heavy weather

I am thinking mostly of the people I love in London, all of them alright, two of whom were closer to that viciousness than anyone should ever have to be. For the rest of it--well, things have shifted again, this time I'm too close to the dislocation to think or say anything sensible about it. Horrible, horrible. Lily tells me everyone's taking it pretty calmly. Most Londoners remember the IRA, a lot of them remember the blitz. My admiration for London, which from the first was stronger than I had anticipated, has grown as I travelled around. There's an unostentatious toughness in Londoners--I hope it's serving them well now.

A sleepiness has been on me since I got to Paris, which is perhaps a form of resistance. I'm not interested in the gilded monuments and the little daily aggressions of this city. Queue jumpers. Unhelpful bureaucrats. All that energy expended on asserting oneself. I drift through it, detached. I have spent the past few months alone with my will, testing its dimensions, its elasticity and other properties. This vagueness may look like passivity, but I'm not so easily fooled now. There's volition in everything. The weather since I got here has been either very hot or very cold; the teachers in the office flap their shirt fronts or draw their cardies around their shoulders and declare it un peu de trop, as if the weather were committing an error of taste, but I like the extremes; they make my new, ordinary-again life seem like a bit of a game. Without feeling a part of Paris at all, I take my pleasures from it. The white wonder of Sacre Coeur. Shops full of tapestries and butterflies on pins. Couscous restaurants and chanson bars. A brasserie with a mosaic floor, crammed with people reading, writing, eating and, invariably, smoking; a table full of Brits and Americans, slipping effortlessly between English and very good French, answering a mobile phone in German. When I get up to leave I want to say that it's been a pleasure eavesdropping on them.

I've enjoyed my encounters with polyglots almost more than anything else in Europe. I sought them out in hostels, trains carriages and clubs. It's thrilling to see the processes of consciousness laid bare, the resourcefulness of people who are struggling to make meaning. One Portuguese guy I met used the word 'substrate' correctly, but had to say 'the opposite of late' because he'd forgotten the word 'early'. A boy from Quebec who had grown up bilingual (not as common as you'd think--you need to prove that your parents grew up speaking English to be allowed to speak English at school) had completely different personae in French and English. He'd veer from louche mec, all flat vowels and slack lips, to personable college quarterback in the space of a sentence. Everyone teaches you their swear words, giving weird insights into the taboos of different cultures--Quebecois blasphemy revolves around the names of the sacred objects in a church; in Northern Italy it gets right to the point with crude suggestions about the morals of the holy family; in Portugal you praise someone's cooking by telling them their mother is a whore.

Most wonderful of all, people speaking in a second language become poets. I think it's because they have a different stock of metaphors to draw on. The most threadbare cliché can glow with a revelatory light when it moves from one language to another. Expressions from your own language that you long ago stopped hearing are mangled into newness. And a language learner has a limited number of structures that they use over and again, substituting vocabulary as necessary. This produces lovely symmetries of rhythm, and lends itself to aphorisms. I was trying to make a simple statement about Australia while I was at lunch with some French people. I laid the words out in my head, laboriously: "In Australia, white history is short, but white memories are shorter." Not bad, I thought. I wish I were so concise in English. Proud as I was of that sentence, though, I couldn't show it off--by the time I'd shunted the words together, the conversation had changed. I dearly want to be a polyglot, a proper one. I want to live freely in that in-between space of thought.