Chapter 4 parisian hermit

In the past few years, I have a home in Paris, and I will come to live in it for a while every year, but until today, this city has never appeared in my writing.Maybe I have to leave far away to write about Paris: if I write because I miss and need it.Perhaps to be more involved, I should have lived here from a young age: if it is our first years, not our maturity, that give shape to our imaginary world.Let me make it clear: a place must become an inner scene, where the imagination begins to settle, for the theater.Today Paris is an interior scene in many pages of world literature, and in many of the books we have all read and had a place in our lives.Rather than being a city in the real world, Paris, to me and to millions of people around the world, is an imaginary city known through books, a city familiarized through reading.I read "The Three Musketeers" as a child, and then, at the same time, or immediately, Paris became the city of history, the city of the French Revolution; later, in juvenile books, Paris became Baudelaire, the great City of poems, paintings, immortal novels, Balzac, Zola, Proust...  

I used to come here as a passer-by. Paris is the city I visited. It is an image that is already familiar to me and I can recognize it. I don’t need to repeat the image.Now life circumstances have brought me to Paris, where I have my own house and a home; in fact, I can say that I am still a passer-by, because my career and the scope of my work are always in Italy, but after all, the living style is different, subject to There are hundreds and thousands of tedious practical problems in family life.Maybe, by integrating it into my personal experience and daily life, and throwing away the aura of literature and culture on its imagery, Paris can become an inner city again, and then I can write about it.No longer a city full of stories, but an ordinary, nameless city where I inhabit.

There have been times when I've instinctively set fictional stories in New York, a city I've only lived in for a few months in my life, and who knows why, probably because New York is the simplest, at least to me, the most succinct , an urban archetype: in terms of its topography, sight and society.Paris is very thick, with many things and meanings hidden.Maybe it gives me a sense of belonging: I'm talking about images of Paris, not the city itself.However, it is the city that makes you feel immediately familiar as soon as you settle down. Come to think of it, I've never set any of my works in Rome, even though I've lived in Rome longer than New York, and probably more than Paris.Another city that I can't describe, Rome, another city that's been written about.However, what I wrote about Rome pales in comparison to what I wrote about Paris: the only thing in common is that it is difficult to find fresh and unrepeated topics in both Rome and Paris; as for new things, any change will immediately have a group of commentators Those who flock to.

Maybe it's because I don't have the ability to establish a personal relationship with the place. I'm always a little half-toned, and I want to go and stay.My desk is like an island: it can be here or there.Besides, today the city and the city are becoming one, and the differences that were originally used to distinguish each other have disappeared, and they have become a continuous city.The reason for this inspiration is due to the way of life that is so common among us: someone keeps moving from one airport to another, living the same life as he would in any city.I've often said, I've repeated it too often, that my home in Paris is a country house, I mean writing, part of my work can be done in solitude, where it doesn't matter, it can be a An isolated country house can be on an island, and my country house is in downtown Paris.So, life in Italy is mostly work-related, and coming to Paris is when I can or need to be alone, which is more likely.

Italy, at least Turin and Milan, are only an hour's flight from Paris.I live very close to the motorway so it's easy to get to Orly airport.When it is difficult to move in the city due to traffic jams, I go to Italy, for example, faster than to Champs-elysees.I can also "commute", maybe, the day when living in Europe is like living in a city is not far away. Likewise, the day is not far off when a city will no longer be considered a city: moving short distances takes more time than traveling long distances.When I was in Paris, I could say that I never left this study. My constant habit was to go to St. Germain-des-Pres every morning to buy Italian newspapers, and I took the subway back and forth, so I am not a loafer, like Portlet The legendary figure who wandered in the streets of Paris that I deified in my works.You see, whether international travel or city-to-city travel is no longer an adventure through various places, but simply moving from one point to another, the distance between them is empty, discontinuous.Traveling by plane is an interlude in the clouds, and moving in urban areas is an interlude underground.

Ever since I first came to Paris when I was young and discovered the convenience of the Metro, a means of transportation with the whole city at my feet, I have always trusted it.Guess my relationship with the subway also has something to do with the fascination of the underworld: My favorite Jules Verne novels are The Black Indies and Journey to the Center of the Earth.It may also be the thrill of anonymity that draws me in: I can be in the middle of a crowd and observe people, remaining absolutely invisible. There was a barefoot man in the subway yesterday, neither homeless nor hippie, just like me and most people, wearing a pair of glasses reading the newspaper, looking like a college professor, typical absent-minded and forgot to wear A professor in socks and shoes.It was raining that day, and he was walking barefoot, no one was paying attention to him, no one was curious, the invisible dream came true...  When I'm in a situation where I think I'm an invisible person, I feel so at ease.

Being on TV was the complete opposite, with the camera on me, pinning me to the visible me, my face.I think once the author is exposed, the loss is not small.The really popular writers of the past had no one at all who they were or what they looked like, they were just a name on the cover of a book, and this gave them an uncommon fascination.Gaston Leroux, Maurice Leblanc (to continue the topic of writers who perpetuated the myth of Paris among millions) were extremely popular writers of their time, and we have always loved them Nothing is known; there are some more well-known authors whose Christian names we don't even know, only their initials.I think the ideal state for a writer should be to be close to unknown, so that the writer's supreme prestige can be spread far and wide.The writer doesn't show up, doesn't show up, but the world he presents fills the screen.Like Shakespeare, about him, there is no portrait left for us to see his appearance, and there is no historical data that can really explain his second or third deeds.Today, the more the writer tries to do it for him, the more empty the world he presents, and the author is also hollowed out, and in the end both sides suffer.

