Alone Time Read online

  It’s more than passively taking pleasure in something, Bryant, a professor of psychology at Loyola University Chicago, explains. Savoring is actively aiming for the most joy to be found in a moment. Consider how Apollonia Poilâne, owner of Poilâne and a granddaughter of its founder, describes her favorite spot, the bakehouse—“a simple and quiet place where the heat of the oven envelops you”—and how she engages the moment: “I like to see and perform the baking gestures, it’s like a coordinated ballet, and to smell the yeast, touch the kneaded dough . . . One uses the five senses, which perhaps explains the fulfilling feeling one has after having finished baking the batch.” In a video of her father making bread in the basement of the shop on rue du Cherche-Midi, he marvels at the beauty of a cracked egg in a circle of flour, then begins tenderly mixing ingredients with one hand, feeling the texture of the butter with the tips of his fingers.

  Finding joy in the moment is what Julia Child did when she sat down to her first meal in France—the meal that ignited a passion, a career, and a revolution in American cooking. “I closed my eyes and inhaled the rising perfume,” she said of sitting before a platter of sole meunière. “Then I lifted a forkful of fish to my mouth, took a bite, and chewed slowly.” It tasted of browned butter and the ocean.

  This is what the writer Eleanor Clark is getting at when she describes degustation as not merely about satisfying hunger, but as an activity that involves imagination, taking our time and paying attention—even indulging in a moment of silence before that first bite or sip. Indeed, the French philosopher Jean-Paul Aron tells us that in the nineteenth century the beginning of a meal was eaten in silence, only to be pierced “by the scarcely audible sound of a smile escaping from impatient lips, or the last sighs exhaled by sizzling meats snatched suddenly from the oven.”

  For a concrete example, consider Tokaido, a French board game. In it, players must travel Japan’s ancient Tokaido road along the coast to Kyoto from Tokyo (known as Edo in the period in which the game is set), taking in vistas of mountains, seas, and rice paddies; tasting local specialties; soaking in hot springs; donating coins to temples; and meeting locals. The object of the game, unlike most, is not to get to the end of the road first or amass the most money. It’s to have the richest experience possible.

  Doing so doesn’t come naturally to everyone, particularly when eating, and particularly when what we’re eating is from, say, a food plaza off a thruway, not a forkful of sole meunière. But savoring can be learned, and there’s good reason to try. People who become skilled at “capturing the joy of the present moment,” as the psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky at the University of California, Riverside, has written, are also “less likely to experience depression, stress, guilt and shame.”

  There isn’t just one way to go about this. There are many savoring techniques that can be used at any time, in private or in public, alone or with others. But in general, they all have one requirement: that we focus our attention on the present experience. That may sound daunting, but there are specific things we can do to achieve this; everyday actions that are surprisingly simple, quick, and elegant yet can make a big difference in the way we experience the world.

  On that spring morning at Les Deux, as people were darting and disappearing around the church of Saint-Germain-des-Prés like billiard balls knocked into motion, carrying tote bags, pushing strollers, heading off to work and school over the wet, gray pavers, into the mouth of the Métro, I slipped a finger through the handle of my coffee cup and eased back in my rattan chair.

  To focus on the present moment, Bryant explained, it helps to refrain from certain habits, like multitasking, worrying, latching on to what’s wrong or negative, and ruminating about the past or future. Easier said than done. Most of us spend nearly 47 percent of our waking hours each day thinking about something other than what we’re doing, according to research by Matthew A. Killingsworth, a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health and Society scholar, and Harvard psychologist Daniel T. Gilbert. That matters, the researchers say, because one of the strongest predictors of happiness is whether or not your attention is focused where you are in the present. “People are substantially less happy when their minds are wandering than when they’re not,” Killingsworth told a crowd at a TEDxCambridge conference. That’s proven to be true, he said, even when our minds wander to things that bring us pleasure, like sex.

