Alone Time Read online

  Baudelaire’s subject was Constantin Guys, the illustrator and journalist whose great pleasure was to wander the city’s sidewalks. His “thinking path,” unlike Darwin’s, was paved and public, though no less a source of inspiration. It was Baudelaire’s description of Guys’s walks that established the archetype and fantasy of the flâneur: the solitary stroller, following his curiosity with no particular destination in mind, nowhere to be but in the here and now.

  More than 150 years later, I went in search of that fantasy.

  * * *

  Months before I arrived at the little hotel with its red geraniums, I was in Paris on an assignment for the Travel section of the New York Times. I had five days and a headline: “Solo in Paris.” The story was up to me.

  To find it, I went walking. Each morning I left my hotel in the 9th arrondissement, just east of the apartment where Proust wrote much of Remembrance of Things Past, and didn’t return until I had gone some twenty miles in whichever direction whim and croissants (and olive fougasse and pistachio financiers) took me.

  It was April, and like any tourist I saw monuments and statues, naked nymphs, and gods among the roses. But alone, with no one at my side, I was also able to see le merveilleux quotidien, “the marvelous in everyday life”: a golden retriever gazing at a café chalkboard in Montmartre, as if reading the daily specials; boxes of pâtes de fruits arranged in grids like Gerhard Richter’s color charts. The city had my full attention; I was attuned to the faint whir of bicycle wheels and the scent of peaches at the street market.

  Although I was traveling without friends or family, each day brought passing companions: bakers, maître d’s, museum greeters, shopkeepers, fellow travelers. The hours were unhurried and entirely mine, like the “limitless solitude” the poet Rilke described in a letter to a friend; “this taking each day like a life-time, this being-with-everything.”

  Only, it wasn’t a lifetime—it was five days. On the last morning, I slipped through a gate on rue de Rivoli into the Tuileries. Sprinklers flung water into the air. A man with a wheelbarrow bent over a bed of long-stemmed tulips. John Russell, the British art critic, once wrote that the rue de Rivoli seemed to say to mankind, “This is what life can be . . . and now it’s up to you to live it.” That’s what those days in Paris said to me. I wondered when, or if, I’d see the tulips again.

  On assignment, I would play detective; partake of everything, get up early, record the details, do the things that felt strange and uncomfortable. But the assignment was over. Months passed and back in New York, the days grew shorter. Yet my head was still in Paris. It wasn’t a matter of missing cream confections flirting in the windows of boulangeries. I missed who I was in Paris—the other me, Stéphanie with the accent on the “e”: curious, improvisational, open to serendipity.

  Finally, I took a long weekend to think about why I couldn’t let go of that particular assignment, why alone in Paris time seemed to be on my side; why my senses pricked up; why I was able to delight in the smallest of things and yet failed to see and feel with such intensity at home. Friends loaned me their empty house near a bay on Long Island where on an autumn afternoon I stepped off a bus with a week’s worth of reading and Chinese takeout. Without car or television, I spent days orbiting between a bench on the front porch and an oversize pink wing chair at the head of the dining room table, like the one at the Mad Hatter’s tea party in the 1951 Disney film, eating vegetable lo mein and reading about different experiences of solitude. I plumbed newspaper archives and Gutenberg.org. I ordered used and out-of-print books. I wanted to know what scientists, writers, artists, musicians, and scholars thought about alone time, how they used it, why it mattered. Sometimes I walked a dead-end street to the bay. Other times I would lie on the wood floor in a patch of sun, staring at the ceiling, trying to deconstruct those solitary hours in Paris. There was something there; some way of living that I’d failed to fully grasp, let alone carry with me to my own city.

  Yet the best way to understand the enchanted solitude I experienced in Paris wasn’t to lie around thinking about it. It was to go back. Alone, of course.

  If the Times assignment had been my introduction to the city, I would have dismissed my time there as just another spell cast on a sentimental American. But I’d been in Paris before. At the house by the bay I’d come to suspect it was the way in which I used alone time on the job, not just the beauty and splendor of the city, that made the days rich and meaningful. If I could figure out what I’d done differently on that trip, and why it felt so right so many months later, perhaps I could adopt similar practices—and evoke similar feelings—in my own backyard.

