A book a day…
Monday, 23 April 2007 | 20:28
“This was the best of Paris. Dreams, like money, can be accounted for in simple terms of deficit and surplus. My hometown is a bureaucratic capital, the kind of place people leave… Such exoduses leave a reduced population of those individuals with an insatiable ecstasy for life and an inexplicable optimism for the future. What is left behind is a lingering sense of compromise. Just like nobody ever dreams of being a payroll clerk at a software company when they are a child, nobody dreams of living in my city.
In a place like Paris, the air is so thick with dreams they clog the streets and take all the good tables at the cafés. Poets and writers, models and designers, painters and sculptors, actors and directors, lovers and escapists, they flock to the City of Lights. That night at Polly’s, the table spilled over with the rapture of pilgrims who have found their temple. That night, among new friends and safe at Shakespeare and Company, I felt it too. Hope is a most beautiful drug.”
excerpt from Time Was Soft There: A Paris Sojourn at Shakespeare and Company, by Jeremy Mercer
