Sarah Wilson
I have found it helpful to see our current moment as liminal. What are we in? How can we grasp our times? We are between an old world, or an old “normal” that is dying, and a new world that’s yet to become. And yes, it feels like being in suspended anticipation. An incapable-of-being-named moment in time in which we find it impossible to see where we are heading and how things will go.
So, why did I uproot my life and move to Paris as I approached 50? In many ways, it was because the liminal times called for it. I was midway through my adult years and everything that had come before was increasingly feeling redundant. I was also part of the way through researching this book, with no idea where the mountains of reading and listening would end up. Oh, and I was entering perimenopause. I guess it felt like I needed to meet my life fully by moving into something else.
But why Paris? I’m asked this a lot. Because, I like to say, the chairs face outward.
The city of Paris is a very human place. More than two million people cram into an area that can be crossed on foot in two hours. Most locals live in tiny apartments (the average size is 46 square metres with no yard; my current home is 25 square metres) that force them onto the street to do their “humaning” in terraces and bars. Here they sit in a challenging intimacy, shoulder to shoulder, in wicker chairs that, yes, largely, face out to the world.
This set-up, I tell anyone who asks for more detail, infuses a curiosity in its people. The French watch the world from their wicker chairs, not, I find, in an up-and-down way but in more of a Latin way – by looking into your face, often wanting to catch your eye so they can get what you’re about. As a woman of a certain age, you do notice the difference.
Of course, the French have a global reputation for being aloof. But I think this is a misinterpretation of a proud adherence to very particular rituals – all geared, in my opinion, at maintaining civil, curious connection.
Where men back in Australia list their interests as “salty margaritas” and “taking it easy”, French men cite poets and seduction techniques.
When you don’t play by these rules or rituals, the French get affronted. When you walk into a boulangerie, for instance, it’s expected that you first volley off a few bonjours, ça vas and so on and in a singsong voice. Perhaps you inquire about today’s country loaf, ask after the baker’s mother. Only then should one launch into one’s order. To bark your croissant request without this dance of pleasantries will be met with a dismissive (aloof) reaction that can shatter some anglophiles.
The French also appear to argue a lot. They will go hard at a philosophical or political issue with you. Equally, they’ll challenge an everyday banality. I think this derives from a few factors: the robust 1970s-style schooling approach, their proud revolutionary history, and a distinctly anti-anti-intellectualism. But again, I find the root of it is invariably about curiously establishing a truth, gleaning your take, making sense of it all.
In my first week in Paris I met Anne, a woman in her early 30s who had reached out to me via Instagram, inviting me to coffee and offering to help my apartment hunt. When we ordered at the cafe, we asked for a non-disposable cup.
At first, we got hit with a non. There was an issue with the dishwasher and they were serving all coffee in single-use cups. But we explained we were committed single-use cup abolitionists and that we’d happily wait until the machine was fixed. Ah, bien sûr, said the barista and commended us for caring and asked about how else we went about our resistance (before hand-washing some mugs for us). Anne explained to me afterward that non does not mean no in France. It means “up for a robust [curious] discussion”.
As it turns out, I’m writing the very passage you’re reading sitting next to two mid-30s men in a terrace on the Left Bank’s Rue Mazarine. On chairs facing out to the street. One of them has just leant across and asked me in French, What are you writing, a book or something? He’s not mocking; he’s found an excuse to connect. Indeed I am, I say. We talk about the gist of the book and they ask if they can buy me an apéro.
I decline politely (it’s 3pm) and go back to my writing. But a few minutes later I notice one of the men is crying. I can just make out that it’s over unrequited love. His friend sits quietly and listens.
The two of them don’t touch their beers. After some time, the crying turns to a loud sobbing. The friend is nodding and holding the other’s hand. I can’t stand it; I start to cry, too. I reach across and grab both their hands. “I’m so sorry,” I say. Distressed guy looks up at me. He blows a snot bubble but ignores it and says in English, “We’re all just trying to work it out.”
We really are. And we’re all so tender. And I think increasingly we will find ourselves needing to nod and grab hands.
There were a few other reasons for packing my life into two suitcases and decamping to Paris. I was looking for love, and French people, in my experience, are up for dancing with it in all the ways – problematic, raw, playful. I go on dates with men who like to discuss their “theory of love” (one guy sat down and announced it straight up as the topic he was keen to cover during our evening together).
Where men back in Australia (but also in the US and the UK) list their interests on dating profiles as “salty margaritas” and “taking it easy”, French men cite poets and preferred seduction techniques.
The women I meet here are equally penetrating with their curiosity and engagement and send me mixtape playlists and drill me with questions about what makes my life meaningful over brunch. I also like the vestiges of socialism that seep into everyday life, even the constant manifestations, as the French call protests. And, oddly, I’m drawn to their almost nihilistic proclivity for the present (I struggle to find another explanation for their culture-wide embrace of smoking, wine and long lunches).
I could well be presenting a rose-coloured and grossly generalised depiction here. But since first landing in France at 18, when I was mugged on arrival and forced to live on the streets of Paris for four weeks while I tried to sort out a new passport and travellers cheques, I’ve found it conducive to my particular ache to make sense of it all, to be curious, to engage and to wrestle with competing truths.
Most Sunday evenings here in Paris, the well-known atheist and philosopher A.C. Grayling and I meet for dinner. A.C. had moved to Paris for reasons not dissimilar to my own. We had met at a writers’ festival in Australia and agreed to do just this one day – sit at a Parisian terrace facing out to the world, him drinking chablis, me Côtes du Rhône, making sense of the world.
A.C. has the mind of someone whose brain evolved to remember details in the absence of search engines. He cites historical moments and pithy quotes while I contribute pop-cultural nuances. We sit shoulder to shoulder and he tells me things like, “Sarah, did you know René Descartes’s body was buried over there?” pointing to the Saint-Germain-des-Prés abbey across the square. “His skull, however, is buried at the Musée de l’Homme down the road.” He pauses for me to get it. We laugh. The guy who forever separated our minds from our bodies suffered a final confirmation.
Most weeks we meet at Les Deux Magots, the cafe where the philosophers of the 1920s and 30s wrote and fell out with each other, also while sitting in chairs that faced outward. As it happens, this period between the two World Wars – les années folles (the crazy years) – saw many writers and thinkers, a lot of them women, decamp to Paris. James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Albert Camus, Hannah Arendt, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Josephine Baker, Ernest Hemingway and Martha Gellhorn all fled, or flocked, here.
It was also a supremely liminal time.
The Spanish flu and World War I had wiped out 100 million people globally, while another World War and a depression (as well as nuclear threat) loomed. It was a time not too dissimilar to our own. Much of the world was emerging from pandemic lockdowns that had sent young people into a spin. It had witnessed unfathomable human-caused destruction, which was then met with economic and ideological flux. The economy roared, then crashed. And from such chaos, a bewildered humanity tried to make sense of it all.
The first wave of feminism hit its peak and women were granted the vote in various parts of the world. Fascism and communism took hold. And so did existentialism.
Intellectuals, dictators and spiritualists all scrambled to answer a question that burned: how do we live now? How do we live our lives when none of the old rules apply?
We ask the same questions today. How do we live now in a world that’s wobbled off its axis?
Edited extract from I Eat the Stars (Penguin Random House) by Sarah Wilson, out now.
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