James Waltz, one of the protagonist of our season, left and went back to Kansas City. On his last Monday he read this farewell to Paris that we like to post here:

“It is known that Paris is many cities mutually contained. One is the city of reputation, who never doffs her laurels while blithely detesting those who pay them homage. Her proud posture silently reminds you that you have nothing to offer her, but, all the while, she will take everything you have. She thrives on your unworthy love, and, like any lover, she is best recognized by her contradictions: the tyranny of her liberty, the luxury of her revolutionaries, the earthly decadence of her piety, and the flagrant infidelity of her passions. Yet you cannot help but forgive the hollowness of her promises for the beauty of their syntax. Against and yet within, part and parcel, is still another Paris. One that does not issue her dictates from a sacrosanct throne, but with an encompassing and heraclitean fervor. She will not yield to your itineraries or charted courses. Her streets are rivers with endless tributaries unfolding always in kaleidoscopic dance. The vessels of your being do not move forward or backward, only toward the shifting center of her diluvian labyrinth. Geographers and geometers may parameterize her dimensions, historians and astronomers mark her measured time, but explorers who see the immensity of her infinitesimals and hear her unsayable syllables understand the immediacy of the transcendent and the certainty of the unknown. And so they speak like fools or sages, undoing the architecture of every word within a single breath, their madness nympholeptic. And yet, between these two cities, there is another still. In the middle of the pendulum swing of these ravaging loves, your own humble and unrequited, then hers mesmerizing and mystic, there is a brief moment of stillness. It is here you learn to measure her time and space by your own symbols and sensations. The friendships which blossom so quickly and earnestly despite or because of the knowledge of their transience. A single spot in a newly familiar park between the honeysuckles and lavender where you watch children playing forgotten games in undecipherable tongues. The grey-blue haze and smell of warm butter and yeast preempting dawn as you barely manage your way back to your apartment. A lover’s lips, still sweet and cold from eating ice cream, or the cheap wine and cheese that bears the wondrous flavor of a denied delicacy. You know they have always been there, but you’ll swear they were waiting for you. You know many more will possess them, but you will always recognize them as your own. For this is your Paris, the one you will remember with the same sweet melancholy as the irretrievable joys of childhood.”

Thank you James and see you soon.