ouverture

from: paris

if you are lucky enough to have lived in paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for paris is a moveable feast.

– ernest hemingway 

extrapolation: essentially projecting the present moment into the foreseeable future – believing that the moment at hand constitutes what your entire life amounted to, rather than just being another passing, transitory experience in the whole. 

– brianna weist

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i brought with me a proportionally far too large stack of books for this trip. sitting on the living room floor, making tough decisions about packing, i decided i couldn’t part with any of them. so taking up most of my hand-luggage on the flight, i sat with my heavy rucksack of books on my knees all the way to paris. that was in the beginning of july. a month has passed now, and i have witnessed this stack (placed honorably on the mantlepiece of the airbnbs non-functioning fireplace), diminish. as one by one they have been transferred to another pile, the read pile, as the month has progressed. 

here it is, as follows, in order: 

transit – rachel cusk 
a moveable feast – ernest hemingway 
good morning midnight – jean rhys 
the inseparables – simone de beauvoir 
swallowing geography – deborah levy 
real estate – deborah levy 
i feel bad about my neck – nora ephron
kudos – rachel cusk 

i like looking at this list like other people like looking at old playlists. like how a certain set of songs will bring you back to a particular part of your past, this little stack of boks will forever remind me of my time here in paris. always as companions in my bag – they’ve been read by the seine, at cafés, on the metro and in bed after a long day of walking. the paris that started with rachel cusk on the plane has been expanded by all of these writers whose words have made the city so much more expansive. following hemingways steps through the gardens of luxembourg, discovering the old drinking-dens of rhys’s main character – walking past the dôme and closerie de lilas – just opposite the les deux magots where i read de beauvoir at her very own existentialist café. walking into the dark of a metro station and its like ive been swallowed by time, emerging into levys paris, the 21th century city, where the bells of sacre cour are still ringing all over montmartre. once home, lying comfortable in my favourite place in this apartment – on the bed, the french balcony open beside me, the cream curtains billowing in the breeze and the draught cool on my feet – i finish nora ephron. funny, brilliant, illuminating nora ephron. the paris that started for me with cusk on a plane is ending for me with cusk on a plane, and i like the circularity of that choice. 

hemingway wrote that it was only away from paris that he could write about paris, and i am tempted of doing the same. but this mission of mine, this unwillingness to extrapolate, to narratarize for posterity, is keeping me to the task i set myself in the last letter: writing about the middle as i am in the middle. 

what follows are little love-letters to the city as it decided to reveal itself to me: by books. in little sketchettes (a term i stole from monet), i hope paris will come alive to you as it did for me; as singular dots of colour of a pointillistic painting will, at a distance, reveal a harmonized whole, i wish to do the same.

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so until hemingway,

love,

e.