[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 is a physically small city comprised of twenty arrondissements laid out like a pinwheel. The inner arrondissements contain tourist attractions like the Louvre, Notre Dame, the d’Orsay, and the Eiffel Tower, while the outer arrondissements include such features as the Bois de Boulogne to the west, the Bois de Vincennes to the east, Montmartre to the north, and the Parc Montsouris to the south. Most tourists skip the outer arrondissements and experience Paris as a very tidy, handy place. But even if you venture further afield, you can get anywhere by metro in no time at all.
Carved out of France with a round cookie cutter, contained by its peripheral road, Paris is intentionally made to feel small so that its citizens can enjoy it. It is a protected zone, with the tenements that house new immigrants rising beyond the city limits, making Parisian schools better than their suburban counterparts. This reversal takes an American a few seconds to process.
Hence my recommendation: Stroll everywhere. This strolling is an integral part of your time in Paris. You can only write so many hours a day—even for the most productive, published authors, three or four hours of writing is often the maximum. The rest of the day is yours, which makes the devil’s ears perk right up. If you like, you can shop, socialize, catch up on your Proust, or jog in the Bois de Vincennes. But a superb alternative to succumbing to the dangers of having time on your hands is the practice of flânerie, the French invention of strolling as art form.
The flâneur is an observer who wanders the streets of a great city on a mission to notice with childlike enjoyment the smallest events and the obscurest sights he encounters. Baudelaire, a resident nineteenth-century flâneur, observed, “For the flâneur it’s an immense pleasure to take up residence in multiplicity, in whatever is seething, moving, evanescent and infinite. You’re not at home but you feel at home everywhere; you see everyone, you’re at the center of everything, yet you remain hidden from everybody.” This is one astute definition of the writer: an observer who ventures everywhere while remaining invisible.
You can stroll in New York but the Tao of New York demands double time. You can stroll in Los Angeles but the Zen of Los Angeles requires four wheels. You can stroll in your small town, but you will run out of sights and strolling room in three minutes flat. Most places are not designed or equipped to support two or three hours of ambling. It is in Paris that the delicious, dreamy strolling of the flâneur can be perfected. Indeed, you may never become the poet of your dreams until you become a poet of flânerie. It is the exercise regimen of the artist.
The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Stanley Karnow arrived in Paris in the early 1950s. He recalls “whipping through Notre-Dame, the Sainte-Chapelle, the Tuileries, the Palais Royal, the Place de la Concorde, the Champs-Elysées, the Arc de Triomphe” and all the other mandatory tourist sights. Then he saw the light. “Presently, realizing that I could not appreciate Paris unless I curbed my frenetic pace, I became a flâneur—an aimless stroller in a town ideal for aimless strolling. I would wander along the Seine, pausing to browse for old prints in the quayside bookstalls, or watch the barges as they cruised up and down the river, their decks festooned with laundry, their sterns flying French, Dutch, British, and other European flags.”
Flânerie fills up idle time beautifully and promotes that meditative state that leads to artistry. Vary your strolling by taking the métro each day to a new neighborhood, even inauspiciously bourgeois ones like the 15th or the 16th arrondissements, and begin your wandering. Stroll, stop for a snack, venture into a museum like the Air and Space Museum (Musée de l’Air et de l’Espace), the Buddhist museum (Musée National des Arts Asiatiques), or the Baccarat crystal museum (Musée Baccarat), smile, and pause to write. Wander on. Punctuate your stroll with cafés and churches. At the end of such a day you will sleep very well.
Even if your hometown isn’t an auspicious place to practice flânerie, practice it anyway. This will hone your observation skills, model the writing life for young poets peeking out from behind their curtains as you pass, and prepare you for Paris. It will get you sunlight and exercise and put a smile on your face. Best of all, it will spark your writing. The walking meditation known as flânerie is a key that unlocks your creativity.
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