The Museum When it Opens

[Many of us are caught in the following predicament: we have tremendous pent-up wanderlust, but we don’t feel that it’s quite safe enough to travel yet. So, let me present you with some excerpts from my book A Writer’s Paris to help slake some of that wanderlust, while at the same time providing you with lessons of values to writers and all creatives. These essays also connect to my recent book Redesign Your Mind, as they present new ways of thinking about the creative process and the writing life.]

When you find yourself in Paris, you find yourself in the psychological, spiritual, and—in many cases—literal home of the painting revolution that occurred from the late nineteenth century through the early twentieth century. Seeing the art of this period in its home of Paris enriches the experience. Although you are in Paris to write, you will also sightsee; and one place you don’t want to miss is the Musée d’Orsay.

The d’Orsay is a transformed train station that houses France’s modern art collection. You must go there as an artist and not as a tourist, which means that you must go when you can actually commune with the art that hangs there. If you visit the d’Orsay at two in the afternoon, you will find yourself packed in like a sardine, one of a thousand other visitors. Elbowing your way from gallery to gallery, your only thought will be Why am I doing this? But if you visit the d’Orsay on a weekday morning when it first opens, you will have that great museum almost entirely to yourself for at least a full hour.

Arrive at the d’Orsay at 9:15, climb to the top where the Impressionist and Postimpressionist paintings hang, and enter a room full of Van Goghs. His paintings are beautiful and very different from their reproductions. The Painter’s Room at Arles (La Chambre de Van Gogh à Arles) is brighter, more vivid than you expected. Suddenly his decision to paint garishly, out of a fear that his pigments would fade over time, makes perfect sense. As much as they have faded, his paintings are still bright and wonderful.

The Gauguins, too, are very moving. All at once you want to take his irony—those mocking words in his Tahitian journal that caused you to dismiss him as bitter and syphilitic—with a grain of salt. At 10:00 A.M. on a drizzly Thursday, in an underlit room with all these paintings surrounding you, you peer into Gauguin’s heart and see that he was gentle. You ignore the fact that he ridiculed Van Gogh, and remind yourself that he also praised him. Gauguin is redeemed at this time of the morning in a way that he can’t be redeemed later in the day, when hundreds of souls pack this small gallery.

At this early hour, all of the d’Orsay’s amenities are yours. You can use the bathrooms without getting in line. You can shop in the museum store without getting shoved. In the gallery rooms you’ll find comfortable rattan chairs, more humane and romantic than benches. If you happen to choose my preferred chair, you will have five Monets to enjoy, five views of the Rouen cathedral.

Downstairs, on the ground level, is an early Monet, painted when he was twenty-eight, as captivating as anything I’ve seen. It’s a snow scene called The Magpie (La Pie), painted the winter of 1868. On a snow-covered fence sits a single magpie. The magpie is one small black spot, and yet it balances all that snow. There is a secret here for the writer, a secret about the importance of every single word.

Finding yourself in such an eloquent church, how will you pray? By pulling out your pad and writing. We work in that silence that Kierkegaard called “the last scrap of Christianity left,” the silence of bookstore niches, shuttered studios, empty museums. The d’Orsay at ten in the morning is a writer’s church, and our practice is to pull out our pads and write. No one can say who or what we’re praising as we quietly scribble; but praise is surely in our hearts.

It makes all the difference in the world whether you visit the d’Orsay at 9:30 or at 3:00. Arriving at 9:30 is an act of devotion. Many writers come to Paris and then fall into step with the tourists. Be the exception and do the tourist sites in an artful way. Write wherever you find yourself, whether in a café or the Louvre, whether on a park bench or sitting in a blissfully empty gallery at the d’Orsay.