I moved to Paris because the chairs face outwards

Chapter 6: A sweet interlude that lands me in my new home

This is a chapter in my Book Serialisation project. You’re new here? You can start at the beginning and navigate around using this Table of Contents if you like.

Quick recap: This book is about how to live in a collapsing civilisation. We have outlined what collapse is and how and why we’re in it. We’re now playing around with mindsets and ways of being for a bit. The last chapter covered the spirituality space we are necessarily thrust into… you can catch up here.

The audio version is at the bottom, ditto my Writers Notes. These are available only to subscribers. Ditto the conversation where we workshop things together.

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Liminality

“Midway through life’s journey

I woke to find myself in a darkened wood,

Where the right road was wholly lost and gone.”

- Dante

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Liminality is a lovely word. It has an onomatopoeic tinkle to it.  

It describes a time or a space between two things and stems from the Greek for threshold, that place between two rooms, such as a hallway or a doctor’s waiting room. In liminality one door has shut behind us, the next has not opened. And we are left in a fluorescent-lit, eerie no-man’s land.

Moving from childhood to adulthood is liminal. So too, I reckon, perimenopause for women. We’ve shed one biologically (and culturally) determined identity, but we’ve not quite stepped into our next one (Doyenne? Elder? Warrior? Muse? Radical?). We’re in a pause, an anteroom of our power.

When a relationship ends, and you are no longer in love, but you haven’t committed to leaving yet, this is a liminal time. I think mourning the death of a loved one is also liminal. They’ve gone, but we haven’t found our new way of living without them yet.

In liminality we grieve what has passed or died, as well as fear what’s ahead. Teen angst expresses this tug of war – a raging, hormonally charged sense of loss is pit against the overwhelm of the responsibilities and expectations that start to flood in. Which is why we once had initiation ceremonies that helped us traverse this ambivalence.

Similarly, pagan celebrations held us as we moved from season to season. Passover and wakes served similar hand-holding purposes. Many Indigenous cultures have managed to hold onto these rituals, but most other societies abandoned theirs over decades of progressive de-collectivism. Kids now pass into adulthood awkwardly, reluctantly and with mental illness; they turn to Andrew Tate and dark online fantasy worlds.

Today we move between seasons and stages of life – and, now, technologically accelerated epochs - unbuttressed and going at the wrong pace for our delicate nervous systems, forever overwhelmed and viscerally terrified of all the unknown unknowns. [Writing this just now makes me feel such compassion for all the grappling humans!] We struggle to process the grief, the fear and the fluorescent-lit eeriness. Yes, it’s the wrong pace! We are bone-heavy, reflective creatures, we need to pause together, to look at each other and fathom things collectively.

I think this is at the heart of our global trauma.

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I have found it helpful to see our current moment as a liminality.

We are between an old world, or an old “normal”, that is dying, and a new world that’s yet to become. It feels like a suspended anticipation, an incapable-of-being-named period in time in which we find it impossible to look forward to where we are heading and to tell our children how things will go.

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“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.”

- Antonio Gramsci

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“If you’re staying attached to the status quo right now, you will be unhinged, because there is nothing there.”

-

Liz Lenkinski

¹

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Now, there’s a tendency to regard inbetweeness as a nothingness (no-thingness) that we flail around in like a Coyote suspended over a terrifying, infinite chasm, legs pedalling madly, reaching for a solid edge.

But it’s way more helpful to see liminality as a convergence, or emergence. I visualise a Venn diagram.

Per the above, liminality is still connected to the “No Longer” past, from which we can selectively draw what we cherished and carry it into a “not yet” future that we are actually already in, that we are becoming and that we creating right now by just being in it. The philosophical and scientific concept of emergence comes into play here. Emergence describes when a system, or a bunch of systems, gets to a level of complexity such that its “becoming” is more than the sum of the parts from which it emerges. It takes on a life of its own we can neither predict nor control.