  Back in New York I went online and booked a room—a photo of a little hotel with window boxes of red geraniums caught my eye—and planned my return to Paris.

  Being in an unfamiliar place can lead to personal change, renewal, and discoveries. Anthony Storr said it’s why many people find it easier to give up smoking when on vacation: It disrupts routine and day-to-day environmental cues that may be limiting or flat-out unhealthy. Indeed, my aim wasn’t to master Paris. It was to master myself: to learn how a little alone time can change your life—in any city.

  This book is the story of what I learned in Paris and in other places where I decided to spend time alone. I chose to explore cities, not the countryside, because I live in one; because in cities we can enjoy both privacy and society; because as Baudelaire wrote, “for the perfect flâneur, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude.”

  At the house on the bay I winnowed the world to four cities—Paris, Istanbul, Florence, New York—one for each week of vacation I had in a year. (I would later revisit certain cities, and those moments appear in these pages as well.) I included New York because it’s home; because I wanted to figure out how to recapture the awe of the outsider in a place so familiar to me that it had become invisible.

  The other destinations beckoned for different reasons. I was taken with the architecture of Istanbul. I liked the thought of strolling Florence when the trees turn as yellow as the farmhouses on the hillsides. Yet all of the cities share certain qualities that spoke to me as a solo traveler. All have waterfronts, and none require a car. The idea of the flâneur may have originated in Paris, yet it was in Florence that Henry James declared himself a “charmed flâneur” in Italian Hours. It’s alone on the back streets of Istanbul that Orhan Pamuk’s characters seek solace and intrigue. It’s on the sidewalks of New York that Walt Whitman sings of America. A number of cities, like Tokyo and Seoul, seemed impossible to omit, but there was the practical matter of my job, and with only a week at most to spare in each place, I ruled out locations that required too much flight time.

  What follows are impressions of four journeys; a love letter to loners, to witches and shamans, to those who cherish their friends, spouses, and partners yet also want alone time to think, create, have an adventure, learn a skill, or solve a problem. I hope something in these pages helps you to find your “thinking path”; to discover what you want from your own solitary moments.

  “When do you pause?” wrote Julia Child’s husband, Paul, in the 1950s when the Childs were living in Paris. “When do you paint or pant? When write family, loll on moss, hear Mozart and watch the glitter of the sea?”

  When you’re alone.

  PART I

  Spring

  Paris

  FOOD

  Café et Pluie ~ Coffee and Rain

  The Science of Savoring

  The word degustation means what it says: not “consumption of” but “tasting,” “savoring” . . . You are in the country of the art of good food, and this degustation is very like what you do in an art gallery, unless your soul is lost.

  —Eleanor Clark, The Oysters of Locmariaquer

  Rue de la Parcheminerie runs between a river and a hill. Walk three minutes north and you’ll be at
the Seine; walk south and you’ll find the Sorbonne. Part of the street is a graffitied pedestrian alley. The rest is a one-way passage beside a church with long-necked gargoyles and one of the oldest bells in Paris. In the middle of the street sits the little hotel with red geraniums, the Hôtel Parc Saint Séverin. There are twenty-seven rooms. One was mine.

  Room 61 had all the desiderata for solitary pursuits: one bed, one slender wood writing desk, one bergère chair with a green velvety seat that sagged just so. In the closet: a small stack of books about France (bridges, the Louvre, Napoleon) and a few issues of Madame Figaro and Vogue Paris. There was scant floor space, though it didn’t matter once the drapes were pulled back and the Roman shades tied up: Sunlight streamed through French doors and casement windows that opened to the rooftops of the Latin Quarter.

  From the balcony you could see straight down rue Boutebrie to the Musée de Cluny and the market on boulevard Saint-Germain that sold sausage, foie gras, navettes from Marseilles, and biscuits from Provence. You could see over mansard roofs, weathercocks, and orange chimney pots to the dome of the Panthéon. To the east was a rose window of Notre-Dame; to the west, the tip of the Eiffel Tower.

  In the morning, a man in boxers appeared on a nearby balcony to smoke and water his plants. In the afternoon, the Abbey Bookshop put wine crates of books on tables and stools in the street. In the evening, silverware clinked and voices floated up from tables that materialized outside the fondue joint next door.

