The Cafe Life or Not Doing Nothing

Pierre et Diana

I spend an inordinate amount of time in cafes here in France. I have a hard time doing it, as lounging the day away and being "unproductive" is not in my blood. But the French do not see it as wasting time; they consider it the beating heart of life. So when a friend asks me to join him at a cafe yet again,  I try not to say, "No, I can't go, not again!" I try not to say, "Are you nuts? We woke up at 9am and now you want me to drive 45 minutes into foothills of the Pyrenees, to some hippie artist medieval town, to sit for 2-3 hours and do nothing but eat, drink, and talk?" I resist and resist. And then I go. And I come away every time feeling like I've laid my hand upon a beating heart. It's a miracle every day, in a cafe. Here's why:

The revolving stage of international characters

~There's the British sea captain, Malcolm, who plays the gong on the side (side of what, I don't know), and regales us with tales of turning 18 in a lawless Singapore 50-odd years ago.
~There's the ancient artist Pierre, for whom the cafe is daily refuge from his abusive Hari Krishna-obsessed wife; he holds my face close to his, hungry for a kind woman's touch, as I hand him chocolates and repeat my name into his deaf ear for the umpteenth time.
~There's Elki from Berlin who we picked up hitchhiking: she learned English from war-time radio, cares for a dowager in a castle down the road, is chiseling a giant block of marble into a giant molar, "just for me, not for commission."
~There's Olivia from Australia and her British husband Will who run one gite (inn) in town and another in the country; she sneaks out the front door at night to smoke pot far from the disapproving eye of her husband.
~There's Eric who grew up with rich and famous parents in Hollywood: his mother wrote Wolfgang Puck's first cookbook.
~There's Leticia, our French neighbor, who teaches Italian at Adult Ed, keeps a place outside Rome, raises her 3 children alone with the help of her rebel/psychiatric nurse boyfriend.
And, to preempt your skepticism, not one of them has a trust fund.

The stories go on and on, the crepes and wine and pastis keep arriving, other characters enter Stage Right, exit Stage Left, the bill gets confused so the waiter sits with us a while to hash it all out, and soon it's somehow several hours later, and we've done "nothing." Except this, which feels rich and important.

It all harps back to Baudelaire and Benjamin and a quote from The Paris Review from a few years back, about the benefits in this modern age of "flanerie":
"The figure of the flâneur—the stroller, the passionate wanderer emblematic of nineteenth-century French literary culture—has always been essentially timeless; he removes himself from the world while he stands astride its heart. For Walter Benjamin, [the flâneur] was a figure of the modern artist-poet, a figure keenly aware of the bustle of modern life, an amateur detective and investigator of the city, but also a sign of the alienation of the city and of capitalism.
In the ensuing decades, however, the idea of flânerie as a desirable lifestyle has fallen out of favor, due to some arcane combination of increasing productivity—hello, fruits of the Industrial Revolution!—and the modern horror at the thought of doing absolutely nothing. But as we grow inexorably busier—due in large part to the influence of technology—might flânerie be due for a revival?"

I, Diana Roberts, am reviving the art of flanerie, one pastis at a time.

Maybe he wrote the book on flanerie?

No trust funds here

We went to a party the other night at our friend Eric's house, where the crowd of French, German, Canadian, and Irish strangers felt within minutes like familiar old friends. It's rare when you walk into a room and think: "These are my people" but I did, and they were.

I spent a wonderful chunk of the party enthralled by a conversation with a Canadian historian, who put into words what I've thus far been unable to articulate about what makes France so unique. He said, "The French are not afraid of decay. In fact, they cherish it. They live in crumbling chateaux, they bury their dead above ground, their sacred "terroir" imparts the rich flavor of centuries gone-by so that with every morsel of food, every carafe of wine, the ancient past courses its way into their modern systems."

He said, "What's amazing to me, as a North American, is when you leave those conventions of commerce behind--when you step away into this world where stores may or may not open at 9 or 10AM, where they all close from noon to 2, then close again at 6 or 7PM, are never open on Sunday, so that six or more hours a day are spent around the table with family--that changes everything. There is no value on 9 to 5. The kitchen with its food and family comprise the ancient 'domus'--the heart of the culture. The values here are tradition, food, family, conversation. Quality of life, not commerce, is what matters and what has been passed down though thousands of years."

French fashion obsession: I love her shawl

So THAT was enlightening. A party where people discussed ideas. Where the faces were varied and somehow more alive than American faces. Where we laughed. Ate. Told wild tales. Reached for the sparkling Blanquette de Limoux or the foggy Pastis again and again. A party from which I went home thinking and stimulated, not drunk and bored.

This is my life in France. I am peering through a window into another way, trying to step outside of my American conventions and adapt to new ones. There are those who view the French as stuffy old stick-in-the-muds weighted down by outdated values. I am having trouble stepping out of my own mud, a rut it seems, of busy "doing" all the time. I must learn, for now, to be happy "not doing," which I guess could be lost in translation as "nothing."