You’ll notice that where we are right now - in that “liminal” convergence - is shaded darker, and definitely not a no-thing. Indeed, ours is a heavy, dark and potent time in which the consequences of our choices, I feel, will be more profound than ever before in determining what emerges.

Bref², I don’t think we are in a time we just wait out or hope our way through.

No, no.

*

Previous liminal eras have been notably potent.

The philosopher Karl Jaspers singled out the volatile “in-between time” in history from about the 8th to the 3rd century BCE and called it the “axial age”. He describes it as an “interregnum between two ages of great empire…a deep breath bringing the most lucid consciousness”. Jaspers argued that the suspended era of uncertainty was marked by radical creativity where the "unquestioned grasp on life is loosened" and "man asked radical questions".

The list of contributions that spouted from this period is epic: Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, scepticism, nihilism, Taoism and Confucianism, Sophism, Plato, Socrates, Homer and the economic market. “Everything implied by these names developed during these few centuries almost simultaneously in China, India and the West,” Jasper’s wrote in The Origin and Goal of History.

I’ll get to another potent liminal time in a minute, but for now I want to plant this: This era we straddle is hard; we were, as Stephen Jenkinson tells us, “born to a troubled time”. But we were also born to an incredibly stunning time.

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The Chinese word for “crisis” - wei ji - also means “opportunity”.

The English word “crisis” stems from the Greek krisis, which also means “to decide”.

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I just had this (after)thought. Adolescence is liminal. We have been somewhat stuck in a liminal not-quite-adulting era for decades. The challenge before us, then, is to “decide” to emerge into a full collective adulthood.

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At some point in this journey, I clipped and saved a line written by William Davies, author of This Is Not Normal: The Collapse of Liberal Britain: “To experience a crisis is to inhabit a world that is temporarily up for grabs”. Yes!

*

And so it was, at 49 and midway through my adult years, I moved to Paris. I was also partway into writing this book. And entering peri-menopause. Fully liminal stuff!

Why Paris? I’m asked this a lot. Because, I like to say, the chairs face outwards.

Paris propre is a very…human city. More than two million people cram into an area that can be crossed on foot in two hours (seriously!). Most locals live in tiny apartments that force them onto the street to do their “humaning” in terraces and bars. Here they sit in a challenging intimacy, shoulder to shoulder, in wicker chairs that, yes, largely, face out to the world.

This set-up, I tell anyone those who ask for more detail, infuses a curiosity in its people. The French watch the world from their wicker chairs, not, I find, in an up and down way. Like many of Latin heritage, they look into your face, often wanting to catch your eye and get what you’re about. As a woman of a certain age you feel the difference.

Of course, the French have a global reputation for being aloof. But I think this amounts to a misinterpretation of what is a proud adherence to very particular rituals, all geared - in my opinion - at maintaining civil, curious connection. When you don’t play to these morays, the French are affronted. So, when you walk into a boulangerie, it’s expected that you first volley off a few bonjours, ca vas and so on and in a sing-songy voice. Perhaps you enquire about today’s country loaf, ask after the baker’s mother. Only then should one launch into one’s order. To bark your croissant request without this dance of pleasantries will be met with a dismissive (or aloof) reaction that can shatter some anglophiles.

Reader: I think this paragraph below should be cut, but I’ve left it here in this instance because I figure some of you might find it interesting.

The French also appear to argue a lot. They will go hard at a philosophical or political issue with you. Equally, they’ll challenge an everyday banality. But, again, I find it’s invariably about curiously establishing a truth, gleaning your take, making sense of it all. In my first week in Paris I met Anne - a subscriber here - who’d reached out to me via Instagram, offering to help me with apartment logistics. When we ordered coffee we had to ask for a non-disposible cup (there was an issue with the dishwasher that day and they were serving some coffees in single use). At first we got hit with a non. But we explained we were committed single use abolitionists and that we’d happily wait until the machine was fixed. Ah, bien sûr said the barista and commended us for caring. Anne explained to me after, non does not mean no in France. “It means up for a robust [curious] discussion.”

