[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.]
In our democratic, pluralistic society we stand committed to the ideas of tolerance and diversity. As a writer, you can celebrate these ideals by falling in love with a wide range of styles, genres, and subject matter and by tolerating your first (maybe awkward and feeble) attempts in unfamiliar territory. Maybe you suppose that you’re only suited to write nonfiction even though you’ve harbored a lifelong urge to write a novel. Announce your own Fourth of July and free yourself from that unwarranted constraint by giving your novel a go.
It is a tribute to Parisians’ commitment to tolerance and diversity that they elected a gay, socialist mayor. The Leftist Bertrand Delanoë, who in an interview two years before running casually revealed his sexual orientation, won a startling upset in a runoff election to become Paris’s first openly gay mayor.
Among his first acts was to create a beach. Parisians are now treated each summer to the blossoming of a beach—complete with imported sand, palm trees, and beach umbrellas—along a two-mile stretch of the Seine. This annual event, running from mid-July to mid-August, has become quite the favorite, with Parisians twirling their parasols, lapping up the sun, and assiduously avoiding the toxic waters of the river. A nice reward for opting for tolerance and diversity!
Rather more importantly, Delanoë liberated the grass. It used to be the case that you couldn’t sit on the lawns of the Place des Vosges, the Parc Monceau, or other Parisian parks. Such frivolity was strictly forbidden, and the garden police, with legendary speed, would dart out from behind a clipped hedge to send you packing. This sad state of affairs prompted guidebook writers to warn that Parisian parks weren’t suitable for children. Parks not suitable for children! The lawns of Paris’s parks languished as manicured set pieces. Delanoë lifted that ban and freed the grass.
Parisians perhaps revere him more for instituting bus lanes, for cracking down (once again and as usual) on prostitutes plying the Bois de Boulogne, and for other civic improvements. But we must credit as his greatest feat returning the grass of Parisian parks to picnickers, idlers, children, lovers, and writers. This single change makes a writing trip to Paris worthwhile, as now the great urban parks of Paris have reached their full potential. You will see something that Lost Generation poets never got to witness: children playing on the grass.
When you elect a socialist mayor who professes that his favorite historical character is Robin Hood, what wonderful mischief you get. You get a mayor spending money from the city’s luxury tax to buy up property in ritzy neighborhoods for conversion into working-class housing. You get bicycles for rent at métro stations, and streets closed to traffic on Sundays to accommodate strollers. Best of all, you get a lawsuit filed against Jacques Chirac (right-wing former mayor of Paris and president of France) and his exceptionally hungry wife for running up astronomical grocery bills at the taxpayers’ expense.
What did these many good deeds net Delanoë? A long-bladed knife in the stomach. On October 6, 2002, during an arts festival, one Azedine Berkane stabbed Delanoë in the abdomen, announcing to police afterward that his religion taught that homosexuality was unnatural and deserved punishment. Delanoë survived his wounds and gained twelve percentage points in popularity, another small but real victory for tolerance and diversity.
If the fact that Parisians elected a gay mayor doesn’t make your head spin, get ready for this. Not long thereafter, Berliners followed suit and elected the openly gay Klaus Wowereit their mayor. At about the same time that Delanoë was leading sixty floats toward the Bastille in the Parisian Gay Pride Parade, Wowereit was heading a proud, snaking crowd of two hundred thousand, some in Victorian garb, some in feather boas and leather, down Kurfuerstendamm Boulevard toward Berlin’s Victory Column. Can’t you just picture Hitler’s expression?
Now, as you unpack your picnic lunch from your wicker hamper and spread out with your writing pad and your lover on the grass of the Place des Vosges, consider yourself celebrating tolerance and diversity. Go the next step and dream up a writing project so different from any you’ve previously contemplated that it constitutes a complete departure. Consider it your homage to the ideals of democracy.
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© Rémi Jouan, CC-BY-SA, GNU Free Documentation License, Wikimedia Commons
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