A few weeks ago, I went to Paris with three of my fellow prestigious H.O.L.P. alumni. All four of us have a creative bent and to a certain degree were all looking to be inspired by the city (in addition to hoping to consume prodigious quantities of wine and cheese … mission accomplished on that front, at least). Paris is, after all, almost universally regarded as a Mecca of art, literature, and philosophy, and has been for centuries.
France has produced some of the most renowned artists and authors in history. Even trying to list only the most famous/generally recognizable of these isn’t a trivial task: Balzac, Barthes, Degas, Descartes, Foucault, Gauguin, Hugo, Matisse, Monet, Proust, Renoir, Rodin, Sartre, Verne, Voltaire, etc. And already I have left off dozens of important and prominent individuals. Even beyond the products of France itself are those from abroad who spent a considerable amount of their time living in France (especially in and around Paris) and credited that time with their artistic inspiration: people like Dali, Faulkner, Hemingway, Joyce, Kafka, Picasso, Steinbeck, Van Gogh, etc. Again, this is an incredibly abbreviated list.
There’s nothing about that which should be surprising or profound to you. The stature of Paris in the history of Western civilization is something we all pretty much take for granted (and while almost everyone reading this is the product of a Western culture, it is true that many Eastern cultures also hold a special reverence for France and Paris … though there are, admittedly, some dark shadows of colonialism/imperialism down that road … and you definitely don’t want to go down that road).
So, again, there’s no question that Paris has been a major source of inspiration for creative-minded individuals for an incredibly long time. Was I, or were my friends, so inspired by the city? Admittedly, I haven’t talked to my compatriots about this since our return, but I would guess that to some extent we all were. Erik (née Spike) spent a decent amount of time on the trip in his sketchbook, or taking photographs of things to refer back to later (like close-up of a hand in a painting at the Orsay). Both Nate (née Bonesaw) and Erik had conversations about the direction of the brushstrokes on this or that painting. And Mike (née Buddhaman) seemed to enjoy few things more than being able to closely inspect the craftsmanship on the furniture in one wing of the Orsay. As for myself, I’ve probably spent more time writing in the weeks since I’ve return than I had in the couple of months preceding.
That said, as I look back at the things I have written since then, almost none of it has anything to do with Paris itself. It has almost entirely been related to other concepts, ideas, or memories that had been on my mind before Paris, but only now I’ve actually dedicated the time to writing them down. And my dear pal Erik’s most poignant and breath-taking piece from Paris was inspired not by the City of Lights but by a plucky American lad:
And, not to compare us with any of them, but the more I considered the works of some of the famous Paris-associated writers and artists the more I realized how relatively little of their work was actually “about” Paris. Take Hemingway. The following works of his were written entirely or partially while he lived in Paris: In Our Time (which takes place primarily in Michigan), The Torrents of Spring (also in Michigan), Men Without Women (short stories that take place almost everywhere but France, with ones in Illinois, Italy, New York, and Spain), The Sun Also Rises (except for the very beginning in Paris, mostly takes place in Spain), and A Farewell to Arms (entirely in Italy). In fact, with the exception of a few chapters of The Sun Also Rises and a couple of short stories, the only work of Hemingway’s that takes place in Paris so far as I am aware is A Moveable Feast, which is not only non-fiction but was published posthumously. And, yet, Hemingway is (rightly) inseparable from Paris’ literary reputation.
I don’t particularly feel like carefully deconstructing other famous people’s oeuvre’s, but a similar pattern emerges with other famous Paris-based artists (Faulkner’s work takes place mostly in the southern United States, Joyce’s work in Ireland, Dali’s work in the realm of nightmares, etc.).
The inspirational nature of Paris really is a self-fulfilling prophecy. You are inspired by Paris in part because you go there expecting to be inspired by Paris, by the weight of its history. A history that is largely a series of coincidences: the geological coincidence of the way the continental plates converged during the Variscan orogeny to create a large sedimentary basin, which directed the flow of water to create stable river ecosystems around which plant and wildlife flourished, which attracted the Parisii to a pleasant location on the Seine that was just high enough to avoid being inundated by the seasonal floods, which attracted the Romans, and so on for hundreds of years until, by chance, some king that happened to live on that land happened to like art and spent money to acquire good art to adorn his palace.
Paris is, in and of itself, arbitrary. Sure, there’s a gigantic volume of amazing and beautiful artwork there to look at, and the age of the city lets you feel a vague connection with individuals who have lived there in the past. Like when I stopped to take a photograph of an interesting looking intersection, only for Erik to later discover a 19th century artist had the same idea:
It is important, though, not to confuse “arbitrary” with “meaningless.” Unless you are a complete nihilist (which must be exhausting), there is an important teleological difference between the two concepts. To borrow the language of semiotics, arbitrary simply denotes a concept whereby the relationship between signifier and signified is unmotivated. For example, the letters ‘c-a-t’ being used to refer to the animal is arbitrary, but that does not make the word ‘cat’ or the letters meaningless. Or, for another example, the fact that red, yellow, and green are used on traffic signals is arbitrary, but that does not make the signals or the lights themselves meaningless.
By that notion, Paris is arbitrary, but it certainly isn’t meaningless or unimportant: it is self-evident that people are aesthetically inspired by it. The ability to reflect on the vast network of art and literature and philosophy that has come out of Paris forces you to reflect on yourself, your productivity, and your habits. There is a reason that many of the prominent artists that I have mentioned in this article as being associated with Paris are also associated with artistic movements or styles that emphasize self-reflection and self-awareness to different degrees.
Whether or not you consider this BlogCat to be arbitrary or simply meaningless is for you to decide.