*

Dr Jud Brewer, who made those observations about kindness (in the previous chapter), has also studied how curiosity affects the brain for more than 20 years. Curiosity, like kindness, he says, opens up important parts of our brains that get us more agile, adaptable, better able to solve problems, and less anxious. Of course, our culture has become decidedly less curious and it’s been shown that this is threatening our collective tolerance, innovation levels and the democratic process. Jud told me, however, curiosity can also be (re)cultivated by simply being curious about everything, including our fear, our anger, whatever it is you might be feeling reading this very paragraph right now.

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So, it turns out I’m writing this very section sitting next to two youngish men in a small terrace (on chairs facing outwards) on the Left Bank’s Rue Mazarine. One of them leans across and says in French, “What, are you writing, a book or something?”. He’s not mocking; he’s found an excuse to connect. Indeed, I am, I say. We talk about the gist of this very book we’re working our way through and they insist on buying me an apero.

I go back to my writing, but a few minutes later I notice one of the men crying. I can just make out that it’s over an unrequited love. His friend sits quietly and listens. They don’t touch their beers. After some time the crying has become loud sobbing. The friend is nodding and holding the other’s hand. I can’t stand it, I start to cry, too. I reach over and grab both their hands. “I’m so sorry,” I say. The distressed guy looks up at me. He (actually!) blows a snot bubble but ignores it and says in English, “We’re all just trying to work it out”.

We really are. And we’re all so tender. We need to nod and grab hands.

*

There were a few other reasons for packing up my life into two suitcases and moving to Paris. I was looking for love and French people, again in my experience, are up for dancing with it in all the ways – problematic, raw, playful. I go on dates with men who like to discuss their “theory of love”. Where men back in Australia, but also in the US and the UK, list their interests on the dating profiles as “salty margaritas” and “taking it easy”, French men cite poets and preferred seduction techniques. The women I meet here are equally penetrating with their curiosity and engagement and send me mixed tape playlists. I also like the vestiges of socialism that seep into everyday life, even the constant protests. And, oddly, I’m drawn to their almost nihilistic proclivity for the present (I struggle to find another explanation for their culture-wide embracing of smoking, wine and long lunches). The French, as I say, are also alive to what they call “collapsologie” – 65 per cent of the French agree with the assertion that "civilization as we know it today will collapse in the years to come".³

I may be presenting a rose-coloured and grossly generalised depiction here. But since first landing in Paris at 18 (I was mugged in Nice and lived “on the streets” of Paris for four weeks while I tried to sort a new passport, money and so on) I’ve found it a place and a people conducive to my particular ache to make sense of it all, to be curious, to engage and to wrestle with competing truths.

I think it’s important we know where these places and people are for us at this juncture in history.

On Sundays I meet the British philosopher AC Grayling, who also lives in Paris, for dinner. AC and I first met at a writer’s festival in Australia and agreed to do just this one day – sit at Parisian terraces facing out to the world, him drinking Chablis, me a Cotes du Rhone, making sense of the world. AC has the mind of someone whose brain evolved remembering details in the absence of search engines. He cites historical moments and pithy quotes while I contribute pop cultural nuances. We sit shoulder to shoulder, and he tells me things like, “Sarah, did you know Rene Descartes’s body was buried over there?”, pointing to the Saint-Germain-de-Pres abbey across the square. “His skull, however, is buried at the Musee de l’Homme  down the road.” He pauses for me to get it. We laugh. It’s perfect, the guy who forever separated our mind from body suffered a final confirmation!⁴

Most weeks we meet at the Cafe Les Deux Magots where the philosophers of the 1920s and 1930s wrote and had fallouts with each other while… sitting in chairs that faced outwards. As it happens, this period between the two world wars - “Les années folles” (the crazy years) - saw many writers and thinkers, particularly women, decamp to Paris. James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Albert Camus, Hannah Arendt, Simone de Beauvoir (who is immortalised at Les Deux Magots with a small plaque above the banquette where she used to write), Jean Paul Sartre, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Josephine Baker, Ernest Hemingway and Martha Gelhorn all fled, or flocked, here.

