I left a piece of my heart in Paris 📌

  Celine

        (imitating Nina Simone)

Yo, baby, you gonna miss that plane

                     Jesse

I know.

                   They both smile.

                   Fade out.

The last scene from Richard Linklater’s “Before Sunset” .

I rewatched Before Sunset sitting in a dim-lit AirBnB’s sofa bed in Paris.I love watching movies that were filmed in the city I am visiting. And then I actively search and visit those filming locations. Cinema has been an essential part of my emotional upbringing and the idea of being in a location that I have only seen on the screen in movies before is fascinating to me.

The only reason I ever wanted to go to Paris, France was Shakespeare and Company- the bookstore. And I only knew the bookstore from my favorite movie of the Before Trilogy.

I couldn’t believe that I was going to visit Shakespeare and Co. the next morning. Google Maps showed it was just 20 minutes away.

Dec 27th, 2022

I was up before sunrise. My outfit prepared the night before, my brain and body wide awake and ready to soak this special experience in. I was very emotional as I made my way to the bookstore that sunny, Parisian, winter morning. There was a line-up of visitors outside but it didn’t take me too long to set my foot inside the store.

This was it.

I made it.

If this were a movie, the background noise would slowly fade, the camera would focus on me, following me as I perused the walls of the bookstore.

I already knew the books I was going to buy from there. The dreamer in me could spend every Euro I owned and bought a lot of them but I didn’t want to buy books that I knew I’d find in Canada. I spent about two hours inside - playing with the piano, sitting and reading across the window from which you can see Notre Dame.

The section of children’s books had a wall filled with visitor’s handwritten notes. One of the other corners also had an antique typewriter.

Would I drop everything in my life to live and work in that bookstore?

Yes.

In fact, the answer is a louder yes after finishing “Shakespeare and Company, Paris: A History of the Rag & Bone Shop of the Heart”.

It's now been three days since I finished the book and it turns out my dream about the bookstore is not over yet. The dream now is to go to Paris again one summer to only spend time at the bookstore as a tumbleweed.

“Throughout his life, George Whitman traveled the world as a self-proclaimed "tumbleweed," blowing from place to place, sheltered by the grace of strangers.

Wishing to repay the generosity he encountered during his journeys, George founded the bookstore in 1951 with the motto "be not inhospitable to strangers lest they be angels in disguise" and threw open the doors to all sorts of writers, artists, and intellectuals who sought refuge.

In exchange, Tumbleweeds (as guests came to be called) were asked only to "read a book a day," help out in the shop for a couple of hours, and write a single-page autobiography for George's archives. Today, the bookshop has housed an estimated 30,000 Tumbleweeds…”

Jesse, played by Ethan Hawke in the Before Trilogy, was a tumbleweed himself. It was his idea to film the beginning of Before Sunset in Shakespeare and Co. In the book that contains the accounts of many tumbleweeds from across the globe, Ethan Hawke says “ Every day, countless tourists line up to visit Notre- Dame. My church is Shakespeare and Company”

George Whitman, the founder of the bookstore and the vagabond who was ‘mad’ enough to create what he called to be “a socialist utopia masquerading as a bookstore”, was a dreamer. It's not surprising that he did not build his dream in America despite being born there. America reeks of capitalism and he was anything but a capitalist. This bookstore did not have a cash register until the early 2000s because this man was not running this store for profit - he was running it for the love of books, literature and a community that allowed dreamers to dream and the artists to pursue their art.

For someone like me, who is a romantic vagabond at heart but a realist at the same time (living a documented, sincere immigrant life with a corporate job in the robotic North America), knowing that Shakespeare and Company exists and having the privilege to have visited the bookstore has been a celestial experience. I will remain eternally grateful to the universe for making it happen and I hope to go back there soon.

https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com