Devotion

by Patti Smith

My notebook remains untouched. A writer who isn’t writing going to talk with journalists about writing. What a know-it-all, I chide myself.

The prospect of boarding a plane without a book produces a wave of panic. The right book can serve as a docent of sorts, setting a tone or even altering the course of a journey.

I sit on the same bench where I had sat with my sister in the spring of 1969. We were in our early twenties, when everything, including the sentimental head of the poet, was a revelation. Inquisitive sisters with a handful of precious addresses of cafés and hotels. The Deux Magots of the existentialists. The Hôtel des Etrangers, where Rimbaud and Verlaine presided over the Circle Zutique. The Hôtel de Lauzun with its chimeras and gilded halls where Baudelaire smoked hashish and penned the opening poems in Les fleurs du mal.

A silvery light seems to spread over Paris. I feel a wave of nostalgia induced by the perfect present. It begins to drizzle. Grainy bits of film swirl. The Paris of Jean Seberg in a striped boatneck shirt hawking the Herald Tribune.

Her single-minded purpose, combination of innocent arrogance, awkward grace, and daring is breathtaking.

I climb the side of a volcano carved from ice, heat drawn from the well of devotion that is the female heart.

I linger, content to be with the ghosts of writers who have passed into this same perimeter. Camus leaning against the wall smoking cigarettes. Nabokov reflecting on the curve of the Nautilus.

I could see the church from my window and thus a long stretch of my life. I had first seen this church with my sister in late spring of 1969. We entered it together somewhat timidly and lit candles for our family.

A burgeoning routine. Awake at seven. Café de Flore at eight. Read until ten. Walk to Gallimard. Journalists. Book signing. Lunch with the Gallimard crew—Aurélien, Cristelle, duck confit and beans, local café fare. Tea in the blue salon, the garden beyond, interviews. A journalist hands me a book on Simone Weil, translated into English. Do you know of her, she asks. Later a journalist named Bruno presents me with an image of Gérard de Nerval, which I place on my night table. It is the same melancholy portrait I had taped above my desk when in my twenties.

Simone and Patrick. Patrick and Simone. He imbues anxious calm. She fills me with adrenaline, dangerously familiar.

On the way to the train I recheck the contents of my sack. Notebook, Simone, underwear, socks, toothbrush, a folded shirt, camera, my pen and dark glasses. Everything I need. I have hopes of writing but instead stare sleepily out the train window, noting the changing landscape as we pass from the graffiti-scrawled walls in the outskirts of Paris to more open spaces, sandier ground, scruffy pine, and finally the pull of the sea.

Drawn to yet an older headstone, I note the word DEVOUEMENT carved diagonally on the border. I ask Alain what it means. —Devotion, he answers, smiling.

A white dragonfly plucked from a music box. A Fabergé egg encasing a miniature guillotine. A pair of skates twisting in space. I write of trees, a repetition of figure-eights, the magnetic pull of love. Not certain of how much time has passed, I cease writing, rush past the curving back of Neptune, down the stone steps, hurrying to the nearby train station.

It occurs to me that the young look beautiful as they sleep and the old, such as myself, look dead.

at that moment it occurred to me that dreamers through time dreamed of those in their own epoch. The ancient Greeks dreamed of their gods. Emily Brontë of the moors. And Christ? Perhaps he did not dream, yet knew all there was to dream, every combination, until the end of time.

I felt helplessly at peace.

Back in New York City, I found it difficult to chemically readjust. More than that, I suffered bouts of nostalgia, a yearning to be where I had been.

Silence. Passing cars. The rumble of the subway. Birds calling for dawn. I want to go home, I whimpered. But I already was.

As she brushed past he felt the sting of intellect.

As the days passed guardedly connected, they assumed their roles, each bolstered by the other.

Twirling about giddily, she experienced the melancholy luxury of solitary joy.

The little witch, he was thinking, yet chided himself for attributing such power to an awkward schoolgirl.

Would that I could die this moment. Just a folly, a teenage prayer, a moment exquisitely mastered.

She felt for the card in her pocket. Stirred by a chorus of sensations, she was at once liberated and trapped.

The qualities that will help you get through life you have received from me. The qualities that will make you welcomed in heaven from your mother.

As she relived that moment she wept at last, not for the loss of him but of innocence.

Why do we write? A chorus erupts. Because we cannot simply live.