[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.]
Paris improves your writing because it teaches you something profound about intimacy. You can walk directly by the Seine—it is there for the touching. You can sit down at a café table and let life envelop you. You can enter an ancient church and use it as your study. These lessons infiltrate your writing and cause you to write more poignantly. You better understand gestures, epiphanies, and fleeting moments after your Paris education.
Consider the bridges of Paris. They are not five-mile-long traffic-clogged behemoths. They are short and sweet. You encounter one of these bridges and your first reaction is to stop. You want to prop your elbows up on the low stone wall, watch the boat traffic glide by on the Seine, and feel yourself transported. Your imagination is engaged, and some poem or short story starts growing. The scale of the bridge is such that dreams are invited and art flows.
Take the small bridge that connects the two Paris islands Ile de la Cité and Ile Saint Louis. The Pont Saint Louis epitomizes the genre of “intimate bridge.” Everyone visiting Paris crosses this bridge and feels compelled to stop. You get a splendid (albeit rear) view of the Notre Dame cathedral a few hundred feet away. You peer down at a slim finger of the Seine, so gentle that you want to baptize your child in it. Around you are Japanese chamber musicians playing a string quartet, or some Czech jugglers, or a French unicyclist, or a folksinger from Toronto looking (if not sounding) like Dylan.
Nearby are the sights that you’ve come to see. There is Notre Dame and the Hotel Rolland with its Moorish windows; lining the island’s narrow streets are seventeenth-century great houses, now museums where you’ll find Chopin, Sand, and Hugo memorabilia. Yet you feel in no rush to sightsee. Standing on the bridge is more important. A bridge has existed at this spot for a thousand years—sometimes a footbridge, sometimes a traffic bridge. Once again closed to traffic, it is today at its most poignant.
This is the perfect place to test your skills as an unselfconscious writer. Sit right down on the sidewalk with your back nicely supported by the bridge wall. Pull your feet in (or stretch them out if you’re feeling adventurous). Get out your pad and pen. Glance up once or twice to warm your forehead with a beam of sunlight, then bury yourself in your writing. It is hard to imagine a better place to start on your new novel or to find that missing word for your poem.
Thank you, Paris, for this lesson in scale. It is among the hardest lessons for a writer to learn. You want to show a war, but you must show a battle instead. You want to prove the greatness of a great love, but you can’t do it through hyperbole—you can only do it by a careful noticing of the way your lovers hold hands. What writer doesn’t prefer an intimate footbridge to the Golden Gate? Look around you in Paris and study her human-size things.
One day I found myself on the Pont Saint Louis standing next to a thirty-year-old man and his sixty-year-old mother. He is reciting his grievances and she is listening with a silence at once tortured and stony. He worked; his father didn’t. Why did she invariably side with his father? He was responsible; his father was irresponsible. Why did she love his father so much and him so little? More hurt than angry, he is ready to cry. Why did she never take his side? Why won’t she admit the truth even today?
The setting has allowed him to speak. This conversation never could have occurred in their living room, at the supermarket, or at the Louvre. This bridge creates a place safe enough for a boy to speak to his mother. She refuses to reply, but Paris still has done him a great favor.
Not every bridge in Paris is worth eulogizing. Many are as ordinary as the ones back home—traffic-choked, a struggle to cross, functional, just steel and cement and a way to go. They do not invite pause and they hardly permit you to stop. But a few of Paris’s bridges are exceptional. They are worth the airfare and the languid hours I pray you devote to them. They are why you came. Bring your pad; bring your pen; the rest is easy.
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