[In this series of posts, I want to introduce you to a certain idea, metaphor, and reality: The International Bohemian Highway. Millions of people who do not fit comfortably into a conventional life are fellow travelers on this highway. I hope that this series of posts paints a picture that resonates for you. If you’d like to meet some of your fellow travelers, please come join my new Eric Maisel Community.]
Some books haunt me a little. Giovanni’s Room, James Baldwin’s 1956 novel about a young man in Paris, is one of those. I read it when I was very young, probably not yet a teenager, at a time when I was reading just about anything and everything, from Eric Ambler spy novels to Newton on optics to apocalyptic novels like On the Beach to Linus Pauling on the chemical bond to Orwell’s essays to the whole Scandinavian oeuvre: Selma Lagerlof, Sigrid Undset, all those chilly novels set in chilly places.
I loved many of those books. But Giovanni’s Room inhabited me. It is a slender, claustrophobic novel about a young man “struggling with his sexuality,” as it’s usually put. I think what mesmerized me was the simple idea of a “small room in Paris.” When I think of the phrase I’ve been mentioning lately, the International Bohemian Highway, it is probably that room that I’m picturing: not the Louvre, not the Eiffel Tower, not the Seine at night, but that room. Why?
And how, so young, could I have known that I wanted and needed Paris? Not a single Jew or Italian in my old Brooklyn neighborhood talked about Paris. The Honeymooners and The Lone Ranger didn’t go to Paris. I didn’t know cultured people—not a one. My high school friends, at the Manhattan math-and-science high school Stuyvesant, talked chess, cyclotrons, and slide rules. And so, how did I know not to go uptown to the East Side, where the money was, or uptown to the West Side, where the culture was, or midtown, where the sleaze was, but “down to the Village”?
Not a single Stuyvesant boy wandered down to Greenwich Village after school—and Stuyvesant in those days was at East 15th Street, a stone’s throw from the Village. But I did. I am guessing that the Jungian idea of archetypes posits the notion that we each have all of those zillion possible archetypes tucked away in our collective unconscious. But what if each of us is born with our own particular and peculiar array of archetypes, some exact and limited number? Maybe some small percentage of the human race is born with the archetype of the International Bohemian Highway and already knows, just out conscious awareness, that he or she is supposed to go down to the Village or off to Paris? We know next to nothing about original personality—and so, might that not be true?
I think there is a shared archetype of the International Bohemian Highway. It is activated when you read a novel like Giovanni’s Room and when you pass a café like the old Café Rienzi in the Village. You are obliged to get a double espresso, whether or not you like espresso. You are obliged to sketch, read a novel, or join in on a folk song. Maybe you will wander into physics, philosophy, or architecture, but even if you have wandered there, you will still be startled by what you feel when hear “Paris” or “The Village.”
Maybe that archetype is deep within you. If so, come join the Eric Maisel Community. Our community could maybe one day become a stop on the International Bohemian Highway <smile>. We shall see. Paris was only a barely-inhabited island in the Seine to begin with. The Village was only a hodgepodge of crooked streets that refused to align with Manhattan’s ordered grid. Let’s see what we become. See you there!
**
Why Smart, Creative and Highly Sensitive People Hurt: A Toolkit for Thriving in a Chaotic World (Personal Growth, Self Development)
Make Your Gifted Life Meaningful
Overcome your unique challenges. The challenges smart and creative people encounter―from scientific researchers and genius award winners to bestselling novelists, Broadway actors, high-powered attorneys, and academics―often include anxiety, overthinking, mania, sadness, and despair. In Why Smart, Creative and Highly Sensitive People Hurt, psychology specialist and creativity coach Dr. Eric Maisel draws on his many years of work with the best and the brightest to pinpoint these often devastating challenges and offer solutions based on the groundbreaking principles and practices of natural psychology.
Find meaningful success. Do you understand what meaning is, what it isn’t, and how to create it? Do you know how to organize your day around meaning investments and meaning opportunities? Are you still searching for meaning after all these years? Many smart people struggle with reaching for or maintaining success because, after all of the work they put into attaining it, it still seems meaningless. In Why Smart, Creative and Highly Sensitive People Hurt, Dr. Maisel teaches you how to stop searching for meaning and create it for yourself.
In Why Smart, Creative and Highly Sensitive People Hurt, you will find:
- You are not alone in your struggles with living in a world that wasn’t built for you or your intelligence
- Logic- and creativity-based strategies to cope with having a brain that goes into overdrive at the drop of a hat
- Questions that help you create your own personal roadmap to a calm and meaningful life
Readers of true, natural self-help books for gifted people struggling with life, anxiety, and depression, like Living With Intensity, Misdiagnosis and Dual Diagnoses of Gifted Children and Adults, or Your Rainforest Mind, will learn how to create meaning in their lives with Why Smart, Creative and Highly Sensitive People Hurt.
—
This Post is republished on Medium.
—
Photo credit: iStock
