literary aspirations

I have a new literary role model: Adam Gopnik, writer for The New Yorker.

Actually, I've never read Adam in The New Yorker; at least, I've never known that I've been reading him. (I feel like I know him well now, and that he'd want me to call him Adam.) I am currently reading, however, his collection of essays and journal entries called "Paris to the Moon" (New York: Random House, 2000). I'm only about 50 pages in, but I love it.

Adam spent five years living Paris - not living in, but living - from 1995 to 2000, and the book is a window onto his experiences there. Obviously, my own experiences are not same; I have neither a wife nor an infant son, nor am I a working adult, nor do I get to attend lectures just for fun. However, I sigh over or exult in most of his stories, as they parallel my own. (In a way, they must parallel my own; Americans who love Paris are, as Anne of Green Gables would say, kindred spirits.)

I'll try to avoid overquoting him in this blog, but I'm still in the early stages of infatuation, and so can't help myself.

"Paris - and this is the tricky thing - though it is always and indubitably itself, is also in its nature a difficult city to love for itself alone. What truly makes Paris beautiful is the intermingling of the monumental and the personal, the abstract and the footsore particular, it and you. A city of vast and impersonal set piece architecture, it is also a city of small and intricate, improvised experience." (p. 8)