The Everyday
Going Through Old Notebooks Part 21: On a Paris evening in winter.
Walking back from the Jardin du Palais-Royal, the sky was so beautiful, that heavy violet-gray color, pressing down against the slate roofs of the buildings, the gold-splashed walls, the glowing windows, the Paris evening coming on. I despaired a little then, feeling how useless it is to try to describe these moments in words. What can one say except that the sky was this lovely, soft, heavy gray-violet over the buildings in the dusk, and that snow flurries were coming down, the flakes melting before they even touched anything, not even collecting on your sleeve?
It felt in that moment, in the face of such immense, quotidian beauty, that the entire enterprise was pointless. That I had nowhere near the skill to accomplish it. What business did I have, to write anything, if I could not paint for anyone that moment on the street in the light snow as evening fell?
I should have tried harder to become a painter, I thought, who might have had a chance of capturing the way the bare trees looked in the gardens with the windows behind them, those purples and grays and oranges. Maybe only Pissarro could have done that. Pissarro, or Monet, or Caillebotte. It was a Pissarro kind of evening. The crosshatched branches, and the crosshatched light, and all the colors coming through in layers.
Maybe it’s not too late, I thought. Maybe I can still learn how to say this thing, which is the only thing worth saying—at least to me, so much of the time—about how this beauty rises up out of the everyday and makes everything, even the unbearable, seem almost worth it.
This post was adapted from a notebook entry written in 2023.
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The only thing worth saying, indeed, and you said it for us.
I've known those Paris nights, the moon above the Seine sending ripples dancing as if they were ballerinas in tutus. You write it beautifully, and your mention of Caillebotte made me think of one of my favorite paintings. Thank you.