Since when has blanket opposition become so much more attractive in democracies than, well, the work of thinking things through?
What do we share and believe in? History? Whose history? Values? Whose values?
Was Progress, the ambition of a society to, well, improve itself, only a brief historical phenomenon that has faded like the Cheshire Cat, leaving us only a jaundiced grin (or a yellow vest)?
Under these imaginative circumstances I can move around Paris with impunity, unlike my friends and neighbors.
Paris has suddenly woken up, after a couple of years of shuttered R&R.
There’s a surreal element to these balmy late fall days in Paris.
Kai Maristed is a novelist, playwright, and translator living in Paris and the US. She studied political science and journalism at the University of Munich and holds a M.S. from MIT. Her books include Broken Ground, a novel of Berlin praised by John Coetzee, and the story collection Belong to Me, starred by Publishers Weekly. Stories and essays have been broadcast by Germany’s WDR, and appeared in the Kenyon Review, Zoetrope, The American Scholar, the Southwest Review, StoryQuarterly, Agni, The Michigan Quarterly, the Iowa Review, and Ploughshares.