La rentrée à Paris
Notes on getting back to Paris and "back to school." (September 2024)
Back in Paris, 31 Aug 2024
How sweet to be home, how sweet that it feels so much like home. Hello from Paris!
I have spent the week getting back into the swing of things, cleaning and cooking, making lists, ticking things off of said lists, reuniting with friends I haven’t seen in two months, or in a whole year. (Les retrouvailles sont un des plus grand plaisirs du monde !) How easy it is to report on travelling, where every day leads somewhere new, when it’s easier to imagine people might be interested to hear what you’ve got to say. This week seemed harder to describe at first, polished to a shine by familiarity, impenetrable as something passed over every day. I could detail my morning rituals and my lunchtime habits. I could tell you about Youki the cat’s routine. I could tell you about how Reid Hall is full of bees because of the lavender newly planted in the courtyard. It’s like this all the time.
This week has mostly felt slow, as I rolled out of bed and picked outfits from the fullness of my wardrobe rather than a suitcase, and made coffee in my own kitchen, and sat in my own office at work. On Wednesday, about midway through my walk home, retracing steps taken a thousand times, I wondered what I could possibly share on scribbles from this slow, slow week. Do I have anything to say about such mundanity?
Then, I realized I was holding my breath.
Turns out, no week is ever the same, and upon further inspection, this week is rare indeed, possibly the last of its kind.
This week has, in fact, felt so slow that time is stretching thin, just to test my patience, to prevent me front sinking my teeth into something new, just out of reach. On Monday I will turn up at 11am in in the Salle Dussane at 45 rue d’Ulm, for a meeting welcoming master’s students to l’École normale supérieure. There I will spend the day attending more assemblies in which I will learn about administrative tasks still to come, student societies I won’t have time to join, and hopefully, which classes I will be taking. Just around the corner are so many unknowns it makes my head spin—people to meet, books to read, time to manage—and I can do nothing more to prepare, not a thing to get a head start. It’s taken most of my energy this week to sit and wait, to try and enjoy the calm, feeling stuck in the “before.” This is not my forte.
Throughout the week I have tried to be present—to focus on work, in these last days when I could devote my attention to only that—only to check the orientation website again, and add events to my Google Calendar, and check whether the provisional class list has been updated, and read the welcome emails, and daydream about what’s to come. And then I turn back to work, to my inbox and Google Drive, and tick something else off of my to-do list, I send an email or make an Instagram post or get another coffee from the Caféothèque. I’ve hugged and kissed my friends, and pulled out my trench and umbrella, and resumed haunting my favorite cafés and museums. Things are good. I am at the edge of my seat.
I’ll be holding my breath until Monday, and will let you know how the air is then.
Classes will start the week of September 16, so presumably I need only wait two more weeks at most; this is two weeks too many. Those particularly amused by my impatience should consider asking my mother (present here in the chat) about my lifelong affliction of “anticipation” (especially pertaining to dancing balls and fêtes). Some things never change.
La rentrée, 10 Sep 2024
Today and yesterday I sat in an “amphithéatre” at l’ENS (”l’école”) for three hours, which means I have only worked half days thus far this week, which means I worked this evening, which means it is 9:52 p.m. as I compose this scribble, which means that I must emphasize the scribbled nature of this missive!
I last wrote just days before I had first crossed the threshold of l’école. I am now the proud owner of a student ID and email address. I even have my class list, sort of, pending the department’s confirmation that I have correctly interpreted the distribution requirements.
L’école has a nostalgic quality already, not because I know it well (today I went to the wrong building, 45 rue d’Ulm rather than 29, for an assembly), but because:
Universities have been my “home” since I was born at the Columbia University medical center and proceeded to grow up in Morningside Heights;
I continue to work at a university; see: salient juxtaposition between my Reid Hall colleagues organizing orientation for Columbia study abroad students, with staff from l’ENS organizing orientation for me;
My dad went to l’ENS in the early 80s.
On my first day at l’école, I live-texted him from my first meeting in the Salle Dussane. He replied, “I’ve been in the salle Dussane so many times beginning with my philosophy oral exam for the concours d’entrée in 1978.” We proceeded to compare the bureaucratization of French and American universities. Classic father-daughter stuff.
Yesterday, I attended the presentation of the Département de Littératures et langage (LILA), where professors (enseignants-chercheurs) presented the courses they’d be teaching over the next year. After the presentations—convivial, varying levels of formality depending on the character of the professor, generally high levels of eccentricity—there was time to introduce oneself to various members of the department, pose questions, etc. I greatly look forward to starting classes and settling into a routine. 10 hours of class a week (plus an occasional extra commitment for additional workshops) means I will, inevitably, be working early mornings and late evenings, as was the case tonight. I’m hoping, or hopeful, that this will be OK once I settle into it. Seeing as I already feel much better than I did when I last wrote, I think I’ll be alright.
Can’t wait to tell you all about it!
