I have never been a great fan of Hemingway.  His prose is too stark and bare for me.  But I appreciate his love for Paris.  He lived in a tiny rundown apartment on the Left Bank, struggling to support his wife Hadley and their baby boy.  Perhaps this is why he couldn’t write about Paris while he lived there.  Paris wasn’t good to him; he needed to get away from the cold apartment on rue de Cardinal Lemoine and long days writing for money in cafés in order to recapture the spirit of Paris.

Julian Green, a writer less known to the English-speaking world, but one I enjoy infinitely more than Hemingway, also recognized this need to watch Paris from afar.  “Certainly the city’s smile is reserved for those who draw near and loaf in its streets; to them it speaks a familiar, reassuring language,” Green wrote. “The soul of Paris, however, can be apprehended only from afar and from above.”  Writing about his absence from Paris during the First World War, Green “rebuilt” the city inside himself, “a kind of inner world” in which he recreated his beloved city; his “secret city.” 

For me, too, Paris is a secret city.  As I sit half a world away and write about it, the city becomes an ethereal shadow, a mere reflection of what it is.  I romanticize it infinitely, so that I am watching myself walking down the winding streets near St. Severin, watching myself watching others, and at the same time watching the slow curl of the Seine as it embraces the islands that form the beating heart of the city and comes together again, swallowing them whole.  Distance gives me a bird’s eye view of Paris, a view which I can manipulate and control: my Paris. 

Everyone has their own city.  For some, the cold fog of London has a mysterious charm.  For others it’s the commercial bustle of sky-high New York or the floating labyrinth of Venice.  Usually these cities are “discovered” quite by accident; they are completely “other” from home and all that is recognizable, allowing them to become idealized beyond all reality.  Place has an uncanny hold upon us, and these undiscovered cities pull on a chord in each one of us that wants something new, something different and exciting, offering us the chance to become someone else in a new and magical world.

Paris is my city.  I have not spent much time there: only about a month, in fact, if you count the days.  It is still an undiscovered land, and yet it is one that I am so familiar with.  Like Julian Green, I have rebuilt the Paris I have encountered inside my mind, and created my own secret hybrid version that I can appreciate uniquely from my vantage point, so far away.  Like an unrequited love, I can fantasize undisturbed, walking lovingly down each familiar street in my mind. 

When I am there, in the true Paris, reality is sometimes brutal.  There is rain, there are French drivers, and there are the little mundane things of everyday life like hunger, aches, and pains—realities that are never present in my imaginary city.  When I sit in my hotel room at night, a cup of chocolat chaude by my bedside and my journal on my lap, I find it difficult to write about Paris.  I can describe mundane details of the day, but everything else is trite and strained.  I struggle with the thought that perhaps I have created a dream for myself that is about to be shattered.  And yet it is still there, the magic that first created this secret Paris I carry away with me.

It is in Ste. Chapelle, with multicolored jewels of light glittering on my face.  It is in the cold Gothic silence of Notre Dame, where the lanterns reflect off a thousand invisible mirrors and the arches reach upwards forever.  It is on the quiet deserted streets of Île Saint Louis, neglected by tourists because it is too small for a metro stop.  It is in on the rue de Buci, my favorite street in Paris, where the smell of the millefeuille fraises from the Bonbonière mingles with the scent of luscious roses from the flower stall opposite.  It is on the Pont des Arts over a sunset picnic of sandwiches from Lina’s.  It is standing breathless in front of the Sacre Coeur, sweeping my eyes over the magnificent expanse of Paris below.  It is these moments, and more, when the city smiles on me too.

Paris smiled on Julian Green when he wandered his city. “Until you have wasted time in a city, you cannot pretend to know it well,” he wrote.  He refers to his book as “a long, aimless stroll,” one that has no plan or purpose, and one that neglects the famous monuments and instead follows the heart.  The memories I have made in Paris—the ones that seemed to transcend the harsh realities of the big city and focus instead on exploration, discovery, and a little hint of love—have been unplanned, spontaneous.  When you waste time in Paris, you become familiar with it in a way that you cannot be familiar with home. 

It is the familiar walk down the familiar streets of the Left Bank—the one I walk each time I am there, starting at the Île Saint Louis and working my way through narrow streets to the Pont des Arts—that brings Paris back to life for me.  The more I walk them, the more cherished they become, like a well-worn, well-read book.  I return to Paris because it is a book I can’t put down.  When I close its pages, the imagined world it has created lives on in my mind; a secret, personal version of itself, a reflection. 

 I will never be satisfied with the Paris I carry around with me when I am away.  I must always pick up the book once again, and as I reread those familiar words, the imagined city becomes real again, and once more I am wandering St-Germain-des-Prés.  As I write these words, so far away, I am there on those streets.  Part of me even wants the rain and the cars and the aches and pains that come with walking from dawn until dusk.  Paris may be more eloquent when she is far away, but she smiles beautifully when you are with her.

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