While backpacking through Europe years ago, I discovered something other than my soul: a love for writing. Since then, I have been back countless times, always with journal in hand, always with the intention of writing a novel, failing miserably at first, but finally succeeding. So instead of writing the usual banal reasons for why I chose these cities (since no one cares anyway), I’ve decided to filch my notebooks and journals for actual excerpts from their cities of origin. Call me lazy, but I prefer to compare this to those writer-strike episodes of your favourite sitcom where all they did was show flashbacks from old episodes to fool you into thinking you were watching something new… So without further ado, here are the Top Five European cities that have inspired me to write.
If something is written by Kafka, can it still be Kafkaesque?
When I finally made it to Arles it was well into November, the sun was still shining hot, my skin was still a golden brown and I had begun talking to myself. I wandered the town on my own, losing myself in its labyrinthine streets and shadowy alleys, and emerging triumphant through the sunny square of The Place du Forum. On a typical August day it would have been swarming with tables and tourists, but now sat quietly and modestly, flanked by gaunt trees and book-ended by a cheap tabac and the phallically-named Grand Hotel Nord-Pinus. One can sit peacefully at the Bistrot Arlesien and hear the faint strains of winter blowing her chords of discontent. A stark contrast to the nearby Place de la Rebublique, where the allegros blare with a thousand disembodied voices, gliding by like ghosts through the Hotel de Ville and the obelisk fountain to the public toilets next to the old church. The crowd trickles along like the urinals, strewn about like coins in a fountain, until finally sucked in by the whirlpool of souvenir shops hawking lavender and soap and lavender soap and postcards with pictures of lavender…
You drift aimlessly from café to café, sometimes sitting on the terrace, gazing at the passers-by with their foreign faces speaking in that alien tongue which you will never master, turning away from them to read the shop signs across the street with their sales and advertisements for drinks and products you will probably never buy and never use, hoping to find an indication of where your life should go. You rise and walk again in the random streets, killing time before nightfall, at times lingering in front of a bar or restaurant door, unable to make up your mind to enter, and then forging ahead, for fear of looking lost or indecisive, until at last you’re able to settle inside a dark corner of a bar in the more desolate part of town. Dusk is seeping into the corners of the room, with the last glow of copper light dying in the dusty wall mirrors, the crooked tables shedding their final benediction. You sit in the darkness of the empty bar looking pathetically lost, a darker shade among the shadows, a prisoner of this strange town. Realizing your hour of dereliction, you wonder when your deliverance would come, and then turn hastily away…
I woke up in a strange place. My neck twisted like a broken hanger. My clothes were still clothes from the night before, but wrinkled, and reeking of smoke. The taste of vodka red bulls in my mouth, an ache in my jaw. The couch I slept on, hot and itchy, like Toronto summers. “Hello?!” Someone’s living room, but there’s no one here. Tenants are ash-lipped beer cans, coke-edged playing cards, half-empty glasses destined for the sea. I gather myself and slip out the front door, leaving it unlocked. I stood a moment, slightly dazed by the sudden light. The streets felt bleak and uncertain – the way you imagine the future to be sometimes. Shops are still shuttered, everything is silent. I look around for clues to guide me one way or another, stumbling and squinting, reminiscent of the drug-addled dawns of summers past. An underground station. London! Left for dead on some abandoned sofa, I descend into the earth to be reborn. Tomorrow, I leave for Paris…
1. Paris, France*
* If you’re an aspiring writer and being in Paris doesn’t inspire you to write, you might as well put down that pen, fast-forward all that tortured writer business, and go straight into killing yourself.
I occupy room number 9, on the top floor at the end of the hall. I occupy the ‘Mexican’ room but there is nothing distinctly Mexican about it. My balcony overlooks the peripherique with their ferment of cars, and the toilet at the bottom across the street. The doors of the toilet open at an exact 90-degree angle to my window and from this vantage point I can see directly and distinctly the hole in the ground slimed with excrement and the two ceramic footprints flanking it. Today I ate a meal – my first in the Mexican room – of a baguette and cheese, which was distinctly non-Mexican but quite French because, in fact, I am in France and not in Mexico.
How frightening it was to finally set down the first words to a life-long dream! To inject life through the pen like the suspended sperm from the vas deferens! For so long the dried-out womb lay unfecund but now it has given birth to a child. An invalid child, but a child nevertheless. Glancing at the guest book today I noticed a new entry. It read: “…my boyfriend proposed to me in our room! Thank you very much…” A proposal in some back alley hotel room with the smell of disinfectant in the air and a toilet across the street slimed with excrement and an aspiring writer down the hall. How romantic. No mention if she said yes or not…
– Tom Day
