In late July, I went around various “monetise your blog!!” bullshit websites, looking for blog topics and prompts that might help me in August. I jotted down a few ideas in my beloved Midori traveller’s notebook, but none of them are appealing tonight. It’s Sunday and I’ve had a few glasses of wine – I often visit my grandmother on a Sunday and she ensures she has a bottle or two in the fridge – and I have nothing to say. No, nothing to say.
Sunday has an odd feeling to it, for me. It’s a melancholy time, a lonely time. I think of the places I would like to be and the people I would like to be with. It is an evening for wandering on a Widow’s Walk, clutching a shawl about oneself and staring out at the ocean.
I picked up a copy of an Anaïs Nin book this evening and opened it to a random page. It is a copy of Under a Glass Bell that I picked up in Paris’s Abbey Bookshop (Shakespeare and Co. is the more famous, but I implore you to visit Abbey. It has piles of books everywhere, rickety ladders, steep stairs down into a cobwebbed book-filled basement… it’s gorgeous). I had opened it to the middle of “Houseboat”, and my eyes settled on one paragraph:
The river was having a nightmare. Its vast whaleback was restless. It had been cheated of its daily suicide. More women fed the river than men – more wanted to die in winter than in summer.
Not too long ago, an author and activist shot himself in Notre Dame cathedral, and I thought to myself, is there anything more “French writer” than that? As it turned out he was rather right wing and was symbolically protesting gay marriage, which rather spoilt the romantic image. You don’t like to think of suicidal French writers as being jerks.
I was so averse to killing that even shooting into the water I felt uneasy, as if I might kill the Unknown Woman of the Seine again – the woman who had drowned herself here years ago and who was so beautiful that at the Morgue they had taken a plaster cast of her face.
I’m a Romantic; I confess it freely. Come, let us set our careful breasts, like Philomel, against the thorn, to aggravate the inward grief, and so on. Bah, Sunday evening, what is it about you that makes me melancholy so?