There is an anonymous blind spot where writing begins, and because of this, it is not easy for me to define the relationship between the place where I write and the world that surrounds it.I can write very well in a hotel room, where, in front of my eyes is a blank sheet of paper, with no choice, no way out.Perhaps this condition is more ideal when I am younger, the world is there, outside the door, and dense messages follow me every step of the way, so rich, I only need to take a step away to start writing.Now some things have changed, and I can write with peace of mind only in the place that belongs to me, and I have to have books by my side, as if I have to refer to some unknown materials at any time.Maybe it's not the book itself, but an inner space constructed by the book, just like seeing myself as an ideal library.

However, I have never been able to have a complete library, my books are always scattered everywhere, every time I want to look up a book in Paris, that book is in Italy, and every time I want to look up a book in Italy To look up a book, that book is in Paris again.I have had the habit of looking up books while writing for almost ten years, and it was not like this before. Everything I write comes from memory, and everything belongs to lived experience.Including every cultural quote should be in my heart and belong to me, otherwise it will violate the rules of the game, and I can't use it as material to resort to paper.Now it's quite the opposite: even the world has become an occasional object of reference, and there is no imaginary gap between this shelf and the world outside.

So I can say, what exactly is Paris, Paris is a huge reference book, an encyclopedia for consulting the city: open this book, it gives you a series of information, all-encompassing than other cities can match.Let's look at the store, which offers the most open and evocative discourse a city can have: haven't we been reading a city, a street, a sidewalk along the store.Some stores are chapters of a paper, some are entries in an encyclopedia, and some are pages of a newspaper.In Paris, there are cheese shops displaying hundreds of different cheeses, each marked with a name, some cheese coated with a layer of ashes, and some walnut cheese: it is a kind of museum, the Louvre of Cheese.The diversity of a civilization seen in these cheeses allows the survival of a considerable number of different forms, making the product economically profitable while maintaining its diversity, as long as the premise is to provide choice, not to violate the cheese system, the cheese language .However, it is mainly the world of taxonomy and nomenclature.If one day I want to write about cheese, I can go out and refer to Paris as if it were an encyclopedia of cheese.Or go to certain grocery stores, where you can find the exotic atmosphere of the last century, the exotic atmosphere with a strong commercial atmosphere in the early days of colonialism, we can say that it comes from the World Expo.

In a certain kind of shop you feel that this is the city where one understands culture, that is, the museum, which in turn gives meaning to everyday life, making the rooms of the Louvre and the shop windows one and the same.We can say that all kinds of street things can be included in museums at any time, or that museums can contain all kinds of street things at any time.So it's no accident that my favorite museum is the Carnival Museum, dedicated to Parisian life and history. The city is regarded as an encyclopedia, and the collective memory has its origins: think about every architectural detail and decoration of a Gothic church, every space and element involves a comprehensive knowledge of knowledge, which means that it can be found in other structures Correspondence.In the same way, we can "read" a city as a reference book, "read" Notre-Dame (through Violle Le Duc's restoration), one capital before another, a bundle of arches before another. Look at a bunch.At the same time, we can read the city as we read the collective unconscious: the collective unconscious is a thick catalog, a thick bestiary; we can interpret Paris as a dream book, a photo album of our unconscious, a This is a complete collection of monsters.So on the route of my father, who is the playmate of my young daughter, there are allegorical animals in the botanical garden, the leisurely snake garden and reptile area with iguanas and chameleons, prehistoric animals, and our civilization in Paris. Can't get rid of the dragon cave. Unconscious demons and phantoms that are tangible outside of us are an inherent feature of the city that was once the capital of surrealism.Because Paris, long before Andre Breton (Andre Breton), absorbed all the basic elements that later became surreal literary works; the footprints and traces left by surrealism can be seen everywhere in the city, which is exactly what emphasizes the charm of images. One way, like in some surreal bookstore, or in some small-scale movie theaters like Styx, which specialize in horror movies. The cinemas in Paris are also museums, or encyclopedias for consultation, and I don't just mean the vast film archives, but all the film screening rooms that are densely packed in the Latin Quarter.In these cramped, smelly screening rooms, you can see films just finished by new Brazilian or Polish directors, as well as silent films or old World War II films.With a little care and luck, every viewer can piece together film history.For example, I am most fascinated by movies in the 1930s, because movies were the whole world to me at that time.It's where I get a sense of accomplishment, and I mean finding lost time, rewatching movies from my teenage years or catching up on movies I missed and thought I'd never see again.In Paris you always have the hope of getting back what you thought you lost, finding the past, and getting back what you had.Another way to see Paris is: a huge lost and found room, a bit like the moon in "Angry Orlando", collecting all the lost things in the world. We're talking about the vast Paris of the hobby collector, the city that tempts you to collect everything, to hoard and redistribute, to search here like an archaeological site.A city belonging to collectors can also be an existential adventure, borrowing objects to study oneself, surveying the world and self-realization.But I don’t have the spirit of a collector. Perhaps it should be said that I only have the desire to collect things that cannot be touched, such as old movie screens, memories, and black and white phantoms. I have come to the conclusion that my Paris is the city of maturity, I mean I no longer see it through the eyes of a teenage adventurer who discovers new lands.The relationship between me and the world has changed from exploration to consultation, which means that the world is the sum of all data, independent of me. These data, I can compare, combine, transmit, and maybe enjoy it occasionally with restraint , but maintain an outsider status from beginning to end.There is an old ring railway below my house, the Paris ring line, which is almost at a standstill, but twice a day, there is still a small train passing by, which reminds me of Jules Laforgue's poem: I will never have an adventure; How small in nature, Paris Ring Railway! Author press: This article is an interview by Valerio Riva for Swiss Italian TV in 1974.Published in Lugano by Pantarei in the same year in limited edition with four illustrations by Giuseppe Ajmone.