It was also a supremely liminal time.

The Spanish Flu and WWI had wiped out 100 million people, while another world war and a depression (as well as nuclear threat) loomed. It was a time not too dissimilar to our own. Much of the globe was emerging from pandemic lockdowns that had sent young people into a spin. It had witnessed unfathomable human-caused destruction, which was then met with economic and ideological flux. The economy roared, then crashed. And from such chaos, a bewildered humanity tried to make sense of it all.

The first wave of feminism hit its peak and women were granted the vote. Fascism and communism took hold. And so did existentialism.

In her essay What is Existentialism? Simone de Beauvoir wrote that during this period, various “isms” competed to “respond to the same need: in France and all across Europe the individual is seeking with anguish to find his place in a world turned upside down.” Intellectuals, dictators and spiritualists all scrambled to answer a question that burned: How do we live now? How do we live our lives when none of the old rules apply?

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We ask the same questions today. How do we live now in a world that’s wobbled off its axis?

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De Beauvoir described existentialism as a framework that refused to render us victims to our circumstances, however shitty they might be. The meaning of the world is created by us. It becomes, it emerges, through us. De Beauvoir argued that we do this via our struggle against the very obstacles and oppressions that try to limit us. In other words, the troubles of the world are what lift us to create the meaning we have always sought. I asked AC to check I had this one-paragraph summation correct. He taught existentialism for decades and, if he was pressed, would describe himself as an existentialist. Yep, spot on, he tells me when we met one Sunday evening in early spring.

AC adds that De Beauvoir particularly emphasises that there is absolutely no objective meaning “out there” in the world, no universal answer to cling to. It’s entirely the individual’s responsibility to create their meaning. I ask him if this idea of using struggle to create meaning could also serve us in our current liminality with all the darknesses and absurdities we face. We agree it could. External structures can no longer provide the meaning we seek (if they ever could). The collective is too unwieldly. Our trust in institutions, such as media, the Church, governments and academia, has disintegrated. And so we must find it ourselves. Sartre warned this very responsibility imposes a dreadful “anguish” on us since so very few of us are capable of navigating such an unbound freedom. But all existentialists insist even this struggle provides meaning. I studied existentialism at university and I remember finding this a liberating notion. It took a long time for me to comprehend it. It felt like a riddle, a koan. In many ways it is.

*

I have always found the Algerian outsider Albert Camus (he kept his distance from the “bobo” Deux Magots set and famously had a massive fall-out with Sartre over communism) provided the most helpful wisdoms for navigating how to live “now”. Camus argued life was absurd: it has no intrinsic meaning and yet we still, doggedly, choose to live. Why do we not give up, why do we not kill ourselves in the face of this paradox? Camus’ answer is that the paradox itself forces us into a truly authentic happiness, a “happiness without hope”, funnily enough. This happiness is not predicated on conditions, but on the experience of simply existing in the “implacable grandeur of this life.”

The implacable grandeur of this life. I love this line.

I also love this one from his book The Rebel: “In the depth of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer. And that makes me happy. For it says that no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me, there’s something stronger – something better, pushing right back.”

Finding our invincible summer within ourselves and pushing back no matter how hope-less, how futile, how absurd the situation we find ourselves in, is how we could indeed live now. My sense, dear friends, is that it’s how we will have to.

*

(Interestingly, the French interest in collapsologie has been described by Tech Crunch as “the latest manifestation of French existentialism, updated for the 21st century.. in that …the only way to avoid collapse is to fully see the world in all its complexity.”)

Sarah xx

Audio version:

1. On her Substack about “The Age of Unhingement”.

2. French for “straight up”, “in short”. I like the “brevity” of the word for such instances.

3. 56 % of British and 52 %s of Americans agree.

4. Although you probably didn’t need that spelled out!