[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.]
The writer, quite possibly even better than the historian or the psychologist, knows that the trappings of civilization are but a thin veneer. The niceties of culture, the freedoms of speech and assembly, our useful legal proscriptions and social constraints—all can end in the blink of an eye if water gets scarce, if unemployment grows high, if fundamentalists multiply, if a despot gets his hands on the wheel. Any Renaissance can plummet into a Dark Ages. We have seen our excellent institutions remain intact for a few hundred years. Should we be sanguine that they will survive a few hundred more?
I am mulling this question over on a bench in the Jardin des Plantes, one of Thomas Jefferson’s favorite haunts in Paris. A stone’s throw from the elephants at the Jardin des Plantes zoo, it is an excellent location at which to speculate on the exact thickness of the veneer of civilization. To understand why this is the perfect place for such reveries, let me take you back to one of those endless spats between France and Germany.
These sparring neighbors grew close to war during the spring of 1870. On July 19, Emperor Napoleon III went off to fight the Prussians and was captured after several defeats. The Empress, no fool, fled to England as Parisians prepared to defend themselves against the Prussians. Thus, began the siege of Paris. Crown Prince Frederick William wrote in his diary, “We shall certainly have to bomb Paris, but we might as well postpone that as long as possible, for I count definitely on starving out the city.” Before too long, however, the Prussians decided to bomb as well. A program of bombardment and a program of starvation proceeded hand in hand.
To deal with dwindling supplies, Parisian butchers first refused to sell more than a day’s ration of meat. Then the size of that ration shrank. Then there was no meat left. The first substitute was horse, from thoroughbred to mule. Then came dogs, cats, and rats. Next came the zoo animals at the Jardin des Plantes, including Castor and Pollux, the zoos two elephants. The only animals spared were the lions, tigers, and monkeys—the lions and tigers because they were too dangerous to approach; the monkeys, according to one account, “because of some vague Darwinian notion that they were the relatives of the people of Paris and eating them would be tantamount to cannibalism.”
The veneer of civilization is exactly this thin and, when it cracks, we get dramas of the most poignant and horrible kind. You can always create a remarkable drama by imagining one of those veneer-cracking moments. It could be the moment when an anonymous French zookeeper, in love with his gazelles and wildebeests and forgetting that his animals are already prisoners and victims, defends his menagerie against the starving crowd. Or it could be Lord of the Flies or Animal Farm.
If you’re ever at a loss for a writing idea and want to ensure that the stakes in your book are kept sufficiently high, just scratch the veneer. At the level of individual characterization, go for the id. Freud posited a tripartite psyche made up of the ego, which reasons; the superego, which wags its moralizing finger; and the id, where our hungers and hatreds dynamically reside. Just have your characters let loose their id, as id is let loose in the classic science fiction movie Forbidden Planet, and your readers will get all the drama they can handle.
Janet Flanner, covering Paris for The New Yorker, wrote in 1938 about Chamberlain’s appeasement speech: “War seemed imminent. Now all the French know is that there is peace. In their curious calm, they don’t want to know anything else. It is the only thing worth knowing, that and the knowledge exciting the population of Europe—that statesmen can think everybody’s way out of war.” Of course, they couldn’t. In every generation, the same cracks inexorably appear. The vigilant writer stands ready to report on these recurring fissures.
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