In which mouse spins in circles to great if imperceptible effect

Qui serait assez insensé pour mourir sans avoir fait au moins le tour de sa prison? Vous le voyez, frère Henri, je suis vraiment un pélerin. La route est longue, mais je suis jeune.
– M. Yourcenar, L’Œuvre au Noir

“Inchoate” is one of my favorite words, and here I have an opportunity for it. I record the following here only because telling it all to my hard drive alone is depressing. So, some notes from the past few weeks.

As I slowly prepare to leave France, to return to the States, perhaps to leave again, I begin to accept the in-betweenness of my current life. There is here, there will be there, and third and fourth places that now merely glimmer dimly in the distance. I have said before that these feelings of disorientation, confusion, moderated chaos, are what I sought, after all, in coming to France in the first place, and I am at last learning to be grateful for them.

I cracked and bought a book. I told myself before I left for London that I was to make no more purchases — I haven’t room in my suitcases. But Tschann Libraire has mystic powers. When I am in Paris I make a point of spending at least an hour amid its splendid selection, its disheveled middle-aged white male clientele, its sour-faced, supremely knowledgable staff. And there in the corner on the bottom shelf in littérature française, my hands fell on an item I couldn’t resist. The superb smoothness, the fine, clean design of a volume from Gallimard’s Biblos imprint. The brittle, sweet crispness of a thousand pages well bound. Yourcenar’s memoirs. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I had to. I simply had to.

It is lovely to think that I may soon have this problem again. How, for example, am I to get my mammoth Longman Milton and Spenser across the ocean? Yes — what a lovely problem to have. We cross our fingers, we scribble our lines, and we wait.

I carry a warmth with me from this recent trip that somehow doesn’t wane. I am grateful for this travel, and I am grateful for friends and fine food and for tea and music and long walks and for sunlight and for the kind old bouquiniste in the rue St Jacques who indulged me though she knew I couldn’t afford her wares.

I am worried about Madame, about her pride and her age and her upcoming potential surgery. For the first time, the other day, she said “tu” to me. Sure, it was to berate me for berating her, but it brought tears anyhow.

I wrote in an e-mail three years ago, “Paris, c’est un conte de fée.” Remains true. I love it anyway and always will, but this city will never be wholly mine nor I wholly this city’s. I cannot stay here — there is something oppressive in this joy — I cannot stay here, it flees from me and I am forever fleeing from it, and for that I love it all the more.

And then, and then — surprise, shock, wonder, heart-pounding éclats que je ne saurais décrire — in a stairwell, this encounter. Two women, or a girl and a woman, or who knows, all but knock each other over — “oh, pardon!” and “excusez-moi!” — and then the sudden recognition — “you!” The heart-pounding, the sudden smile, the awkward bises, suddenly I am, yes, just a girl again and she touches my arm and she smiles “mais ça fait longtemps!” And oui, ça fait longtemps and qu’est-ce que tu fais là? And je vis en France maintenant, ou bien… Sérieux?! Sérieux. And she smiles again, and that awkwardness, et toi tu fais quoi? And let’s-get-together-sometime and oh, mais je n’ai plus tes coordonnés… [As I say it I can't help hearing "corps donné, je n'ai plus, je n'ai pas ton corps donné..."] And she writes me her coordonnés, corps donné, and I see her name written there in her hand and I stumble over the words trying to form, “Ça fait plaisir de te voir…” plaisir, plaisir, plaisir… I stumble on the “plaisir” and stare dumbly at her name, written there, in her hand. Bon, beh, à bientôt, j’espère! Oui, j’espère… bon, au revoir! Au revoir and goodbye and I stumble down the stairs and into the sunshine, my hand on my heart, clutching my beautiful Gallimard volume, goodbye and oui, ça m’a fait grand plaisir.

And so, flight to the closest possible refuge — the cimetière du Montparnasse. These dead have rescued me more than once, and they do again. They don’t talk, thank god, they don’t stumble over their words and they don’t give a damn about me or my girlishness or the fluttering of my little heart. Simone, salut, je me mets là un instant, si ça te dérange pas, juste le temps de respirer un peu. Reading in the sunshine in a cemetery, smoking though I oughtn’t, smiling suddenly in the sunshine in a cemetery. A young woman approaches, nods to me, salutes the tombstone, rolls a cigarette and leaves it as an offering. If only these dead could smirk — and perhaps, after all, they do.

Have I mentioned music?

Alchemical combination of book, cigarette, gin, music gives a sudden immediacy to the wonder and the simple joy of being young and free and with the means to do as I please. It is for the best, suddenly say the book and the cigarette and the gin and the music, this itinerant life. You are young and free and you are beautiful; you have language and space and time on your side; you are beautiful and young and the world you want is there and you will have it. And what’s more, you, slight and hardly apprehensible thing, transparent and fleeting and frequently fleeing though you are, you are loved.

It is good, however, that these moments do not last or they would crush us. And so I return and fall into a long and dreamless sleep and rise into a dreamless waking and that is that.