  One morning soon after I arrived, after the tables had been put away and the streets where students had walked arm in arm in the dark were empty again, I woke up to chirping and the faint shouting of children. I cracked the balcony doors and in came the distant swish of passing cars; the air cool and damp on my bare feet. Boys were kicking a ball around the churchyard. Bells chimed.

  Time to begin. I pulled on jeans, a T-shirt, and my old leather jacket; tucked an umbrella in my bag; slid a finger through the tasseled keychain; and left room 61. At the end of the wallpapered hall I circled down six flights of corkscrew stairs to the lobby, past the pale blue sitting room with the morning pastry baskets, and handed the key to the woman at the desk, sprinkling in my wake the few French words I knew—Bonjour, madame! Merci!—as I breezed out the door onto rue de la Parcheminerie.

  Parcheminerie takes its name from the parchment merchants who worked there in the Middle Ages, though one of dozens of volumes of the nineteenth-century series Promenades dans toutes les rues de Paris (“Walks in all the streets of Paris”) says Parcheminerie was at one point known as rue des Écrivains, street of writers.

  The philosopher and writer Denis Diderot had an apartment there in the 1700s. The photographer Eugène Atget began hanging around in the 1800s, chronicling the demolition of Parcheminerie’s shops as medieval Paris continued to be reshaped into Napoleon III’s vision of modernity. Historical photos and drawings reveal that the entire street once looked to be as narrow as the graffitied alley, with houses and shops selling wine and liquor. One of the few things to have survived is the old church.

  A flamboyant Gothic cathedral with gargoyles and stained glass, Saint Séverin dates to at least the thirteenth century. A sign indicates that it’s dedicated to a Saint Séverin who founded an abbey in Switzerland, though it also acknowledges another Séverin—a sixth-century hermit known as Séverin solitaire, said to have lived nearby. According to legend he was buried on the grounds, next to my little hotel. An auspicious sign.

  Parcheminerie had a certain mystery, thanks to the old church and the sleepy pedestrian alley with its black street lamps and curiosities in the windows. Across the street, in a Louis XV house, was the Abbey Bookshop. Beyond its glass door, stepstools and side tables were piled upside down, concealing a labyrinth of books stacked as tightly as bones in the catacombs.

  A torn copy of a page from Paris Buildings and Monuments by a Parisian architect taped to a sidelight said the parchment merchants had left by the late-fifteenth century. Next door, seemingly disparate artifacts were propped in a window in front of closed drapes—a straw hat, a lavender plant, an illustration of an electric-blue Buddha with the words “le guérisseur” (the healer)—like clues to a mystery. I photographed them as if they had some meaning that would later be revealed, then aimed my iPhone at the hotel. The photo caught my reflection in the dark glass of the door, my phone obscuring my face like the floating green apple in Magritte’s The Son of Man.

  I crossed onto rue Boutebrie, past the row of trees and the motorcycles parked beneath them, turned left at the corner brasserie, out of sight of the little hotel—and became anonymous.

  Alone, there’s no need for an itinerary. Walk, and the day arranges itself.

  The world’s first sidewalks appeared around 2000 B.C. in what is now Turkey. But it was in Paris—where there are at least as many styles of wandering (flânerie, dérive, errance) as there are the customary cheek kisses (la bise)—that the sidewalk became an avenue for pleasure. No need to follow the 1920s-style red METRO sign underground, or climb into the taxi with “Parisien” on its rooftop light. From the sidewalk, the best of the city can be had for free. There are flowering courtyards hidden behind painted doors. There’s a giant chocolate gorilla in the window of Patrick Roger, a cow on the awning of the fromager La Fermette, a red poodle in the window at Hermès. Follow the sidewalk and you may find a Ferris wheel or, on an overcast spring morning, loaves of fat, round bread marked with a “P” in a small brick storefront on rue du Cherche-Midi. On the windows in fanciful script was the family name: Poilâne. I went in.

