Belle Paris?

"X is Y, but Paris, Paris is beautiful." A common enough thought in all its variations. But is Paris beautiful? Or, more precisely, is it really as beautiful as they say?

Certainly Paris is pretty. There's no doubt of that. But it's far easier to say whether something is pretty than to say whether it is beautiful - and a good deal of distance separates the two. Paris is also, without question, elegant and stately. And its architecture and city planning - in certain districts at least - form a harmonious whole of a sort one very rarely encounters, especially in a city of Paris' size.

But all of this is not entirely to Paris' advantage. For precisely this elegance, this harmony of elements often lessens one's aesthetic responses. There is something predictable and monotonous about just those features that Paris is most famous for. Something which can deaden, rather than excite, the senses.

Contrast Paris in this respect with New York - a city that is all too seldom thought of as beautiful. New York lacks the harmonious interaction of building with building that characterizes the stereotypically Parisian boulevard. But just this makes New York far more of a feast for the imagination than Paris. For New York is filled with unexpected and unpredictable juxtapositions. It is constantly challenging one's imaginative faculties in a manner Paris seldom does.

To say this - to prefer New York to Paris - to reject a certain sort of theory about what beauty consists in. In particular, it is to reject the classicism that states that beauty simply consists in the harmonious interaction of an object's elements. Or, in other words, it is to insist, against Kant, that beauty is impossible without a certain measure of the sublime.

Of course, Kant also believed that a beautiful object is one which excites the free play of our imaginative faculties. And this seems to me more or less correct. I differ from Kant only in what sorts of objects actually do excite this sort of state in me. What Kant found beautiful, puts me to sleep. And what I find beautiful, would have been enough to paralyze Kant's aesthetic senses - if he is to believed.

No problem here - for Kant is not famous because of his fine sense of taste. But what of Paris? Is there still hope for its beauty? Part of the problem here, I suspect, is that Paris in the past was hardly as harmonious a place as it is now. Hardly as clean. Hardly as neat and tidy and well-organized. Perhaps the Paris of the fin de siecle would been very much to my liking. Thus, my recipe for Paris is simple. A bit of poverty. A bit of bad urban planning. And a bit of day-to-day decay. And Paris will soon be back on the right track again.