  Happily, even us mind-wanderers, multitaskers, and ruminators can master ways to savor. One method, particularly useful for travelers, involves what Bryant calls “temporal awareness”: reminding ourselves that the moment won’t last, that soon the meal will be gone or the trip will end. It may seem counterintuitive, but awareness that something is fleeting tends to increase our enjoyment of it, for as Bryant explained, when time gets scarce, it heightens motivation. It’s the truth behind the maxim about only knowing what you’ve got when it’s gone. And one trick to preventing that from happening, Bryant said, is to treat the moment we’re in as if it’s the last of a lifetime.

  To do that, he suggests identifying the sources of joy in the moment by asking ourselves questions like What is it that is going to be gone? What is the joy in it; the sources of the positive feeling?

  Alone at a sidewalk table in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, just after a June rain, I listen to the low hum of French being spoken around me, breathe in the scent of coffee, feel the breeze across my cheek, in my hair, carrying away the last of the storm; all the things I’ll miss when I’m back home.

  Like temporal awareness, many savoring techniques can be tried anywhere. One, called “sensory-perceptual sharpening,” involves heightening an experience by focusing on just one of your senses—like closing your eyes to fully appreciate the fragrance of a warm baguette, or to better hear the wind rustle the trees.

  A wonderful savoring strategy for the start of a trip is what Bryant calls “self-congratulation”: reminding yourself of how long you’ve waited for the moment to happen (you’re finally taking that solo vacation!) or why you deserve to be experiencing it (you spent a year saving up for a plane ticket). This “recalled anticipation,” Bryant said, is the joy of appreciating an experience that you had been looking forward to. It’s how I felt after handing the key to room 61 to the woman at the desk and walking out of the hotel onto an empty street, the whole of Paris waiting.

  Absorbing details and taking mental photographs of a moment is another way to savor it—a process Bryant calls “memory building.” While this mental snapshot captures a visual record—the green-and-white umbrellas of Les Deux Magots, the steeple of the Romanesque church—it’s not meant to be only a panoramic. The aim should be to build into your mental photograph the multisensory feeling of the moment as well: the air redolent with warm rain, the tinkling of porcelain cups being lifted and returned to saucers, the soft mercis and au revoirs. This way, when you mentally summon an experience, you’ll rekindle more than images.

  Yet while savoring is fundamentally about the present moment, skilled savorers know how to play across time, choosing particular moments by dipping into the past or even the future. Now and then they may decide to savor through anticipation, recalled anticipation, or by reminiscing (more on that later).

  To help embed mental snapshots in his memory, Bryant often begins reminiscing about a trip as soon as possible, sometimes when he’s in an airplane seat on the way home. He may start by thinking back to the day before he even left, to packing and setting the alarm. His mind searches for the details: the arrival of the taxi and the song the driver was playing on the radio; those feelings of excitement about what was to come. He tries to relive the trip almost in real time; so much so that he doesn’t necessarily get through the whole thing by the time the plane lands.

  There is a difference, though, between savoring a moment and clinging to it. There’s no scientific upside to clinging, to mourning the last days of a great vacation. Acceptance of this requires practice, but to be a great
traveler, to be a good student of life, as Bryant put it, you have to learn to let go. “One of the laws of travel,” he said, “one of the laws of the kingdom, is it must end.”

  Learning to savor many experiences in many different ways is important, Bryant said, because the diversity of savoring strategies in our repertoires is predictive of how much we enjoy the moment—which could explain why my time during the Paris assignment months earlier was so poignant.

  It was a happy accident that the things I did in service of that assignment also turned out to be savoring strategies. I was living in the moment, memory building, and using sensory perceptual sharpening, because I knew I’d be writing about the experience later. I wasn’t doing the usual worrying because I was away from home and my responsibilities there. I was acutely aware that every moment was fleeting, that I had only one chance to get the story. And I began reminiscing almost as soon as I left for home because I had a deadline. All of these parameters inadvertently allowed me to savor my experience in ways I simply didn’t when I was off-duty.

