[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.]
Maybe the following thought has popped into your head and is about to derail your plans for your Paris trip: How arrogant of me to think of living the leisured life of a bohemian artist—even for just three months—when I could be helping the poor, mentoring middle school students, or getting on with a real profession and a real career. I understand your concerns entirely. I’m a privilege-conscious person myself. Precisely these questions of privilege strike me as I cross the Place Vendôme one cloudy afternoon in July.
The Place Vendôme is a legendary place—the home of the Hôtel Ritz, its bars, and much Hemingway mythology. Here Hemingway drank. Here, legend has it, he welcomed the liberation of Paris by ordering seventy-three dry martinis for his new buddies, the first American troops to arrive in the city. You can still visit the Hemingway bar at the Ritz, though it’s only used for special occasions nowadays. Does this mythology make the Place Vendôme feel romantic and literary? Not in the slightest.
The Place Vendôme has no benches, no trees, and no simple niceties. What it has are expensive shops and a towering statue of Napoleon. The occasional tour bus loads in the middle of the Place, so loitering is not strictly forbidden, but you sense that someone is peeking out from Cartier to make sure that no rabble is gathering. The painter Gustave Courbet led exactly such a rabble against this bastion of privilege, toppling its central pillar during the heady days of the Commune. The intention was to replace Napoleon’s statue with a monument to democracy and world unity. Courbet lost, and was forced to replace the original column at his own expense.
I hope that you will be able to come to Paris with enough money that you won’t have to work at anything except your writing. If you can do this, however, you are in a privileged position—even if you labored for years to save for your adventure. Worse yet, maybe you didn’t have to labor. Maybe you have affluent parents, or married money. Won’t that make your stay in Paris reek of privilege? How many Ethiopians or Peruvians can bop into Paris and write? If you can, you are among the world’s royalty. Isn’t that close to a sin?
No, it isn’t. But if, emotionally and intellectually, you side with the world’s downtrodden, and if you have enough money in your pocket for a sojourn in Paris, privilege may prove a real psychological impediment for you. First you will have to give yourself permission to come; then you will have to regularly reconvince yourself that writing on a park bench in a Paris square is a legitimate activity in a world of floods, famines, and the unequal distribution of wealth. I hope you can do that. If you criticize yourself for being indolent and indulgent, you are being reasonable in one sense but absurd in another. Opt to see this absurdity. Consider writing in Paris to be good for humanity, and not an abuse of privilege.
And another worry: What if you convince yourself that going to Paris to write is absolutely legitimate, then go to Paris and don’t write? There’s a new pain! The fear that you may fail yourself and squander your time can combine with questions of privilege and make you doubt that you should make the trip at all. Demoralized by your vision of yourself as a privileged American stargazing and eating croissants, you may indict yourself for your aspirations and sentence yourself to house arrest back in Butte.
You should be praised for your conscience. It is good to know when you have something that others don’t. It is righteous not to forget that people are suffering, and that part of your purpose is to help. That way of thinking is not neurotic self-flagellation (though it can become that), nor an excuse for not writing (though it can become that too). Your concerns are praiseworthy. Yet they are not reasons to forbid yourself the writing life. Generosity and compassion do begin at home. Not only must you grant yourself permission to go to Paris, but you must picture yourself writing. Predict success; and if you can’t predict success, at least don’t predict defeat.
For a conscientious postmodern person, even the best impulses—like risking a year on a writing adventure—have moral ramifications. You might pass on Paris for practical reasons; you might pass for psychological reasons; you face one more potential obstacle as you ask yourself, Is it decent and honorable to write in Paris when I could possibly be doing more good in some other way? As to the answer to this particular moral question, I believe that right is on your side.
The Place Vendôme represents the negative aspects of privilege: privilege as a protected world, exclusionary and defensive, not wanting to be troubled by those it considers inferior. The privilege you are experiencing as a writer in Paris is something very different: It is the privilege of the lone individual fortunate enough and brave enough to follow her dream.
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This Post is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: Shutterstock
