LETTERS FROM PARIS #40 Discovery

“America is my country. Paris is my hometown.” It might be a bit presumptuous; but Getrude Stein, who said that, put Paris on the map. She made it, more than any other writer, the place to be. Of course, Paris for centuries had been the centre of arts and culture. But it was Stein, who was born in the 1870s who helped transform it to a Mecca for the likes of Hemingway and Wilder. She “discovered” Matisse and Picasso. She created a world of art and culture and she was the centre of that world. Perhaps better than anyone, she would seem to reflect my own Francophilia; of course I have had no effect on Paris. I am of course, no Gertrude Stein.

That may be the way I thought of Paris until – until I visited the Musee Chagall on a hill overlooking Nice. First there is the art. I confess that the power of it brought tears to my eyes. The power and shock of his primary colours, the creatures of myth, the Chagall people and animals floating on air, and the breathtaking sense of reality, mythology, and religious folklore in his work. There is one room dedicated to Biblical stories, from Moses receiving the Ten Commandments to Jacob’s Ladder and the sacrifice of Abraham. Wait – I’m getting to it.

My own Epiphany was quick and easy as easy as standing in front of a Chagall masterpiece and actually gasping. I’m not being melodramatic! I have struggled with my own sense of what Paris means to me, and how the French people seem to have infiltrated my brain, and then I encountered the man who called himself a “citizen of the world” – Chagall. Born in Vitebsk, Russia, his career flourished in that country, both before and after the revolution. He went to Paris, which at the time was where every artist went, and had yet another career. From there to America where he worked with distinction, then back to France where he finished his work and his life in 1985 at the age of 97, working almost to the end.
He said the he would not like to be like the others. He wanted to discover new worlds.

So perhaps I too, taking my cue from Chagall, will realize, not that I am a “citizen of the world” that would be too lofty for me, but that the qualities I ascribe to the French and to Paris exist in many other places.

Maybe what I am in search of, and this is getting far too adolescent (I am starting to sound like Sylvia Plath) is a reason to love Paris and its people and history. The revelation may be that what I find in Paris is not unique to Paris. It was for Gertrude Stein, but not for Chagall. It is simply that Paris personifies the passion for culture and the arts. But the truth is that I am at home wherever there is that passion; wherever people love the art and their artists; where people can disagree with passion and agree with love; where the government of the country so respects the Arts that it encourages, endows, and supports them. Why do artists come to Paris? Why perhaps equally do they throng to New York, where culture abounds and the federal government is indifferent?

Perhaps any city that pays to keep its museums and galleries, its concert halls and orchestras alive and running is my kind of place. It’s why I love – surprise – Cleveland.

And finally, it is what I would like my own city to be: a Mecca for all that. The fact is that we already support our culture, native or imported, theatrical or musical. I just want more. It’s a kind of greed I suppose. It’s a greed that is satisfied by three months in Paris.

Yesterday in Nice we bought a piece of art glass. Today we will travel to Saint Paul de Vence, and who knows? They have a lot of glass artists there.

Then I think: we have collected wonderful pieces in our own Beaver Valley, in Wellington Prince Edward County and in Elora. Our artists work – they sometimes thrive. It’s Paris all over again and I am perhaps running in dizzy circles.

Welcome home.