The Least I Can Do

"Impose ta chance, serre ton bonheur et va vers ton risque. À te regarder, ils s'habitueront."

"Press your luck, hold your happiness close, and move toward your risk. Watching you, they will grow accustomed to it."

— René Char, poet and Resistance commander

Week three, and the experiment is beginning to clarify itself. It's now clear that my being here is not about Paris or books or solitude in the abstract. It's about the gap between the self I perform and the self I actually am and whether a man alone in Paris can close it.

The distance is not theoretical. I can feel it in my body.

My routines have thinned. My contact with friends and family has dropped off. In their place: long stretches of unstructured time and a rising, ambient anxiety. This was, in part, the point. I came here to feel alone. But it is one thing to say that; it is another to live inside it.

Four years ago, I tried something similar in the Italian Alps. I rented a converted grain barn in the mountain village of Les Combes for two weeks. After a week, the quiet and isolation were too much, and I cut short my stay. I can remember the exact moment the isolation broke me. I had just finished hiking the mountain for two hours without a single human voice to break the spell. When I returned, I resolved to pack my bags, not out of boredom, but out of a sudden, sharp need to hear the clatter of other voices, even if I couldn't understand the language. I spent the remaining week in Lake Como and then Milan, where the background noise of other lives restored something in me.

That same pressure is building again.

Yesterday, I sent seven separate messages to friends — men and women — under the pretense of checking in.

They were not about them. They were probes.

I wanted evidence that I existed in someone else’s mind. A reply would confirm it.

We are social creatures; this is not a revelation. But most of our connections are thin, and I am beginning to suspect that I rely on even those thin threads more than I admit. Remove them, and something unsettles quickly.

In their absence, my attention has shifted and I notice small things with unusual clarity. I look for connections to keep my anxiety at bay. This morning, I found a dead honeybee in my apartment. It had come in through the open window looking for something — pollen, warmth, a way back out — and had not found it. I put it outside on the ledge rather than in the bin, which felt important, though I couldn't have said why.

I am also eating differently — not healthier, but more deliberately. Yesterday, I set a new personal best of eight minutes to devour a Magnum White Chocolate ice cream bar. Sitting on the couch, without distractions other than gazing at the microwave clock, I relished the frozen confectionery delight. I have also learned to savor a cup of tea, Twining’s Lemon Ginger, and have successfully mastered the practice of nurturing an espresso at a Paris café.

These small acts of attention help, but they are substitutions, not solutions. They soften the edge of being alone without resolving it.

When these distractions fail and the apartment begins to close in, I leave. On Sunday I rode a bicycle to the Bois de Boulogne, a sprawling forest on the western edge of the city, about twenty minutes from my door. It is one of the great green spaces of Paris — wide enough and old enough that once you are inside it, the city recedes and something older takes its place.

My destination was the Monument de la Cascade, where thirty-five French resistance fighters were executed just nine days before the liberation of Paris. Betrayed by a collaborator, then shot by the Gestapo.

The morning was bright — runners, cyclists, sunlight through the trees.

And then the monument.

A commemorative oak tree at the site still bears the bullet scars, marked with a plaque reading: "Passer-by, respect this oak: it bears the traces of the bullets that killed our martyrs." There are places that hold their history in the air. You feel it before you read the plaque, before you understand what happened there.

The inscription on the monument reads “Here were shot the 35 martyrs of the resistance.” Some were incredibly young — two were only seventeen. But Luigi Vannini was fifty-two. I am seventy-six. He had already decided what he was willing to surrender. I am still learning how.

So young. Nine days to liberation.

I stood there longer than I expected and read their names aloud, quietly — Jacques Delporte, Luigi Vannini, René Faugeras…. It felt wrong to let them remain text on stone. Reading their names aloud was the least I could do. It was also all I could do.

What makes a life real? Is it being witnessed? Remembered? Named by others after we are gone?

Those thirty-five are remembered. Their names are fixed in stone. People stop. People read. Occasionally, someone speaks them aloud. Streets in the neighborhoods they came from bear their names now. In that sense, they are still held in the minds of the living.

And here I am, sending messages across continents, hoping for a reply that will confirm, in some small way, that I exist. Standing there, the two impulses felt uncomfortably close.

Back in my apartment, the silence was the same as before but altered.

Less like something to fill. More like something to face.

Not empty. Not full.

Just there.