The city is a different place in the rain. The pavements go dark and reflective and suddenly there are two streets, one above and one below, and the people in the lower one are walking upside down under their umbrellas. Everybody moves a little faster and looks a little less. Conversations happen in doorways.
I have come to love walking in it, which is a recent development. For most of my life rain was simply a reason to stay in. Then a friend who had grown up somewhere very dry told me that the first thing she noticed, moving north, was how beautiful everyone’s city was when it was wet, and how nobody here seemed to see it.
Rivière’s rain
Henri Rivière spent more than a decade drawing the Eiffel Tower from every corner of Paris, borrowing the idea from Hokusai’s views of Mount Fuji. In most of his views the tower is somewhere in the background, half hidden, while the foreground gets on with its life. In one of them it is raining on the Quai de Passy. A crane is unloading, a cart is waiting, the river is grey, and the rain comes down in long straight lines across all of it. Nobody is looking at the weather. The weather is the thing that has made the quay look like this, and nobody has noticed.
That, I think, is the pleasure of a rainy walk. The city stops performing. Everyone is too busy keeping dry to look at each other, and so you can look at everything.
The best walks are the ones you almost did not take.
I wrote that in a notebook years ago and have no idea whether I made it up or copied it from somewhere. Either way, it is true of rain.