  Poilâne bakes heavy loaves of sourdough bread with sea salt from the marshes of Guérande, a medieval town on the west coast of France. Salvador Dalí was a customer (and the rare recipient of Poilâne’s bread sculptures). Julia Child brought a film crew there to shoot a lesson in bread making. Yet any passerby can stop in for a loaf, even just a few slices. A saleswoman cut three for me, each as long as my forearm. I pointed at an apple tart and at the crisp, thin sugar cookies known as punitions (punishments), sold in a clear bag pinched in the middle, like goldfish at a street market.

  I had made it halfway up rue du Cherche-Midi with $17 worth of pastries in a paper sack when the morning mist, which an American in Paris can easily write off as poetic, became rain. The wet bag began to rip. My umbrella busted a rib, and what remained of it was soon flopping around my head like a sunhat.

  I walked a few blocks, hunting for some undiscovered coffee shop, before bowing to the inevitable and taking refuge from the rain under the familiar green-and-white umbrellas of Les Deux Magots.

  It was a fast storm, blowing in and letting up within minutes, and so from a sidewalk table amid the umbrellas I ordered a café crème and a croque provençal: open-faced slices of toast topped with tomatoes, ham, and a browned dome of grilled cheese.

  Les Deux Magots is old Paris. It’s not the Paris of South Pigalle or the Haut-Marais, where people line up for empanadas and ice cream at Clasico Argentino, and Glow on the Go! sells beauty products alongside nitro cold-brew coffee and gluten-free avocado toast. The word “magot,” as in Les Deux Magots, is also old. It refers to a Chinese- or Japanese-style figurine, not an insect, and there are two in the café, the name of which is taken from the novelty shop that once occupied Les Deux’s original location on rue de Buci. The waiter brought over a couple of pitchers—one dark, one light—and zipped away, leaving me alone with my coffee.

  The pleasures of mealtime have long involved company. The word “companion” comes from the Old French, compaignon, literally “one who breaks bread with another.” Indeed, French gastronomy is included on UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity List (along with the tango, falconry, and Chinese shadow puppetry), where it’s described as a social practice that “emphasizes togetherness.”

  To share a meal is to undoubtedly experience one of life’s great joys. Yet this doesn’t mean that there can’t be
some kind of connection when we eat alone, be it with ourselves, what’s around us, or a higher power. UNESCO states that French gastronomy emphasizes “the pleasure of taste,” and that some of the essential elements involve utilizing local products, pairing food with wine, and taking the time to smell and taste items at the table. Alone, we can plumb local markets and examine their wares closely. We can breathe in and relish the flavors in a sauce, or the coolness of a pitcher of cream. We don’t necessarily take time to do these things in the presence of company, particularly during lively conversation. A solo meal is an opportunity to go slow; to savor.

  “Savoring” sounds like it ought to involve an Adirondack chair and a glass (or bottle) of wine. But then one morning on rue des Saints-Pères I watched a man in a suit barrel along the sidewalk, stop abruptly outside a flower shop, stick his nose in a potted pink rose, and inhale before he resumed speeding in my direction. What exactly does it mean to savor? Is it relaxing with a drink? An impromptu pause to enjoy the scent of a flower? And does it just happen, like rain showers and moonrises? Or are there ways to invite it in?

  In the last decade, the science of well-being has exploded. Prescriptions for happiness abound, and there’s no shortage of studies to refer to. (It’s worth noting that many studies demonstrate that while a particular behavior or action may be associated with happiness, the behavior may or may not be the cause of that happiness.) Certain strategies, like smiling more, sound like reasonable, if obvious, ideas. Other tactics may work for some personality types, though there is no universal prescription. There are, however, a number of practices widely believed by social scientists to help us flourish.

  Savoring is one of them. In the 1980s, Fred B. Bryant and Joseph Veroff felt that there was something missing from existing dimensions of psychological well-being, like happiness and satisfaction. They reasoned that there should be another factor—one that had to do with controlling your own positive experiences. Bryant’s empirical research involving engagement and enjoyment ultimately led him to the concept of savoring. In Savoring: A New Model of Positive Experience, the scholars define it as “a search for the delectable, delicious, almost gustatory delights of the moment.” It describes the process of enjoyment: how a person manages or “attends to” not just a gustatory delight, but any kind of positive experience.