“Parce que là-bas… je me sens vivante,” I answered.
Because I feel alive there.
Despite barely being able to string more than two words together in the language, I had responded without thought in French while speaking to a friend from Bordeaux.
“Why are you so drawn to Europe?” she had asked.
Because I feel alive there.
It seems like a simple answer, but until that moment, I had been unable to verbalize exactly what kept me going back across l’Atlantique. My response to the question usually includes a lot of bumbling on about enjoying language learning, the benefits of public transportation and a walking culture, unique cuisine, and so on. But the answer is actually far simpler. Because I feel alive there.
Of course all of the above things contribute to my love of Europe, but in actuality, those aspects of life abroad annoy me almost as much as I enjoy them. Learning a new language is a constant frustration. Progress always leads to plateaus and not being able to communicate makes your average intelligent person feel no smarter than a Kindergartener. I love walking and my waistline certainly appreciates the exercise as much as my wallet enjoys not having to pay to maintain a car, but the individualist American in me is frequently frustrated by my inability to be in control of when I can go somewhere and how long it will take to get there. I appreciate European cuisine greatly, but 4 months into living anywhere, I am usually making hamburgers for myself a few times a week and cursing the exorbitant prices that I must pay for peanut butter.
Living abroad is like being on constant sensory overload. In truth, it is not nearly as glamorous as it sounds. Even the smallest everyday tasks are complicated. Grocery shopping alone is an adventure and living your life constantly concerned about committing a faux pas is extremely exhausting after awhile. There is an unending consciousness about everything that you do. Every action is thought out and is more likely to have a purpose when even the simplest endeavor is that much more of a challenge. But despite this, when you are acutely aware of everything that you are doing, there is no chance of having a life that consists of “wash, rinse, repeat” or of getting in a rut. It is this overriding feeling that I would consider to be what makes me feel so alive there.
I have always had a strong interest in history and am fascinated by things that are older than I am. Although I can be rather high maintenance and would probably not enjoy the lack of indoor plumbing or toothpaste, I sometimes feel as if I’ve been born into the wrong generation.
As a child, I far preferred my American Girl dolls to my Barbies. My friend Mary Catherine and I would play dress-up in long skirts stolen from the closets of our mothers and invent elaborate stories involving pioneers, colonists, and immigrants. Unlike our peers and their lemonade stands, Mary Catherine and I invented “Café Français” where we labeled our plastic food and store-bought croissants with their French names and played tea party while discussing our glamorous futures in Europe. We laid atlases across her kitchen table and decorated coffee cans with the flags of all the countries we wanted to visit and to keep our allowances in until we had the funds to get there.
The paint has cracked and faded over the years, but the coffee can still sits atop my bureau in my bedroom at home. Both Mary Catherine and I ended up spending a few years abroad, she in France and me in Spain, England, and Germany. We have visited one another in our respective cities and have marveled at how far we have come since the days of playing Ellis Island in my backyard.
While the challenges of the heroines in the historic novels I read as a child were unique to their time periods, they appealed to me because their struggles touched on universal themes. Not belonging in one place or another, never feeling completely whole no matter where they were in the world, and ultimately discovering that home is truly where the heart is. I did not even have to leave my backyard to feel this way as a child. An old soul feels these things because, in some way, they have already experienced them. Perhaps that is why I am drawn to all things old.
In the introduction of “Notre-Dame de Paris” (The Hunchback of Notre-Dame), Victor Hugo says that he was inspired to write the book because of a single word carved into an obscure corner of one of the walls of the cathedral:
‘ANÁTKH
In Greek, the word means “fate.” He was so moved by the word and thought so long about why the poor soul may have felt the need to leave such a word as his enduring mark, that he weaved together the tragic story of Quasimodo of Notre-Dame.
The importance of architecture is a presiding theme in the novel. Hugo later remarks:
“Il existe à cette époque, pour la pensée écrite en pierre, un privilège tout à fait comparable à notre liberté actuelle de la presse. C’est la liberté de l’architecture.”
(“There exists in this era, for thoughts written in stone, a privilege absolutely comparable to our current freedom of the press. It is the freedom of architecture.”)
I am no expert when it comes to architecture, nor a connoisseur of any art form for that matter, but I appreciate what is old particularly when it is still relevant. I like nothing more than to read a story or quote that is still applicable hundreds of years later, much in the same way that I enjoy meeting people from different parts of the world who, despite speaking different languages and coming from a different culture, are kindred spirits.
When walking around in Europe (as I am far more prone to do there than in the U.S.), I am so often struck by the deep curves and cracks in buildings that have been around far longer than my own country. Like the indentations in my coffee can, each shows its own marks of change.
Charles Baudelaire, in his “Le Peintre de la vie moderne” says, “Etre hors de chez soi, et pourtant se sentir partout chez soi; voir le monde, être au centre du monde et rester caché au monde, tels sont quelques-uns des moindres plaisirs de ces esprits indépendants, passionnés, impartiaux, que la langue ne peut que maladroitement définir. Ainsi l’amoureux de la vie universelle entre dans la foule comme dans un immense réservoir d’électricité. C’est un ‘moi’ insatiable du ‘non-moi’.”
(“To be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the center of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world- such are a few of the slightest pleasures of those independent, passionate, impartial natures which the tongue can but clumsily define. Thus the lover of universal life enters into the crowd as though it were an immense reservoir of electrical energy. He is an ‘I’ with an insatiable appetite for the ‘non-I.”)
Being surrounded by history, frequent encounters with kindred spirits, and an awareness and appreciation for the everyday simple things in life…. the feeling that I get while in Europe can be described as nothing other than, simplement… what it means to be alive.
“Je n’arrive pas à penser dans ces moment-là. Je me laisse aller, je fais le vide autour de moi….” – Yelle
(“I manage to not think in these moments. I let myself go, I make a vacuum around me….”)
