I’m In Need of a Walk This Week
Revisiting 100 Days of Solo Travel (Again)
I’m in need of a walk this week. I say it every year, and every year I mean it: I love the fall. And there is nothing like an autumn walk. The pressure from summer is off, and it feels like I finally breathe out after holding in all the hot air. The leaves are beautiful. Wearing sweaters is beautiful. Life is grand.
But a specific reason that I love the fall is because it is a long anniversary for me. I say it every year, and every year I mean: I think a lot about my time solo-traveling around Europe. During my first run at graduate school, I saved up some money and went around Europe for 100 days in the fall of 2017, mostly using couchsurfing.com and staying with friends.
(Fall is also the anniversary of the time I tried to write a book on Heidegger’s Being and Time, but that’s a different time, one & two).
And I am in need of a walk this week. Here is where I was around these past few days six years ago.
Montparnasse Cemetery
It’s only fitting that I went here. This is also the cite of where Sartre and De Beauvoir are rested, but finding Tzara’s here was a surprise. I adore that he his named only as “poet” on his stone. In the presence of this, it clarified my vision of being a writer.
This was on October 24th. The next day I would revisit nearby to take my first attempt at my French language exam, the DELF. I failed that time, but I had my revenge in June 2021 in New York where I officially earned the B2 level of French.
Shakespeare and Company
Where else!? Again, I had to. But this photo is special for the event that happened just before it. As I made my way up the stairs in the bookshop, I passed an opening on the bookshelves. I had carried with me all this way the first proof of my first book, unpublished still, and set it on the shelf. I didn’t think to take a photo of it. My heart was enough. I accepted this would happen one later day.
In the moment of that peaceful acknowledgement of my dreams, I sat down in the reading room. Through that window, you can see Notre-Dame. The morning was cool and misty. I grabbed a photo for the vision forward. This was October 26th.
The Sea Organ
In what, at times, feels like a breakup, I left France for Croatia. My first city out was Zadar. The end of France was the end of the first third of my trip, and I was now headed into a sprint across the Balkans toward Romania.
But I had to make time for this. I had heard about the sea organ. I needed to see it, to hear it.
It is an art installation that is carved as steps on the boardwalk by old town Zadar. As the waves move through it, it changes the air in the structure, and it plays music like an organ.
Here, I sat for hours listening. I have often, since then, paused in my daily life to recall that it is still playing even now. It has never stopped. I remember when I walked far enough away to never hear it again.
Life is grand.
More soon,
Trevor
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