  Long after that trip, I learned that Bryant and Veroff had likened the act of savoring to “taking the perspective of an inquiring journalist toward one’s own pleasurable experiences.” Turns out, there are advantages to bringing a reporter’s habits to daily life.

  At the sidewalk tables outside Les Deux, patrons sit across from the church of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, which has existed, at least in part, for a thousand years. Rilke likened the cathedrals in the midst of Paris to a sea or a forest. “They are solitude and stillness,” he wrote in a letter to his wife in 1902. “They are the future as they are the past.”

  People come to Les Deux Magots and its neighbor Café de Flore not necessarily for what the cafés offer today, but for what they used to be: asylums of the great thinkers and artists who worked, socialized, and argued there, including Hemingway, Picasso, Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Camus, James Baldwin, and Richard Wright. The coffee may be overpriced, but it’s the price of history. At times it was grim: Sartre and de Beauvoir’s café days were marked by a scarcity of food, and the horrors of the German occupation. But we don’t often think about that while we drink our coffee. We come because Hemingway and Sartre came, because we feel there is something of their spirit there, something that might rub off, something that speaks to who we want to be.

  Outside Les Deux, silver kegs were being delivered to the curb along with crates of Perrier and bottles of Badoit. Soon the bottles would be emptied. My chair would be filled by another diner, who knows how many more times that day, or that season. I finished the last of my croque provençal, grateful for my time at the table, for the church, for the coffee, for the morning rain that brought me there.

  * * *

  When I returned to room 61 that afternoon, dark clouds were again gathering. Beyond the balcony, over the dome of the Panthéon, they were merging into a sinister band, as purple as the inside of a clam shell.

  I reached into the Poilâne bag and tried a couple of punishment cookies as rain began to plop and splash in through the windows, which I had opened wide in anticipation. The streets below were empty; people had already sought shelter when—swoosh!

  Sitting in that room with the windows open during a rainstorm was like being in a treehouse with a wool blanket. I felt a childish kind of excitement; a longing for thunder. Alone, I could listen to the rain come down, listen to it in a way you can’t when someone else is around, with bodily stillness. It fell hard, soaking the streets, scattering the pigeons.

  Sometimes during my stay I ate outside on the balcony with the birds that flew in arcs from the church to the chamfered building across the way. There’s no shame in occasionally eating in. The food writer M.F.K. Fisher once lounged around her hotel room in Avignon in her pajamas, drinking Champagne. James Beard ordered a Christmas-morning breakfast of buttermilk pancakes with maple syrup, bacon, a bowl of raspberries with sugar and thick cream, and a pot of tea to his hotel room. Breakfast is my favorite meal to take alone; it’s just me and the dawn chorus, hot coffee, and a warm croissant.

  Around the corner from the hotel, at Marché Maubert, a long-running market in a parking lot, I could pick up fruit. Or buy a glass jar of yogurt with chunks of cherries from the Loire Valley at Laurent Dubois, the fromager, where rounds of cheese in paper cupcake liners are decorated like cookies with dark, sticky hearts of fig and nuts. A stop at Eric Kayser on rue Monge for the croissant was essential. I would hurry back to the Hôtel Parc Saint Séverin, butter-stained bag in hand, to fill a glass with water from the bathroom sink and take the Vogues from the closet to the table on the balcony in time for the morning church bells.

  Unfailingly, the smoking man would appear in his boxers. In a way, I was more a part of rue de la Parcheminerie on the balcony than on the street. Even if no one on the block was ready for the day or cared to venture out, we could all see one another in our various states of disarray; half-dressed, talking on phones, brushing aside curtains, leaning out dormer windows to see what was happening below. We drank in the quartier from our private places.

  The rain fell harder and louder, leaving the zinc roofs glistening. Then a burst of bright white light broke through the clouds, lit up the pale apartment buildings, and made the petals of the red ivy geraniums transparent: an honest-to-goodness sun shower. Little by little, the rain began to hush, slow, become gentler still until—silence.

