It's been a while since my last post. It always seems as though the times I do get around to posting are always the times when I should be doing something else (invariably that something else is sleeping!) It always seems as though I don't really wake up and get active until it gets dark. Let's hope I get out of that habit by the time summer arrives, otherwise my 'active' period will be limited to about 10:30 at night until 3:30 or 4 a.m.

Anyway, a new term has started. I'm taking an eighteenth-century class called 'Narrative and Subjectivity' and a creative writing module, 'Writing from Life', which I have to admit to being a little scared about, having never taken a creative writing class in my life. Trust me to wait until I'm a postgraduate. I've only had one class so far, but it seems to be okay. Apart from perhaps the ominous 'in-class writing excercises'. Not my forte, I fear...

On a sidenote, I seem to be internalizing British punctuation but not spelling. This can't be good.

So today I have been working on my first assignment for the Writing from Life course. We had to pick a Life Writing text and write, informally, about how it inspired us. (Sounds a little like a book report assignment...). These have to be posted online. Mine is below.

On another sidenote: Lost finished this week. No Lost, and no West Wing. My life is measured in TV shows...

Okay, all my eloquence has gone tonight.

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Journeys

Choosing a piece of life writing that has inspired me is a bit like trying to name my favourite song. So much depends upon the atmosphere, the place, my mood. But what my favourites have in common is a fusion of self and place that speaks to the way our surroundings affect and become part of our lives, of who we are. Travel literature is a fascinating type of life-writing because it relates self to location in such an inseparable way that it reads as autobiography of both person and place. These books inspire our journeys, literal and figurative. Sometimes these are journeys I can revisit every time I open the pages to reveal ticket stubs, boarding cards and luggage tags carefully preserved. But more frequently they remind me of journeys of the imagination for which the only destination has been a greater insight into who I am and what I want to be. Julian Green’s Paris, a thin, heavy grey volume which the front cover proclaims ‘the most bizarre and delicious of travel books’ is, for me, the inspiration for both a literal and a figurative journey.

I began what I can only describe as a rather clichéd love affair with Paris when I was seventeen. Emotional and in an adolescent state of ‘inner turmoil’, I somehow convinced my parents to let me travel on the Eurostar alone, for one night, to a city I had already created in my head from my reading. My memories of the lonely winding streets of St Germain that Sunday morning have given the city a personality in my mind: not a trite ‘lady of love’ persona, but an emotional, secretive, moody, grey and misty character.

Perhaps what draws me to Julian Green’s Paris is his identification with that same Paris I know. He talks of wandering the city in his head, ‘rebuilt inside’ himself, during the war when he was forced to leave: ‘Paris, for me, had become a kind of inner world through which I roamed in those difficult dawn hours when despair lies in wait for the waking sleeper’ (15). His journey into this ‘secret city’ (15) is an exploration of the various faces that Paris presents to him: in buildings long since demolished, in statues that still cast voyeuristic eyes from atop revered monuments, in stairways that sag with the impression of a million busy feet. He tries to identify what it is that makes Paris Paris: a mixture of sensory impressions and objects that, like Proust’s madeleine, call up involuntary associations: ‘Everything in this city has a quality that defies analysis but enables you to say without any hesitation: “That is Paris”– even if it is only a milk can dangling from a door knob…’ (51). This is not the tourist’s Paris, he argues, but one that can only be discovered by ‘wasting time’ in the streets (49), wandering aimlessly, haphazardly, as his prose begins to do towards the end of the book, recording personal snapshots that are mere impressions of his Paris.

In Green’s love letter to a city, I discovered not only how place can be as much a character in writing about life as a mother or brother or friend, but also how language can recreate life, senses, experiences of place and time. Each time I return to Paris I read the bilingual copy bought in a Left Bank bookstore five years ago, sometimes letting the original lyrical French bring to life the vibrant yet melancholy city Green describes rebuilding inside himself whenever he is absent (15), and sometimes focusing on the translation, noting the way in which his words recreate not only the Paris that I know but Green’s own interior construction, a city that is personal to him and that is only alive as he lived it, through the words on the page. In one chapter of the book, Green describes visiting Notre Dame for the last time before the war. The stained glass had been removed from the giant rose window above the north transept and the gaping void was covered with a giant canvas, which howled a warning in the winter wind, ‘a sort of dull explosion that was like a gun being fired’ (65). Unaffected by the noise, the worshippers below continued their candlelit vigil. Sixty-five years later I sat in the same cathedral under the same rose window, its stained glass now glowing in the spring sunshine, watching a group of worshippers praying over candles for the departed soul of Pope John Paul II. With a notebook open on my lap I recreated my Paris, alive in time not to a war but to the death of a man I never knew, and realised how much Green’s prose had affected the way I viewed this church, this city, and my own way of rebuilding places inside myself with words.