Paris, the departure

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Paris is my hometown. Paris is where travel begins. I walk around small and large streets, I come across people and places. Some persons remain in my memory like some places, marked by an interrogation on the world.

Walking around Paris is already like travelling, as one can feel in all big cities, it is not made only of itself. Life from outside the city, from the earth comes to inhabit Paris.

I go around Paris streets seeking where life comes from.

May be it comes from this white, dusty, building, from the dark windows, from this curved street which descends towards the centre of the city, from the succession of neon signs.

In a few hours, I will leave. I will go far away. It is the first time and I will not sleep tonight.

All that I had read, the books on the first explorers of the South Sea Islands, the anthropological accounts, the contemporary writers, all those who created an image or an interpretation of a place, a fascination and a knowledge.

Mircea Eliade has described, in The Sacred and the Profane, the fusion which existed in ancient people, between gods and nature, between man and the world that surrounds him.

How to explain the passage from this intellectual reality to a reality directly experienced by the individual, as if I had become a part of the world instead of a separate being ?

The shark I had seen, whose fin had silently slipped through the surface of the sea still gilded by the sunset, was he the soul of a great Fijian chief ? Did he tell me that what I thought at this time was the truth of the world ?

To me travelling has been this experience of a link with the world, with culture and with nature.

Culture is the fight against what in man believes that things, men, the world, are only what they seem to be. Culture is what gives its form to the world, it is a construction by man of nature. It is the only way by which the world can be renewed.

This intuition about culture is universal and contingent, it is an extension of man anywhere and at anytime. It will touch the somewhat attentive traveller, the slightest detail, the smallest object, which will evoke, a thousand miles away from his place of origin the feeling of proximity, of recognition which will even become a part of its own life.

To reach these delicate settings in different times and different places, I had booked a seat on a plane, which needed kerosene to fly. I had a digital camera which gave me images I can comfortably watch in my heated home. I was glad I had air conditioning and sunscreen in the blazing heat. Bottled mineral water was an intense relief.

But all this is no match with a single drop of ocean water in Fiji, the smallest stone of Mexico or the slightest dust brought by the wind of the Moroccan desert.

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