Spanish Love
March 28, 2014My Shakespeare and Company/Paris memoir was recently released in Spain under the title La librería más famosa del mundo and there has been a curious stream of positive reviews, including this lengthy piece in one of the country’s leading newspapers, El Mundo.
I say curious because it’s now been almost a decade since the book was originally published and it’s odd to see these old stories revived and to be confronted with the person I was both 15 year ago when I arrived in Paris and 9 years ago when I wrote the drafts of this book in Udaipor, Paris, and Marseille. The contrasts between now and then are stark and obvious: then I was a bachelor, rootless, precarious, searching, with a life rich in adventure and romantic chaos; now I am a father, rooted, overwhelmed, anxious, with a life rich in profound love and happiness. Two almost entirely different people but that’s the thrill of life, isn’t it, to live as many varied and pulsating existences as possible during this brief gasp of time available to us.
These new reviews are also echoing around my mind because I am yet again struggling with the notion of providing for my family and the relentless financial demands associated with raising children and owning a home. Many a morning I wake ready to throw myself at the mercy of the local employment center in hopes of landing any sort of secure job that would deliver the peace of a regular monthly paychecks for the next, oh, 20 or so years before my children can fend for themselves. But then, I see the review in El Mundo or have a tickle of an idea for another book or see the humming work of my active writer friends and I remember the intricate, paradoxical joy of crafting words and the vast (non-monetary) rewards of creation. And I say, hey, why not keep writing and continue to cobble together a modest living through teaching and translation and the occasional magazine essay?
So, what to do. The truth is I have no answer but I have a deadline for one. I am building my home office in the old garage at the back of my garden and I’ve promised myself that I will set my foot firmly upon my new path when it is done. Of course, that office has been stalled for the past four months. But that’s only because I’ve been unable to apply the leveling cement because of frost risk. Right? (Cough.)
What would the 2005 me on the cover tell the 2014 me to do?