  I cracked the French doors and stepped barefoot onto the soaked wood. A bird flapped its wings. A man sneezed.

  A boy rode by on the back wheel of his bicycle.

  La Vie est Trop Courte Pour Boire du Mauvais Vin ~ Life Is Too Short to Drink Bad Wine

  On Eating Alone

  There’s only one very good life, and that’s the life that you know you want, and you make it yourself.

  —Diana Vreeland

  Comptoir Turenne is on the ground floor of a nineteenth-century building with battered shutters in the Haut-Marais, on the less fashionable end of rue de Turenne. On the more fashionable end, Glow on the Go! serves concoctions like the Lolita with organic cherries and “superfoods adaptogens,” Baby Beluga sells bikinis and matching sunglasses for Capri-bound toddlers, and the windows of Delphine Pariente’s jewelry shop advise: Soyez heureux, be happy.

  Comptoir Turenne has no such panache. Its sidewalk views are mainly of a real estate agency and a men’s suit shop. It is not on “must-eat” lists. Visitors are not burdened by the ghosts of Hemingway and Sartre to have an indelible experience. All of this makes Turenne a laid-back spot for breakfast pour un. You can sit under its cheerful red awnings, mere blocks from the action, and fancy yourself Parisian.

  Portions, however, appear to be measured with Americans in mind. A croque madame arrived at the table looking as if it had been flown in from the Cheesecake Factory. A sunny-side-up egg was as big as a pancake. Beneath it, thick, crusty bread was covered in toasted cheese. Beside it, french fries were piled in a little deep-fryer basket. A salad was already beginning to migrate off the plate. There was barely room on the table for my café crème and the speculoos tucked between the cup and saucer.

  I eyed the speculoos. The Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh tells a story about being a child and taking half an hour, sometimes forty-five minutes, to finish a cookie that his mother bought him. “I would take a small bite and look up at the sky,” he wrote. “Then I would touch the dog with my feet and take another small bite. I just enjoyed being there, with the sky, the earth, the bamboo thickets, the cat, the dog, the flowers.”

  I can polish off a speculoos in less time than it takes to say “speculoos.” Nonetheless, Nhat Hanh’s story resonates in an age when it’s not unusual for a meal to be eaten with one hand while the other is posting a photo of it to Instagram. Men in suits stopped for coffee and cigarettes. Children were being walked to school. For the solo diner, no view is better than the one from the sidewalk, even the one from Comptoir
Turenne. When you’re not sitting across from someone, you’re sitting across from the world.

  I’ve eaten by myself in France more than anywhere else, with the exception of my own country where, more than half the time when we’re eating, we’re eating alone. That’s more often than in any previous generation. Pressed for time at work or school, Americans frequently eat by themselves at breakfast and when snacking, according to the NPD Group, a market research company. More than half of lunch meals are solitary. And more than 30 percent of Americans have dinner alone because they’re single or on a different schedule from their partner. The trend is being seen in other countries, too. In South Korea, for instance, it’s largely being driven by long work hours. And while many may not be dining alone by choice, the fact that more people are doing it is changing perceptions. “Dining alone has not only become socially acceptable in South Korea,” Euromonitor reported, noting that Seoul is an incubator for trends that resonate throughout East Asia and beyond, “it is almost fashionable.”

  Be that as it may, all too often the meals we have alone are rushed and forgotten, as if they didn’t matter. In the United States, for instance, dining alone has led to what the Hartman Group, a food and beverage consultancy, has called the “snackification of meals.” Certainly, we all have times when we have to eat and run, but what about the rest of the time? Why should a meal on our own be uninspired or scarfed down as if consumed on the shoulder of an interstate highway? Why shouldn’t the saying la vie est trop courte pour boire du mauvais vin—life is too short to drink bad wine—apply, even when we sip alone?