Thursday 8 February 2018

Solitude and writing in Paris








I've just spent a week in Paris, alone, writing and not-writing, and it was difficult and wonderful in equal measure.

I normally write pretty much anywhere I happen to be: I write in my office and in my kitchen, on trains and planes, in libraries and cafés. I'm not bothered by noise much, and I've written stuff I'm proud of while sat alongside my family watching television. So I don't need silence or solitude to write.


But Paris gave me a whole week alone, and I'd been longing for it. It felt wantonly extravagant, and essential.

It was harder than I remembered to be so alone. I spoke to almost no one except to buy coffee and food and one day I didn't speak at all. For a week I had no meaningful conversations: there was no emotional weight to anything that I said or that was said to me.

I missed my family and friends. It was strange and discombobulating to be in a city full of people, not one of whom knew or cared about me.

It might be easy to wonder if you exist if you have to live in such solitude for long.

I can see how appalling loneliness must be.

But for me, this was a brief interlude. And while no one in Paris cared about me, I equally didn't care about them, except in a general kind of way. And it was a huge relief, once I settled into my solitude, to have no responsibility except to myself. How often can any of us say that?

It was a luxury, and I took it seriously. I read, walked, looked at people and buildings and art. I walked more. It felt vital to be out, letting whatever I came across come in.

The very difficulty of being alone seemed to strip the wires of my mind of their usual insulation. I was alert and vulnerable. And being exposed emotionally made me open to the hidden currents of the story I was writing.

I'd been worrying at the story for ages. I knew something was missing, and I even knew what but I didn't know how I was going to write it. On the fourth morning in Paris I woke at five o'clock knowing exactly what to do - an idea came into my mind out of nowhere that transforms and completes the story in just the way I'd been looking for.

I'm sure that extended time alone allows me to find things I don't know are there.


There are small pleasures too that I only see when alone: the rhythms of a café as day turns to night, wisps of song coming down the stairwell as the snow falls in the dark outside, the golden sandals my neighbour left outside his front door.

When I was young, I dreamed of being a poet living in a Parisian garret. I'd have friends, of course, and we'd sit in cafés and laugh and argue about life and poems and friendship, but mostly I'd stare moodily out of my tiny window and write.

This last week, I lived a little of that dream. I didn't look moodily out of the window, because I was enjoying writing so much: that's what I didn't know when I was young. I enjoy writing, as well as finding it terrifying and hard work.

And that's the thing. Last week I felt disconnected from the people around me and alone. It wasn't easy. But I'm glad I didn't spend it in a cosy writer's retreat where I could chat to other writers in the evening - though I've been on retreats like these, and I love them, and would gladly go again. But writing, for me, is also about fear, and risk, and exploration so sometimes I have to get a bit uncomfortable and look at things that aren't beautiful, and to feel a little fear.

As a coda, I found this poem, 'Bryant Park at Dusk', by Geoffrey Brock, which  catches the pleasure of solitude perfectly in his description of a lone woman reading in the park as night falls:  

And what I loved was this:
The way, when dusk had darkened her pages,
              As if expecting a kiss,
She closed her eyes and threw her head back,
              Book open on her lap.
Perhaps she was thinking about her story,

              Or the fall air, or a nap.

The whole poem's up on the Poetry Foundation website.