Wednesday, April 09, 2008

Miserable Sods

One thing I need to make clear: when I wrote that I wasn’t encountering the unhappy French people of popular lore, I was in Marseille. There are, indeed, some miserable bastards in Paris. I think this is true of any city: there are people who seem to have the weight of the world on their shoulders, and who blame those of us who interact with them for adding to their already significant burden. You can hardly blame them, living as they do in Paris, where there’s nothing to do but absorb the world’s great art and culture, eat the most delicious food imaginable, and have sex with gorgeous, sexually-aggressive women. The question is whether these miserable, world-weary sods become that way by living in crowded cities, or if one’s chances of encountering them are just statistically improved by living in crowded cities.

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