grander mansions and museums, the energy in the cafés. Everything about the city exudes the feeling that art, literature, history is at the forefront of society. I walked past the Café de Flore with its red leather chairs and booths and square tables on the Boulevard Saint-Germain. Just down the street, Les Deux Magots, the two cafés separated only by a tiny, narrow street. I imagined Oscar Wilde, Joyce, Hemingway, Simone de Beauvoir drinking white wine or dry sherry at their open tables. The sounds of French conversation, with its lovely cadences and aristocratic sounds, the leisurely feel of the city, and its fashionable presentation stirs me. The women look aloof and flirtatious in their stylish dress. It’s delicious being alone in a foreign country. Something has changed.
Why did I fear coming to this city alone?
May 5, 2002
At the Louvre today I saw a magical painting by Fragonard,
The Bathers
, and the painting has stayed with me. I love the freedom dramatized in it, the nude voluptuous women bathing in a stream, their frivolity and lightness. Adam would have loved the lushness, the embodiment of the rococo spirit, the spontaneous brushwork. The joyfulness, the delight in the body. Have I ever been that carefree?
I don’t know why I am thinking of Adam so much, when I have not thought of him in years. It is as if he came into my life for a specific reason, to reveal to me the intensity and pathos that exists for those who create, or to unleash those desires inside me. Tonight dinner at a French cafe John Cloud heard about. He teaches at Princeton, and we have become friends. It’s in the 11th arrondissement, close to the Bastille, on the Rue Saint-Sabin where they are famous for their cheeses and charcuterie. He heard it described as an artsy cafe that looks as if it might have been Bogart’s just before he went off to Casablanca. You can sip coffee for five Euros standing or nine Euros seated at the dark red banquettes next to old wood tables.
May 6, 2002
Today I went to an inspiring lecture on
Anna Karenina
as the embodiment of the Russian view of human guilt and crime. Afterward I wandered out to get a breath of air. It’s always a jolt, when teaching
or
working in the library for hours, my mind focused on disentangling a thought, exploring a theory, to walk into the streets and witness the everyday: people shopping for their dinners, children skipping rope. I experienced that very sensation after stepping out of the lecture hall. It’s as if I live in two separate realities. I love the linden trees in this city. The way they curve. The light gray color of their bark. I like walking the Champs-Elysées and admiring the Parisians in their stylish and elegant attire. I can be anyone I want to be here. No one knows me. It’s that same feeling I experienced when I first moved to New York from Chicago. One can invent oneself in a new city. I imagine I’m inside a Henry James novel. Isabel Archer when she first embarks in Rome before everything begins to turn. The history. The glamour. The sensation of being a foreigner in a foreign land. The anxieties I struggle with at home, the small details of life, seem insignificant here.
There’s this wonderful china shop I passed by twice. And in the window a beautiful painted pitcher. My eyes rested on it. The handle pale green, the body the color of cream. The lip of the pitcher a rich, seductive burgundy traveling through the mouth into the interior. An array of delicate hand-painted yellow crocuses—two dots of color in the middle of green buds—bordering the rim. The buds signify something about to break into blossom but forever frozen in that state of becoming, fired into the porcelain for eternity. I thought of Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” the longing for the permanence of passion and beauty; to stop time before beauty becomes tragic. The flowers painted on the pitcher will never yield, will never fully be, but are always becoming. “What
Why did I fear coming to this city alone?
May 5, 2002
At the Louvre today I saw a magical painting by Fragonard,
The Bathers
, and the painting has stayed with me. I love the freedom dramatized in it, the nude voluptuous women bathing in a stream, their frivolity and lightness. Adam would have loved the lushness, the embodiment of the rococo spirit, the spontaneous brushwork. The joyfulness, the delight in the body. Have I ever been that carefree?
I don’t know why I am thinking of Adam so much, when I have not thought of him in years. It is as if he came into my life for a specific reason, to reveal to me the intensity and pathos that exists for those who create, or to unleash those desires inside me. Tonight dinner at a French cafe John Cloud heard about. He teaches at Princeton, and we have become friends. It’s in the 11th arrondissement, close to the Bastille, on the Rue Saint-Sabin where they are famous for their cheeses and charcuterie. He heard it described as an artsy cafe that looks as if it might have been Bogart’s just before he went off to Casablanca. You can sip coffee for five Euros standing or nine Euros seated at the dark red banquettes next to old wood tables.
May 6, 2002
Today I went to an inspiring lecture on
Anna Karenina
as the embodiment of the Russian view of human guilt and crime. Afterward I wandered out to get a breath of air. It’s always a jolt, when teaching
or
working in the library for hours, my mind focused on disentangling a thought, exploring a theory, to walk into the streets and witness the everyday: people shopping for their dinners, children skipping rope. I experienced that very sensation after stepping out of the lecture hall. It’s as if I live in two separate realities. I love the linden trees in this city. The way they curve. The light gray color of their bark. I like walking the Champs-Elysées and admiring the Parisians in their stylish and elegant attire. I can be anyone I want to be here. No one knows me. It’s that same feeling I experienced when I first moved to New York from Chicago. One can invent oneself in a new city. I imagine I’m inside a Henry James novel. Isabel Archer when she first embarks in Rome before everything begins to turn. The history. The glamour. The sensation of being a foreigner in a foreign land. The anxieties I struggle with at home, the small details of life, seem insignificant here.
There’s this wonderful china shop I passed by twice. And in the window a beautiful painted pitcher. My eyes rested on it. The handle pale green, the body the color of cream. The lip of the pitcher a rich, seductive burgundy traveling through the mouth into the interior. An array of delicate hand-painted yellow crocuses—two dots of color in the middle of green buds—bordering the rim. The buds signify something about to break into blossom but forever frozen in that state of becoming, fired into the porcelain for eternity. I thought of Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” the longing for the permanence of passion and beauty; to stop time before beauty becomes tragic. The flowers painted on the pitcher will never yield, will never fully be, but are always becoming. “What