It has never been the beauty or the elegance of Paris that has inspired the writers to write. Those fine things inspire the tourists. (And the tourists within us.) The writers don’t even love Paris; they need it.
They live off her oxygen. For Paris is the city in which you understand best your own loneliness, the one you’re born with. It’s a place where the underlying “melancholy of being” feels right, where you don’t blame yourself for the perpetual drudgery of dailiness, the imperfections of love, the dizziness of pursuing a livelihood, the perpetual battle with time. In Paris you relish the countless minutes spent contemplating the philosophy of grammar. You surprise yourself by being fascinated with the nuances of punctuation. Language — yours and the others — becomes your stock market.
In New York or Chicago or LA, even London of recent years, I don’t feel like that; I feel like achieving, of gaining fortune, fame, and greatness, of building a swimming pool and upgrading my vehicle. It whips you this thing, and you jump, wishing eBay had been your idea. You place your self-worth against the measuring stick of buying power, and the bar is held high by one amoral force: the media. It’s not who you are, it’s how you’re perceived that counts. And we come to really believe that almost as a religion.
Fortunately, it’s not wholly like that in Paris, where pleasure is still had in the peeling of a pear or in selecting ripe figs in the market — even in the great boom of the new economy where young, bright French kids are shedding their culture’s disdain for the vulgarity of cash and undisguised self-aggrandizement. For some, success in France today is getting featured in Capital or Investir magazine.
Although the pubescent, upwardly-mobile class in urban France now seeks more openly a globalized version of fun (email, scooters, lime-colored cell phones, over-priced brunches), the writer’s Paris is not about attaining anything. There are no winners or losers in the City of Light. There are walkers and talkers, drinkers and thinkers.
After you’ve been to the sights and know the museums by heart, after you leave your office or finish your last task for the day, what counts is that demi-heure with a demi beer and the friendly teasing of Robert or René whose immortally-damp torchon is always tossed over his left shoulder. You hardly know this man behind the counter and yet you punctuate your life with the return of his square chin, that silly onyx pinkie ring, and the often-told story about what went on in the cave during the Occupation. This isn’t about being nostalgic or morose, it’s about living in step with what’s real — whether your cell phone is playing “La lettre àElise” in your pocket or not. What’s morose is the necessity to submit to the fact that the American Dream does work, and that regardless of how far you get, and how deep into the rêve you wade, you’re always working for someone else’s benefit. Management has served you a slick way to continue to believe in yourself while producing for them.
And this is true even for writers. One leading editor at an established French publishing house that now belongs to that giant water company that also controls much of Hollywood reminded me that even chez lui literature is far from the company’s core business and fiction is only barely tolerated, as long as he hits the jackpot one-in-four-times. The German mastodon, Bertlesmann, one mustn’t forget, is now the largest English-language publisher on earth.
A few disparate details have jumped out from diverse pages and screens these last weeks. The US Ambassador to France has remarked aptly, in a Financial Times op-ed, that globalization implies the creation of lots of losers, and he rightfully acknowledges that the very big winners had better start understanding the cost and responsibility of sustained pocketing of massive riches... René the barman and those figs in the market require no swelling bank accounts.
On the last day of the Sydney Olympics I relished a tiny detail at the closing ceremonies, the most elaborate and religiously-choreographed Olympiad celebration ever. As a famed Australian operatic singer projected her powerful voice to a hundred million telespectators, a large white moth, a papillon de nuit, attracted by the shower of impressive light, landed squarely on the front of the woman’s sequined evening dress as her powerful diaphragm rose and fell with song. The cameramen of the world were held captive to the winged insect as it sat passively at the center of the televised planet. Sitting in front of my Paris set, I took this as an elegant reminder that beyond all the manipulation, the years of planning, the hundred thousand security guards and strategy execs, fortunately, we can’t stop a simple moth from living its own spontaneity.
That’s the part that Paris writers (and the writer in all of us) need most. The next time someone asks you why you’re really here – really here – let the moth in you reply.
Writer and publisher David Applefield (david@paris-anglo.com) is the author of Paris Inside Out, The Unofficial Guide to Paris, and the editor of www.paris-anglo.com