[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.]
I hope that you’ll go to Paris and write. Right now, though, you need to write precisely where you are, with dirty dishes in the sink, bills piled high by the phone, and snow falling not on cedar, but on your dilapidated car. It is wishful thinking to believe that you will write somewhere else when you haven’t been writing where you live—a fiction that is easy to love because it promises effortless masterpieces and jasmine-scented evenings. Don’t succumb. Paris is a beautiful dream and a doable reality, but not an excuse for not writing at home.
As you sit in your apartment, your task is to tackle your novel or your short story and then tackle the world of book publishers or quarterlies. To help buoy your spirits as you work away, access the Paris already inside of you. There is a Paris-of-the-mind that resides in each of us, a Paris of Hemingway and Camille Claudel, of Gertrude Stein and Romaine Brooks, her salon rival. There is a Paris-of-the-mind made up of a thousand stories, a million images communicated in books and movies. It is available to you right now.
As has been said about God, if Paris did not exist we would have had to invent her, so profound is our attraction to what she represents. We need Henry Miller and Anaϊs Nin entwined, we need the student protests of 1968, we need Abelard castrated in Notre Dame as retribution for his love of Héloϊse. We need the chestnut trees, the cafés, the bookstalls, the outlooks on the Seine. We need them and, luckily, we have them, tucked away in a corner of consciousness, ready to be rolled out with or without a glass of wine.
You don’t have to hang Toulouse Lautrec posters on your wall or place Gauguin coasters on your coffee table to taste Paris. Just close your eyes. You can be in the Place des Vosges, sitting and writing, whenever you like. You can be walking the boulevards of Saint Germain des Prés beside Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. It will help if you’ve been to the real Paris, but that hardly matters. Paris is part of our shared vocabulary, alive in the hearts and minds of artists everywhere. Can’t you picture Paris right now?
But by all means add some icons to your environment. A postcard, a blue vase, a framed photograph, a coaster, café music, this book—use such totems and mementos to keep Paris alive. I keep a postcard in front of me of a scene that might be anywhere in Europe. The sun is rising over a cobblestone street, a leafy tree overhangs four or five empty café tables, centuries-old buildings with their steeply sloped roofs stand cheek by jowl in the cold morning light. It is a postcard that I gave to one of my daughters and then stole back. Now it faces me as I write.
I have Paris even when I’m not there. But when I’m there, it’s hard to leave her. Just as it’s the first place I visit when I arrive, the Place des Vosges is where I take my leave. I give it a whole afternoon. I sit on the western side of the park, musing about Georges Simenon and Josephine Baker, who consummated their affair a hundred yards away; or perhaps about a certain Camus essay, penned the night of Paris’s liberation, in which joy and thanks mingle with pessimism and sorrow. And I do a little writing.
Dusk falls. The park’s guard, looking every bit the toy soldier, cries out that the Place des Vosges is closing. Lovers, asleep on their blankets, rouse themselves; the last tourists shut their guidebooks. In the morning, I’m off to the Gallieni bus station to catch the bus for London. I’m sure I’ll arrive early enough to do some writing and watch some dramas unfold. Maybe someone won’t be allowed to board our bus. Would I mind if it were me?
I don’t know if it’s intelligence that makes the writer—or heart, or hard work, or an existential feel, or that thing called talent. I don’t know if each of a billion people could write an excellent novel, or if only a thousand can. I don’t know if you leave the womb already a writer, or if writing is a decision you make as you look around for a path you can love.
What I do know is that, if you have read this to the end, you belong to our family. Since our family vacations in Paris, I’m sure our paths will cross in the Place des Vosges. You may be lost in thought and not notice me, but not to worry. I’ll be lost in thought, too.
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