Paris, city of desire and knowledge – Liberation
Chronicle “Life points”
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You can only be free when you are a foreigner in your own country, a sort of migrant who does not cross borders. Paris is only the city of students but they are the anonymous gold of the future.
It is said that it is by leaving that one better understands the nature of one’s city. And it is true that it was during these months when I was no longer in Paris that I better understood his secret. Like many foreigners, my first contact with Paris goes back to the years of my studies. I came here as if to know the oracle: I imagined that within the perimeter of this city knowledge could have found its relationship to desire and passion – in their strangest, most absurd, most neglected forms. After all, that’s what it’s all about: study is a menu and between desire and knowledge.
My story is neither singular nor particular. Paris is not only the city of fashion and style, revolutions or museums. It is the city which identified itself so much with the life of its students that it elected them as protagonists of one of the most important events in its recent history: May 68. Not that the city was invaded and populated exclusively, or mainly, by people who come there to study, do research, teach or hear from professors from all over the world, as may be the case in any European or American university center. They are not even students in the technical sense of the term. Most people who come here are looking for some kind of knowledge that probably hasn’t been invented yet. They are students in the truest sense of the term, people in search of rapid knowledge…