Paris through the roof of a taxi

Paris is always the same, always different. There are times of the year, if I understand correctly, when Paris is always a bit rainy: like the morning I took the photo.

We know what we know by successive approximations. By incremental investigations, I would say. It happens a bit with everything - it happens so much that I bet someone has given the phenomenon a name.

The first time you set foot in a city you see it, you experience it, you understand an initial layer of it: many cities, many, at first have something of perfection. Even in their imperfection, an order of some kind emerges. And that order is what comes first. In a way, at that point, it is a bit like the city is still a map, with few details.

Then you go back to it and you go back to it.

And it is at a certain point in these returns that the city really takes its form, the one in which you have an augmented perception of it, which contains everything in the layer of first access and in the layers that follow.

You take a city that is close to your heart and remember the first time you were there, the emotion of that first time. And then the next times: the moment when you realised that the facades of the houses are not so uniform, that there are traces of recent time; or the moment when you noticed the dirt beside the pavements.

That's it: I love this cyclical sinking, this immersion in reality. And I love cities that, inside me, survive this onion process and come out more alive than when I first met them.

Paris, certainly. Barcelona, for one thing.