BonjourParis.com

Monsieur Sparrow seems perfectly calm, skirting the feet of the seated passengers making his progress down the aisle as the train accelerates. After hopping three metres or so, he turns and makes his way back toward me, still unconcerned, just going about his business. The more I watch him the more he seems to be a regular commuter, an avian working stiff qui fait la navette domicile-travail-domicile, a daily round-tripper, going to and fro, work-home-work, getting on in the world, getting nowhere at all, like everyone else on the train.

Traveling is a challenge no matter how you approach it or like it. Travel barges in on your personal space, starting at the airport. It doesn’t end there. You can tell a lot about a culture by how people interact and how much distance they give one another. Unless Americans are forced into sardine situations, they tend not to stand on top of one another. As friendly as people in the U.S. tend to be, by telling one another too much too soon, strangers rarely touch one another. In other countries, the protocol is very different.

From November 6, 2009, through March 7, 2010, the Jewish Museum of Art and History in Paris features an exhibition about a prominent and relatively little-known Jewish family who could have figured in Marcel Proust’s great opus In Search of Lost Time.