| Heya <<First Name>>,
I don’t quite know what to say to people who ask me why I’m living in Paris for the next three months.
Maybe because I don’t know the answer myself.
Or, rather, my head doesn’t know but my heart does. (Meanwhile, my head is still waiting for the soundbite explanation. It may take decades to get here and, really, who’s got time to wait?)
So for now, my rough-draft answer is tautological: “Because it’s Paris.”
The real answer?
Maybe it’s because the door of my micro-apartment has a knob in the center. Every time I go down the worn swayback stairs and walk out of the porte cochère into the street, everything feels fresh. (In large part because I’m a bumbling fool new to both the language and the city.)
Maybe it’s because I like walking these streets with all their odd facades and wabi-sabi cobbles.
Maybe it’s because it’s good to be in a city that feels like a giant living room.
Maybe it’s because of cheese.
Maybe it’s because of serendipities.
Serendipities. Okay, I was looking for a coffee shop the other day to get some work done. The coffee shop was no longer there, but I found this children’s bookstore instead.
Bookstores are flames. I’m a moth. I went in to have a browse.
I found a glorious book called “Les Goûts Extraordinaires de Monsieur Bear,” which is all about delicious things to taste.
Plus, the book comes with an attached baguette bookmark. Yum.
The shopkeeper asked me if I wanted it gift-wrapped and I said, “Non, c’est pour moi.” She laughed and said something I didn’t understand. I nodded and laughed anyway.
Maybe it’s because I want to be uncomfortable. To keep growing and learning, and practicing resilience. So far, I’ve gotten stuck in a train station, tried to dry my clothes in a washer, tried to go down an up escalator (in my defense, the escalators here stop when no one is using them), and purchased left-handed scissors even though I’m not a left-handed scissorer.
Maybe it’s because I want to wallow in cliche. I am SO reading “A Moveable Feast” right now.
Maybe it’s because of Mary Oliver. In her poem “The Summer Day,” she asks what it is I plan to do with my one wild and precious life. I didn’t feel I could dodge the question any more. Not after a year when I lost people I love and time feels precious.
Maybe it’s because I want to think about reading with kids, and its role in the world. It’s something I find easier now that I’m outside the States. My brain is quieter. I’m on my phone less. I’m not watching TV. I’m even forgetting it’s NFL playoff time. (Whoa!) I’m noticing more. Noticing good things, like the tastes Monsieur Bear talks about. Noticing alarming things, like a flurry of articles recently about the growing threat of authoritarianism … even at home.
What struck me as I read some of those articles was how important language, empathy, writing, and critical thinking are in pushing back the forces that would benight us.
To take just one example, Yale history professor Timothy Snyder writes about the importance of being alert to how certain words are used (and misused). “Be kind to our language. Avoid pronouncing the phrases everyone else does. Think up your own way of speaking, even if only to convey that thing you think everyone is saying.”
Another serendipity. I took a stroll (never has the word “stroll” felt so germane) over to the English-language used bookstore in the Latin Quarter — the San Francisco Books Co.
My pretext for the visit was to find a particular book. When I didn’t find it, I consoled myself with two books I hadn’t been looking for.
One, “Angels and Ages” is by New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik. It starts by noting a delightful chunk of trivia: Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin were both born on Feb. 12, 1809. Gopnik then springboards into a consideration of the men as symbols, “one representing liberal democracy, the other the human sciences.”
Central to their influence, he says, was the way they used language. “They matter,” Gopnik says, “because they wrote so well. … Good writing is mostly good seeing and good thinking, too.”
And of course they were both readers. Lincoln especially so. Indeed, “without ‘formal’ training — with nothing but a lot of reading — Lincoln became a practicing lawyer before he was thirty and soon one of the most admired men in his state.”
Hmm …
Language. Vocabulary. Empathy. Critical thinking. Writing. …
Reading to children and with children helps them develop all those skills. And more. Could reading with kids be a critical component of democracy?
The scholar Maryanne Wolf thinks so.
In her wonderful, dense book “Reader Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World,” she writes:
The great, insufficiently discussed danger to a democracy stems not from the expression of different views but from the failure to ensure that all citizens are educated to use their full intellectual powers in forming those views. The vacuum that occurs when this is not realized leads ineluctably to a vulnerability to demagoguery, where falsely raised hopes and falsely raised fears trump reason and the capacity for reflective thinking recedes, along with its influence on rational, empathic decision making. …
My gloss on all this is that a grownup who reads to a child is basically a freedom fighter.
Which is pretty cool.
By the way, I was drawn to the Gopnik book because he wrote a collection of essays I loved called “Paris to the Moon.” I read it long ago, before my kids were launched into college and while I was comfortably settled in my Seattle life and home and career.
If you had asked me at the time why I was reading that particular book, I would not have known what to say.
I like to think I’d have given “Because it’s Paris” as my rough-draft answer.
But now, some 20 years later, I know the real answer.
Oh my, what seeds books plant in us.
Happy reading,
Jeff and Bob …
… who believe that reading with kids can change the world for the better. |
