Jennifer Carroll is a 21 year old actor and writer. She first began writing for the Uxbridge Cosmos in 2007 when she had the opportunity to share her experiences as a Canadian ambassador for an international conference for women in Dubai. At the beginning of 2008, she moved to Ireland to pursue a career in theatre and film. Far From Home is her monthly account on living and working in Dublin.
Previous
Ah, Paris
I could have stayed between these pages for the rest of my life.
There it sat. Waving at me from under the shadow of Notre Dame. Small and unassuming. Charming in its messy appearance, it differed from anything else on the streets of Paris. Even the store front itself seemed... dog-eared, nearly. As if gentle travellers the world over visited and hurried away, marking it for later use.
Shakespeare and Company, from inception to present day, has housed and continues to house English speaking writers when they came to live in Paris, boarding them for free and allowing them to write at their leisure, a patronage rarely seen this side of the Renaissance. It is a bookshop and an oasis. It is proudly bohemian and unabashedly idealistic, flaunting thick novels and indulgent poetry in an age of tweets and status updates. A first edition of Ulysses taunts you from the front window display. As you duck through the front door, the smell of literature and culture immediately assaults your senses. The only natural light trickles in from the storefront windows - windows throughout the rest of the shop would only be a waste of precious space for more shelves and books. Rows of books tower over you on narrow shelves, delicately and manually organized, the genres and authors neatly labelled with a terse hand. Ladders dot the space in order for someone to clamber to the lofty shelves that line the top inches of the walls. Crevices are filled with poetry. There is a considerable section devoted simply to the Bard. You can nearly see the shadows of Joyce and Hemingway climbing the steps up to the reading library where they would have lived, created, wrote. When you follow their shadows you find books devouring every inch of shelf space in the library, an indulgent loft where the books which are not for sale live - you may sit and read them, however they must be returned to their familiar home to be enjoyed by the next set of curious eyes and vivid imagination.
As I crouched in the Shakespeare corner downstairs, I heard a gentle tinkling of notes flit across a piano, which with no second thought I assumed came streaming out of a sound system via iPod or ye-olde-antiquated-CD-system. But no. That is just not how Paris does things. At one point in a gentle yet unfamiliar rondo, I tilted my head toward the music to try and place the melody, when I noticed the sound seeping through the ceiling. I clambered up the creaky steps toward the library, and tucked in the back, in a fold of books and old chess sets, I found a man giving an old apartment piano a vigorous workout. His fingers deftly weaved between notes and emotions, within the held silence of a rapt audience, their books suspended just above their laps, pages held in mid-turn.
I sunk into a chair, enraptured not only with his obvious skill, but with the idea of beauty Parisians refuse to abandon. That beauty is important. It is essential. Beauty is necessary for beauty's sake. It is as essential to humans as oxygen and light - it feeds our body, our mind, fuelling it, willing it to press on in this bleak reality that is life. It gives grace to tragedy, meaning to obscurity, hope to cynicism. It lifts our eyes from gutter to sapphire sky and imposes upon us the task of creating more beauty.
I get lost in the saturated melody as I run my fingers along the broken spines of well worn first editions. I could stay in this place forever. It seems sacred to me in some way, in how it holds onto the written word. Words combined into something profound, bound together and presented to eager, starving minds. Reminding them that beauty exists in the tiniest, most insignificant moments, and that meaning is held in the most unassuming of hands.
