THERE AND HOME AGAIN

I am home again and there is a great deal to say about the terrible things happening in the world, but let me begin with a comic episode from our Paris stay. This visit was spent by Susie and me packing up personal belongings and getting ready to sell the apartment. We have a buyer, but these things take time and it will probably be the end of September before the closing takes place. One of my biggest tasks was doing something with the books I have been displaying on the shelves of the apartment for these past 17 years. The guidebooks, the pocket dictionaries, the Michelin guides, the enormous numbers of volumes of schlock fiction – they all stay. But that left the complete set of the works of Marx and Engels in German, more than 40 thick heavy volumes in all, plus some books on Kant’s philosophy that I had not yet brought home, and one copy each of every translation and edition of every book I have published – roughly 70 volumes in all.

 

Because of my Parkinson’s, merely getting them down off the shelves in preparation for packing them was a large job, but I managed it and by 10 days ago there were large piles of books in the middle of the apartment waiting to be packed. A wonderful man, Yves Liverset, who has over the years made repairs in the apartment, agreed to help and on July 15 he showed up with some boxes and tape and set to work. The boxes, it said on the side, were each 30 cm x 30 cm x 60 cm in size and all of the books fit snugly into four of them, which Yves taped up securely. Two days later, just a week ago, he came to take them to the post office.  Yves had come in a tiny electric car – one of the free cars that Paris makes available and which apparently one signs up for using one’s cell phone.  He parked outside our coop building, carried  the heavy boxes out two at a time on a little two wheel roller, and put them in the back of the car. They just barely fit and in fact because the hatch was not securely closed the car would not start. Traffic built up behind us on the one lane one-way street and finally, in exasperation, the blocked drivers got out and pushed us to the end of the little street and off to the side so that they could get by. Then finally the car started and off we went to the post office, which was only four or five blocks away.

 

Yves brought in the four boxes and explained what we wanted to do. By now it was about 9:30 in the morning.  It turned out that the post office has a 20 kg limit on boxes that can be sent by post and each of our four boxes weighed in at a little bit more. So we had to cut open the boxes and keep removing books one at a time until each box registered a bit below the 20 kg limit. An enormously helpful young woman working at the post office, who ended up spending hours with us, brought out four small shipping boxes which we filled with the overflow books. Then it came time for the paperwork. One of my Parkinson’s symptoms is a condition called micrographia. To put it simply, I can no longer write anything that is legible so Yves had to do all the writing. Each of the eight boxes required an elaborate shipping label and an equally elaborate customs label so Yves had to copy out my Paris address and my American address 16 times! Finally, at about noon, the job was done. There they sat, four big boxes and four small boxes ready to go. The cost? €1000! This was, needless to say, a great deal more than I paid for the books in the first place but I considered it cheap at the price to get them safely back to the United States.

 

I figured it would take three weeks, four weeks, three months before the book finally arrived. I would be rested from my trip and eager to see them by the time they showed up.

 

THE BOOKS ARRIVED YESTERDAY! 

I think we must really raise a glass to the French Postal Service. I have already put 45 volumes of Marx and Engels on shelves here in my office and when I have recovered some measure of energy I will figure out what to do with the copies of the books I have written. By the way, my books tend to be short and rather small and I think all 70 copies, including the various additions of my textbook ABOUT PHILOSOPHY, will take up about half the space occupied by the Marx and Engels, if that.

 

With the arrival of the books the reality that we have sold the apartment washed over me and I felt very sad. We will not always have Paris, but we had it for 17 years and that is something.