Parisian Passions
Zara dress (sold out), vintage necklace, Tory Burch flats. Related looks:
Paris is a real trompel’œil, a magnificent stage-setting inhabited by four million silhouettes. Nearly five million at the last census? Why, they must have multiplied. And that wouldn’t surprise me. It always seemed to me that our fellow citizens had two passions: ideas and fornication. Without rhyme or reason, so to speak. Still, let us take care not to condemn them; they are not the only ones, for all Europe is in the same boat. I sometimes think of what future historians will say of us. A single sentence will suffice for modern man: he fornicated and read the papers.
Paris is beautiful; I haven’t forgotten it. I remember its twilights at about this same season. Evening falls, dry and rustling, over the roofs blue with smoke, the city rumbles, the river seems to flow backward. Then I used to wan-der in the streets. They wander now too, I know! They wander, pretending to hasten toward the tired wife, the forbidding home …Ah, mon ami, do you know what the solitary creature is like as he wanders in big cities?
But on the bridges of Paris I, too, learned that I was afraid of freedom.
I didn’t know that freedom is not a reward or a decoration that is cel-ebrated with champagne. Nor yet a gift, a box of dainties designed to make you lick your chops. Oh, no! It’s a chore, on the contrary, and a long-distance race, quite solitary and very exhausting.
-Albert Camus (random excerpts from The Fall/La Chute)
Camus didn’t enjoy Paris so much, but he did produce a lot of brilliant work during his time spent there. When I visit Paris, I always feel compelled to visit Saint Germain des Pres and grab a cup of overpriced coffee. My heart tingles everytime I go there. It makes me feel a little bit closer to Camus.
I haven’t slept much lately. I pull all nighters just to work sometimes. The sunrise is the insomniac’s reward. When I’m awake I work obsessively. I’ve been told that I need to take breaks to stay sane. But why? Sanity is overrated. I want to work. I use the term “work” loosely here because I do a number of things all at once (beyond The Stranger) and don’t see a point in limiting myself. Today I began web development and designing work for a startup, and I am excited beyond words. If I had a choice (and the physical capacity), I would never sleep and work perpetually.
Initially this entry was an admittedly passive-aggressive response to people who get upset with others for choosing work over trivialities. Then I realized that there is no point in trying to justify workaholic tendencies. A passion doesn’t need justification, only implementation. There’s a difference between being enslaved by your work and loving it so intensely that you prefer it above all other endeavors.
Photographer: Linse Rose Kelbe
