I woke up this morning and thought, I’d really like to go for a run today, only it was pissing with rain, the streets slick and the eaves dripping. So I hunkered down in the study with several cups of lapsang souchong tea (there’s nothing like drinking tea that smells of woodfire smoke in winter to make you feel the season in your bones) and got to work. Several hours later I was so absorbed in my work I was surprised to notice that the day has cleared entirely, the sky blue through the empty branches of the plum tree outside my window. No, I still haven’t gone for my run.

I’m doing research, and in order to continue this post I’m going to have to admit once and for all something that I have a hard time saying aloud. Every time the words escape my lips I give a little schoolgirl giggle, blush furiously, and backtrack out of embarrasment. But, I’m writing a book (yes, a book, b-o-o-k and no, you do not need to tell me how unlikely literary success is in this age), and today I’ve been searching for information on the best way to pitch said book to literary agents.

The problem, of course, is that said book belongs to a genre that is nebulous at best. It’s certainly not fiction, but it’s also not a biography, an analysis of current events, a how-to book. Okay, so it must be something else? How about memoir, or narrative nonfiction. According to one site memoir is “the only nonfiction subject that must be treated as fiction,” while “narrative nonfiction…is still nonfiction and you would submit a proposal.” Which is fine, except that my book is not memoir, strictly speaking, and neither is it narrative nonfiction, strictly speaking, if I’m to believe what I read (narrative nonfiction: The Perfect Storm, Seabiscuit, et cetera). The only way I’ve ever been able to pinpoint what I’m writing is by comparing it to other things, kind of like a movie pitch. It’s The Art of Travel by Alain de Botton meets Sun After Dark by Pico Iyer meets The Flaneur by Edmund White meets All Souls by Javiar Marias (which is a novel, confusingly) meets Isolarian by James Atlee–you get the point. And obviously, the more I think about it, the deeper I fall into the abyss of finding the genre.

So I’m stepping away from that for awhile. Something I read this morning advised the author to “look at the value your book offers to the reader,” and that’s something I can do much more easily. It makes me think of Roger Mudd asking Ted Kennedy in 1979: “Why do you want to be president?” and Ted Kennedy botching the answer, not knowing, not being able to compensate for never having thought about a question that sounds too basic to be problematic. It was one of the greatest lessons of my undergraduate degree: if you’re going to run for president (or write a book, for that matter), you should sure as hell be able to answer the question “why.”

Why? Because I’m too young to write a book; because there’s no reason I can think of for someone to remain silent because of age or experience. Because while we may be entering an era of austerity, the election of Barack Obama indicates that we’re finally, eight years late, exiting an era of intellectual shrinkage. We’re becoming curious again*, and suddenly, the way in which we view the world–as individuals, as a generation, as the human race–is becomming important. Because sometimes a city is not just a dot on the map but a state of mind, and this affects us, whether we think about it or not. Because the art of experiencing place is a universal art; there is a backdrop to everything. Because the more we think about where we are–physically, geographically, generationally, emotionally, intellectually–the better we’re able to understand where we’re going. And because there’s always something to be said for a few pretty words on a page. It’s finer entertainment than anything else I can think of.

*Obama: “But those values upon which our success depends – hard work and honesty, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism – these things are old.”

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In the old days, people would ask you how your crossing was–was it a rough crossing, or a smooth one? they would want to know. That was when the only way to get to Paris was over the thin, choppy stretch of sea called the English Channel, and it was much more of a production.

Now there is no crossing: only a long, swift, sweeping motion, like a wave of the arm–you fall asleep in Paris and wake in London, and there is just a tunnel, a fast train between two cosmopolitan cities. At the station everything is in French and English and all the announcements are made in both languages. Even at this early hour people are reading newspapers and preparing for their day in suits or swish trousers and high heels. It is impossible to tell why they are making the journey. I myself am making it to get my visa stamped.

“Is this your first presentation?” the man at passport control asks me about the visa, and I nod.

We stayed first in a cheap hotel and then at a friend’s crumbling, recently sold apartment. On our last evening there we were having a meal on the mattress–cheese, paté, wine–when a girl came into the apartment to take away all of the furniture. It was embarrassing because our friend had forgotten to tell us she would be coming and had forgotten to tell her that we would be there. We slept without a mattress that night (last night), in the August heat, but it was okay somehow.

We walked around a fair bit, but because he had sprained his ankle the night before we left we had to take it easy. I read The Flaneur by Edmund White; it reminded me that Ernest Hemingway was hungry and poor in Paris, too. There is a passage in A Moveable Feast that I had forgotten until I read The Flaneur; it’s long (less a passage and more a chapter) but the start of it goes: “You got very hungry when you did not eat enough in Paris because all the bakery shops had such good things in the windows and people ate outside at tables on the sidewalk so that you saw and smelled the food”. Then he describes how he used to wind his way around the city avoiding all the places that made him hungry and tempted to spend money. But also he writes: “We ate well and cheaply and drank well and cheaply and slept well and warm together and loved each other.” So there’s that, and it’s a far nicer thing than being able to afford a fancy hotel with a mattress or to enter every museum or shop for souvenirs and clothing that will just take up space anyway.

We drank café au lait facing the street so we could watch all the people. Our biggest expense was coffee, not accommodation or food. It was a good thing he had bought me The Flaneur, really; “the flaneur,” White writes, “is…in search of a private moment, not a lesson.” And, “Paris is a world meant to be seen by the walker alone.”

We had a kir each at Sartre’s café, Café Flore, across from the Lipp where Hemingway eats in A Moveable Feast. Because the drinks were so expensive we drew them out, sipping slowly and delicately, enjoying being able to rest our feet while other people walked on by. The waiter brought us a plate of green olives and I sucked them from a toothpick and we picked the pits out from our teeth.

There is probably a lot more I could write but I’m tired. We’ve been on the road for most of August, it seems. We’ve been to Cambridge, the Cotswolds, Brighton, and Paris. Oxford has emptied completely, taking a tiny breath before she fills with students for the term. Even the Cowley road this morning as we walked back from St. Clements seemed wide and quiet; only a few cars trickling past, hardly any other pedestrians. I’m uploading photos and going to have a nap. It’s September, and part of me doesn’t know how this came to be, even though I’ve seen it happen so many times before.

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