So it was also a blessing to be shielded at my desk and elsewhere in the apartment from wide-open spaces and boundlessness. When I raised my head, there was water at eye level, close enough to touch, running in the gutter; or a truck, with a load of sand and a shovel stuck in it, drove by. I often worked there, and the hours with the family could be surprisingly festive.
By compensation, wide-open space entirely different from that of my bird’s-eye view awaited me when I stepped out of the house with its dark nooks onto the square at Porte d’Orléans and began walking. In the beginning I still headed into the city, going from one center to the next: Alesia, Montparnasse, St.-Germain, whose fraternally broad tower I could always rely upon to give me a sense of arrival.
For a good year I did not get past the city limits, at most crossed to the middle of the bridge over the beltway and immediately turned back. All the harmony characteristic of the metropolis, not only in the buildings but also in the movements of the passersby, seemed abruptly to fall apart over there in the suburbs of Gentilly and Montrouge, the former to the left of the arterial road, the latter to the right, the two indistinguishable at first sight. Just as the houses lost their common features, so, too, the pedestrians, far scarcer than inside the gates, without so much as a by-your-leave lost their character. They seemed slower to me — an inelegant slowness like that of people who are lost — also more awkward. Although there were few of them, they avoided each other, as I saw from above from the vantage point of the bridge, on the much narrower suburban sidewalks, turning in the wrong direction and not infrequently colliding with each other, while on the other hand the people of the metropolis filed past each other in the heaviest crowd with the grace of dancers. And the slower the pedestrians moved, the faster the cars went there beyond the gate, where the avenue with a name turned into a national highway with a number, “Nationale 20.” They no longer glided, but whizzed by, and the stretch of highway that followed was also infamous for its accidents. I understood those who translated the word banlieue as “place of banishment.” Even the sky above, no matter how blue it may have been, lost its Parisian materiality (which of course came into view again when one glanced over one’s shoulder). It became clear that the appearance of the sky took its cue from what was down below and happening on earth. At the time I felt the sky was not operative above the suburbs. It did not reach down to the ridgepoles and streets, and outside the city limits no longer extended into the splinters, pores, and bubbles of the asphalt. Extra portas its gray no longer had color value.
Nevertheless I felt drawn more and more powerfully out into this nothingness. Soon, long before my fortieth year, I had recognized that city life, even on the edge of town, was not for me anymore: for all the casualness it lent me, to the point of a redeeming self-forgetfulness, for all the verve (with which, to be true, I often no longer knew what to do), almost nothing from this environment gripped me, and without being gripped by something, something before my eyes, I was deprived and felt lifeless, or at least not at my best. Over the years, things in the metropolis had stopped having a lasting effect, cafés and movie houses, the boulevards, the Métro, even water flowing in the gutter, scraps of paper blowing across squares, cats dashing between the rows of graves in the great cemeteries, clouds passing overhead. As pleasant as things in the metropolis could continue to be, they had become meaningless. They no longer signified anything, no longer gave me intimations, no longer reminded me of anything (did not connect with anything in my childhood memories), had ceased to make me dreamy or inventive — and that was all necessary for feeling enthusiasm or even an everyday sensation of life. Although I was still young, big cities no longer held any charms for me. In my eyes they were dominated by inconsequentiality; and my days were not supposed to be inconsequential. And in the meantime I have realized: in the metropolises, just as in the sun, I easily lose my memory; in the shade, in the dark, it comes back to me, indefinite yet monumental. In the time of Gilgamesh the gods still belonged in the capital city of the land. And now?
But it was without ulterior motives that I then ventured beyond the Porte d’Orléans into the suburbs (I later read in a book by Emmanuel Bove that for one of his heroes, who moved, initially still in a cheerful mood, from the edge of Paris out to Montrouge, even the flies on the walls gradually lost their luster).
And with the very first step over the line my curiosity was transformed into a sense of peace and my uneasiness into amazement, and the two produced great alertness. All the houses in the suburbs continued to look either too large or too small to me, the noise on Nationale 20 had something hostile about it, and the few people who had crossed with me on the overpass promptly fell out of step and became isolated from each other (whereas those crossing toward the city were picked up by a common tailwind as soon as they set foot on the overpass). Even the splendid and luxurious articles available only in the metropolis, with which they were loaded down, like border crossers from an underdeveloped country, promptly began to dangle from them, and rubbed against them like ugly and useless trash.
And yet I felt I was in territory that was not merely different but also new. A special realm began there, as when one enters a forest, when the world through which I have just been moving — one step among the trees is sufficient — draws back and in its place an entirely different one opens up, surprising, infinitely more sensuous, its first effect being to make me listen more attentively. That is followed by looking, smelling, tasting, perceiving as a mode of discovery.
That was what I experienced, to my amazement, with my penetration into that region outside the city limits. A new realm only for me? No, I felt altogether as if I were in a realm of the new: like the people, things there on the outskirts presented themselves in isolation, which meant that although they might lack the grace and brilliance of their counterparts in the capital, they appeared fresh as the morning. That was not so clear to me at first; I merely sensed it — but how!
These things and this area had to be something solid, different from all the phantoms with which I had fooled myself every time, in my lifelong pursuit of the place that was right for me, a blind believer who over time had become almost an unbeliever. I had an intuition that in such suburbs there was something to explore. I glimpsed, scented, sniffed it out. Finally, in accordance with an early dream of mine, I could view myself as an explorer in my own way. And I scented and sniffed out, beyond the roar and rumble of the Route Nationale, an as yet unheard silence, which was there as soon as you turned off the road, tangible, to be fingered, licked, and savored, silence as an as yet undiscovered and undescribed wind.
After that I made my way every day to the suburbs — without this excursion my day felt incomplete — and not only the ones to the south. But my main route remained the zigzag back and forth between Montrouge and Gentilly, crisscrossing Nationale 20, into the silence and back again into the racket, as far as Arcueil and Cachan, where, as I had learned in the meantime, Eric Satie had spent the last decade of his life all by himself (the cemetery on the slope above the Bievre, with the stone aqueduct higher up, was sometimes my destination).