Paddling down a stream of consciousness

From Dordogne to Paris.

6:55 am

I’m on the 6:50 train from Vélines to Bordeaux and the thunderstorms from earlier have made way for a sky that looks like the underside of a very rough sea. The air smelt distinctly green on the platform and the leaves on the trees were heavy and plump. 

Clouds or rough seas?

7:42 am

The journey into the city always feels so easy. One straight line that rolls through vines and villages and over the Gironde — which today was even more swollen than usual — and into Bordeaux-St-Jean. I’m sitting at a café outside the station now, eating a formule petit déjeuner (espresso and a croissant) for €3.50 as I wait for my train to Paris at 8:41. The two men running the place are welcoming and a little sleepy-eyed, and the one who brought me my breakfast told me, “Gardez votre sourire, c’est très agréable” — keep your smile, it’s very nice. 

I never thought I would be the kind of person to drink espresso at breakfast, or coffee at all for that matter, but over the past year or so I seem to have found my way into it. I’m hoping the one I’m drinking now will ward off any sleepiness on the next leg of my journey. I have a real knack for falling asleep on trains and only narrowly avoided it on the one I just got off. Sleeping isn’t the goal today — that was decided last night when I was thinking about what I might write. The point of today’s journey is to look and listen and smell and taste and to transmit those sensory messages into text, as I am attempting to do now. 

On a recent weekend in the Peak District, I did a morning meditation that guided me through listening to my surroundings, noticing the smells, and tasting the flavours on my tongue. I found the smelling component the most enlightening since, at first, I didn’t think I could smell anything apart from the fresh country air. But once I settled into it I realised that the pine hedge and the damp grass and the cup of tea by my side all had something to say, painting an olfactory picture of place in just a few breaths in through my nose. 

I read or heard or saw somewhere that if people were given the choice to lose one sense, most people would choose smell. Isn’t that interesting? I suppose it is the most subtle, but it’s also very closely linked to taste, which is probably my most treasured of the 6. And it’s the sense most intimately associated with memories. 

8:25 am

I’m on the train now waiting for it to leave the station. It smells just as one might expect — of people and cleaning products and over-used upholstery. Perhaps I’ll let go of the smell part of my journey for now. If all goes well, there will be conversations to eavesdrop and views out the window to take its place. 

8:41 am

… and the train is gliding out of the station right on time. The sun is shining now and the woman hacking up a lung on the other side of the aisle has drunk some water and taken her medicine, thank god.

Out of Bordeaux we go and past swathes of future apartment buildings in mid-construction. It seems that in all the cities I’ve been to recently — Nantes, Frankfurt, London, Bordeaux — near-identical blocks are going up in their hundreds. 

I actually know why this is. I wrote a PhD proposal that was very much adjacent to it, and it’s pretty much because urban populations are growing too fast — with 1.5 million people worldwide moving to the city every week — for the number of homes available. This means that governments are under immense pressure to get as many homes as possible built as fast as they can. 

I know that they are absolutely necessary — people need roofs over their heads right this minute. But I can’t help but wonder whether it’s all a rush job and that we will feel the same about the faux-brick façades, sterile interiors, and poor quality materials of today as people did about the flats erected post WWII — a little resentful. I guess that remains to be seen.

9:02 am

We are zooming along now and I’m thinking about my friend Conrad who, for environmental reasons, hasn’t taken a plane in 6 years. If he goes anywhere, it’s by road or rail, and this train of thought has led me back to a thread running through the novel I’m reading right now.

The book, Either/Or by Elif Batuman, is named after Soren Kierkegaard’s book of the same title. In the thread I’m thinking of, Batuman’s narrator, Selin, navigates the differences between the ethical and the aesthetic lives put forward in Kierkegaard’s Either/Or. When she picks up a secondhand copy of her own, she flips it over and reads the text on the back cover, which says:

“Either, one is to live aesthetically or one is to live ethically.” 

To get a bit clearer on what Kierkegaard meant by ethical and aesthetic without actually reading the book, I have googled it, and an article from the Academy of Ideas has come up explaining, nice and simply, that:

“The aesthetic life is lived when an individual relates to themselves. That is, such an individual lives for themselves, and seeks out novel experiences of beauty and pleasure. The ethical life is lived when an individual relates (and thus defines) themselves to other people. Such an individual lives a life of duty, and seeks above all else to serve others.”

Given that explanation, and circling back to dear Conrad, I posit that he has managed to transcend the dichotomy between the two options and in fact, lives a combination of both the ethical and the aesthetic life. On the one hand, he makes his decisions based on what is best for the planet, making his avoidance of planes an ethical choice. Yet, while air travel is often cheaper and faster than other modes of transport, it is also often deeply unpleasant and ugly. As I look out the window and see forests and meadows and cows that may as well be the Oxen of the Sun, it seems that in the case of mass transit, the ethical choice may also be the aesthetic one.

Something to keep in mind for any future trips.

9:34

Pulling into Angoulême and it reminds me of when Andy and I drove through here on our trip back to England last May. It was our first journey of the summer and we were both so happy to be back in our van on another adventure. The town was very nice and I liked that I had seen parts of it in Wes Anderson’s film French Dispatch, but the best part came afterwards when we drove a little further to one of the best campsites we’ve ever found on Park4Night. I wrote a newsletter about it back then, so I won’t wax lyrical about it now, but here are some photos and a pin of where it is in case you’re ever passing through the area. 

11:43

When I got to Montparnasse and walked into the metro, the queue at each ticket machine was 30 people deep. Instead of spending what could have been days waiting my turn, I walked 2 minutes down the road to the next stop where there was no queue whatsoever.

I am now sitting, rather smugly, on line 4 heading to Strasbourg Saint-Denis where I will change onto line 8 to the 11th arrondissement. I am staying at my friend Gigi’s place and plan to spend the rest of the day wandering the streets thinking about how much I love Paris — as I am wont to do when I’m here.

I wrote about Paris too recently to do it again now, so this is where I will leave you. 

Thanks for paddling this stream of consciousness with me.

See you in the next one, 

Annabel