After a two week break to be with friends and family in Agoura Hills, NYC and Philadelphia, we came happily back to ave Marceau and the quiet beauty of Paris in August. “They” weren’t kidding when they said that “everyone” goes on vacation during July and August. In this respect France lives up to its reputation. Though there are a lot of people about the major tourist hotspots, by and large we have noticed a drop in about half the people on the streets and the Metro, and many of the restaurants and stores are closed.

As I alluded to before in past blogs, it’s really interesting to be in a place where leisure/vacation time is an integral, accepted and expected part of ones time, especially during the summer. As Cesar (our house agent) told us yesterday, “blue collar take off in July, white collar in August,” --- he was packed and ready to go on vacation today for two weeks with his family. So far the weather has been absolutely lovely, without the expected heat wave, that is also famous in Paris in August.

An aha moment that we realized this week was that here in France, is that we get literally no junk mail. We assume that the cost of mailing catalogs and other advertisements is prohibitive, as well as “it’s simply not done,” but in the 10 weeks since we arrived, we have received exactly four pieces of mail. Two were from the bank with our individual pin numbers for our debit cards; one was from the immigration office with paperwork and an appointment date for an interview and one was an insurance policy that Maury arranged while here. Aside from a few FedEx deliveries with some stuff I shipped from the U.S., our “personal mail” is now all electronic. It’s strange to find an empty mail box day after day. Maury commented that the one day we can remember that happened in Agoura, we were sure that something was wrong at the post office!

Another similar system that is in place, are with very high gas prices and highway tolls that keep cars small and extremely gas efficient and highways beautifully maintained. It’s all about economics, I guess, and having a homogenous and obedient populous that accepts it!

Maury is continuing with his French classes and is deep into it, with the seriousness and intensity definitely ratcheted up this month. I’ve decided to take a break and concentrate on get to know Paris with a deeper study of its culture and history (i.e. spending a lot of time in museums and cultural events) and concentrate on my writing.

I have thought for some time about the intersections of Judaism, Israel and environmentalism and am attempting to put some thoughts down on paper. It seems a little disconnected to be in Paris doing it, when my usual haunts are my foundation projects on the west coast, east coast and Israel which I define as my true “center” --- but of course, I’m not complaining! Paris has been a spot of great inspiration for so many, and I can certainly feel it as well.

Part of my inspiration to do so, came from a book I recently completed, “Writers in Paris: Literary Lives in the City of Light.” Particularly the 100 years from around 1840-1940, it’s clear that the space and place of Paris became a moment in time almost unequalled in literary output that had such huge ramifications on not just the style of literature --- whole movements such as Dada and Surrealism, for example --- but the wild and wooly behavior that accompanied it was absolutely without borders ---they fought for each other on obscenity charges, they slept with anybody and everybody, they critiqued each other’s work with impunity. They did it all with complete abandon, melting into each other endlessly in cafes, restaurants, theaters and artist’s and music studios and political rallies in and around the core of Paris. Perhaps this is why so many of their stories use as context, not just the streets of Paris, but the specific buildings, because this is literally where their inspiration came from, feeling at the core of something extraordinary. They accepted each other in all of one another’s craziness, bound together in their own world defining a new type of freedom of expression. Time and time again the book described how such famous authors (in no particular order) such as Emile Zola, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, James Faulkner , Samuel Beckett, Henry Miller, Simone de Beauvoir , Jean Paul Sartre and dozens and dozens more felt magnetized to come to Paris ( a la Close Encounters of the Third Kind) as young, and more often than not penniless, feeling that they had a story to write. Their impact is still felt today, as many of their homes and apartments are now museums, which I look forward to exploring.

Sadly, World War II and the German occupation, like so much else, put an end to this era, especially for the American writers of the 1920’s-30’s that found their voices here as writers.

Another recent inspiration was a book I read by Henry James (another writer that came to Paris for inspiration as a young man), “A Little Tour in France.” It was originally published in 1884, about a six week tour James made in the south of France. It was absolutely a delightful book, where his descriptions of where he’d been and what he’d seen (mostly antiquities and castles) were so descriptive, and yet so moving at the same time. This to me, is travel writing at its best.
In a detailed description of the Pont du Gard as an example of the Roman proclivity to “overshoot the mark, and I suppose a race which could do nothing small is as defective as a race that can do nothing great,” he concludes with this sentence:

“When the vague twilight began to gather, the lonely valley seemed to fill itself with the shadow of the Roman name, as if the mighty empire were still as erect as the supports of the aqueduct; and it was open to the solitary tourist [James] sitting there sentimental, to believe that no people has ever been, or will ever be, as great as that, measured, as we measure the greatness of an individual, by the push they gave to what they undertook.”