSE friend, on the other hand, had had them before, and thought they were terrible desserts, which is why she looks so skeptical of our canelé. My LSE friend was correct; it’s a mediocre pastry.)

Beyond the sandwiches and croissants, we had other French staples: beef tartare, normal steak, galettes (we had those in Bayeux since Normandy is apparently famous for its galettes), quiche, and an éclair. Oh, and lots of fries; I thought it was some kind of joke that we call them “French fries” (or Freedom Fries, as the American does), but evidently fried potato is very common in French food. I also ended up thinking that the wine was quite drinkable (normally I really dislike the taste of wine), as was the Norman brandy that we got in Bayeux. The espresso in the typical bakery (boulangerie, or patisserie for pastries specifically) was also quite good. I’ve never been an espresso person, but I think I may have been converted in Paris.

Anyhow, after leaving the Louvre area, we walked along the Seine, saw the Notre-Dame de Paris (Notre Dame technically translates to “Our Lady,” so there are many different Notre-Dames), and walked around a lot more, eventually winding our way back to our hostel after dinner. This trip was also my first experience in a youth hostel — I thought it was really positive, and I didn’t feel like there was much of a downside to living it in compared to, say, a hotel or AirBnB.

The next day, we spent a lot of time among the dead. We started (after our croissants and coffee, of course) in the Cimetière du Père Lachaise (which included notables such as Chopin, Delacroix, and Fourier).

Then we went to the Parisian catacombs. The story, in essence, is that Paris ran out of cemetery space sometime in the mid- to late-1770s, so they decided to move bones, en masse, to former stone quarries. And they did so kind of weirdly. Here are some pictures — you can judge for yourself. (I did admire, as you’ll see in the last picture, the fact that the gift shop sold catacomb-styled condoms.)

Next to the catacombs is the Cimetière du Montparnasse, where we ate lunch. We visited, among others, the graves of Poincaré and the shared grave of De Beauvoir and Sartre. The De Beauvoir and Sartre grave seemed to be almost a place of pilgrimage; many people left ticket stubs on the grave, and there were also kisses left on the tombstone. Interestingly enough, we also stumbled upon Susan Sontag. I was hoping to see Durkheim, who was somewhere in the graveyard, but after a surprisingly long time of searching, we gave up.

After that, we walked west to see the Eiffel Tower. It is quite impressive. I expected it to be somewhat dinky, but it was a magnificent piece of architecture, I have to admit. We had a bottle of rosé in the park nearby and debated (of all things) how Covid policy ought to be set by LSE. We also saw one of a few replicas of the Statue of Liberty, and we walked back to the hostel in the rain.

On Wednesday, we went to Bayeux. Originally, I wanted to go to Tocqueville (to see, of course, Alexis de Tocqueville’s grave), but lacking the mental preparation (and because my friend’s level of insanity is insufficiently high to try to make the journey), we settled for Bayeux instead, where the Bayeux tapestry is held. The Bayeux Tapestry tells the story of the Norman invasion of England in 1066, a pivotal moment in British history. I’ve been interested in the Norman invasion for a long time (I think in sixth grade I once wrote a research paper about it!), so it was cool to see the actual tapestry. The tapestry is truly quite long, but it also has all kinds of randomness to it. There are depictions above and below the main narrative that seem essentially random: animals eating their tails, nude men and women, esoteric symbols, and so on. Because we couldn’t take pictures of the Bayeux tapestry, I don’t have many photos from that museum, but we also went to the cathedral in Bayeux, which was absolutely gorgeous. If you notice that it looks quite similar to the British cathedrals that I have often posted pictures of on this blog, that’s because the British cathedrals are often built in Norman style.

Once we got back to Paris, it was relatively late in the afternoon. We walked to a garden (Le Jardin du Luxembourg) to see another Statue of Liberty as well as the Palais du Luxembourg, where the French Senate meets. We had dinner somewhere around the area, and then we walked back to the hostel in the evening, where we saw the lit Eiffel Tower, Panthéon, and Notre-Dame. The Seine was beautiful.

