The Sophian

Issue date: 4/27/06 Section: Features

Media Credit: Courtesy of Les James Where is Les James? Mixed into the crowd in the Marathon de Paris, which took place on April 9, 2006.

On April 9 I ran the Paris Marathon, along with 35,000 other participants. The course started at the Champs Elysée and looped around Paris and along the Seine, past crowd-lined boulevards and through the peaceful woods in the 16th arrondisement. I had a lot of time to think during those 26.2 miles-I'm not a champion runner, so I was running for the better part of four hours. It was a lot of time for me to reflect upon my Paris experience, which is rapidly drawing to a close.

I thought about my arrival in this city, on August 26. Although it wasn't my first visit to Paris, it was certainly the first time that I'd made the trip alone, without even having a return ticket. The euphoria was almost instantaneous, especially after the stressful final weeks at Smith last spring. I dreamed of a well-deserved year-long break from the pressures of academia. Paris being my chosen destination, I had spent every free second before my departure imagining mornings spent running along the Seine and afternoons drinking coffee and watching life from the corner table of a café in St-Germain des Pres. The first month or so passed in a blur as I made myself at home in the city. It seemed like there was always something to do or see. I was thrilled to be speaking French all of the time; after all, this was the whole reason that I had been conjugating verbs and memorizing vocabulary lists since 5th grade.

I don't remember exactly when everything changed. Maybe it was when the weather got colder, or it started to get dark at 6:00 p.m., and then 5:00 p.m. Maybe it was the string of lewd stares or comments from men on the metro; it might have been the classes with endless assignments and indifferent professors. Whatever it was, I remember feeling distinctly alone in the vast city no matter where I went. I found myself longing for the camaraderie of Smith and the constant presence of someone-for at Smith, there's always someone to study with, someone to run with, someone to party with, someone to have three-hour-life-changing-talks…it's just a matter of going down a hall or up a flight of stairs. Even those of us who believe ourselves to be so fiercely independent are thrown off by this notion of aloneness.

Continued...

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