Thursday was the day my friend and I parted paths. She decided to go to Nice (South France) to enjoy the beaches; I decided to return to London. She had a morning flight, whereas I slept in and caught an early afternoon train. I got to see some more political posters, I enjoyed my morning croissant and espresso, and I finished Malcolm X’s autobiography while enjoying a beautiful Parisian day. (More on Malcolm X and the other book I read in Paris — No One Is Talking About This — next week.) It was also a gorgeous day in London, and I spent a while relaxing in a park near LSE after I got back into the city.

I spent the next day in a few calls and trying to get work done. It was fun. On my walk back from LSE, I caught a picture of the sunset from Waterloo Bridge that I’m quite proud of.

On Friday, I had another trip — this time to North England, the town of York, in order to meet my Fast Stream buddy (a member of the British civil servant who is matched with me). I’m actually quite proud of the relationship we’ve developed over the last year, given that it was entirely through Zoom, but it was really nice to see her in person. We had a traditional British afternoon tea. I also finally saw Platform 9 ¾ at Kings Cross. York was a beautiful little town — it has very old English vibes to it. (People say to go to the main tourist areas to get a Diagon Alley feel — narrow, cobbled streets with quaint stores lining the sides.) But mostly I just enjoyed getting to chat with my Fast Stream buddy and seeing a new place.

Things I learned from this experience:

Paris is really good at making public space inviting — there are so many benches and outdoor seats and public bathrooms that it makes you want to spend time with others outside, as my friend observed. I think that’s a big part of why it might properly be called the “City of Love” — it draws partners and friends (romantic or otherwise) out into the public. And the French, we noticed, are not shy about public displays of affection.
The restaurants in Paris seem to seat people very close to others, and the tables are tiny. The result is that you feel like it’s a quite intimate space, where you’re eating with many people beyond your group. Like a party, that can create a very warm and inviting atmosphere — or it can be overwhelming and tiring. I actually quite liked the effect, except for the fact that I was very worried I was going to elbow the person sitting next to me every dinner.
The police in Paris are weirdly militarized, and I came away deeply skeptical of them. At the park near the Eiffel Tower, I took a picture of six police officers walking around in what felt like a military formation, dressed in camouflage and holding rifles. One of the guys came up to me and told me to delete the picture — he even watched me do it! A friend on a call later that week noted that deleted photos on iPhones are saved, so I’ve actually restored it. When we searched up the law, it turns out that France has banned spreading pictures of police officers that can “harm the physical or mental integrity” of police officers; as a news article citing a government official explains, the law bans only images shared “with comments ‘intended to harm’ or incite violence.” What struck me was that the picture I took, in itself, does no such thing (see for yourself below). It is obviously overbroad to ban an image when the law criminalizes only a method of dissemination. But putting that aside, it’s not clear to me why that image itself ought to impugn the integrity of the police officers unless that police officer believed that his very presence, in that formation and context, is in some way problematic. Guilty man, I suppose.

The traditional English afternoon tea is a meh experience. The sandwiches are small and you eat them with a fork and knife. Absolute absurdity. But, the afternoon tea did cement my love of British scones. The key to the British scone, and what differentiates it from an American scone, is that the British scone itself — like much British cuisine generally — is rather tasteless. The scone, rather than serving as a dessert in itself, is merely the vector for delicious clotted cream and jam, a truly scrumptious and diabetes-inducing combination. As it is said, British scones are “class.”

* * * * *

Rose: I think the highlight of my week was the walk back from the Panthéon on Wednesday and then the subsequent morning of reading in a park. Paris at night really is beautiful, and a peaceful morning was a nice way to cap the trip.

Bud: LSE starts this week! I’m excited to dive in fully to social scientific methods training. And I’m excited to meet new people.

Thorn: I made the mistake of going to the gym after getting back from Paris. I was already pretty tired, and then I had to carry a friend’s briefcase as well as my own backpack and duffel bag for about an hour of walking. By the end I was just exhausted.

Gratitude: I’m thankful for both my LSE friend and my Fast Streamer, who showed me Paris and York. It was a really fun way to spend my last week of freedom before going back to school. Also, I’m grateful for my friends who have helped me with my law school applications, whether by talking me through ideas or reading my essays. It’s all been super helpful.

Future topic: Malcolm X and No One Is Talking About This.