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Jesse Curran
The Cities of the Interior
Air India. 2009. Early October, Thursday evening. I’m in the middle seat of the middle seats, sandwiched between my golden retriever boyfriend and a mysterious stranger. It’s a night flight from JFK to Charles De Gaulle. And because it’s October and I’m a grad student flying to Paris with her golden retriever for a long weekend, I’m doing my best to grade essays on the plane. The mysterious stranger glances down at my pile. He says, Oh, Annie Dillard. She was my teacher. So, we start to talk. Tell me about Dillard, Wesleyan, let’s get some of those little Bombay Sapphire bottles and chat about novels and essays and writers and writing until we eventually fall on to a treasured one. Winterson, The Passion. He tells me it’s why he’s on this night flight. For research. For a new book. Winterson’s all over it. What she does with Venice is what he wants to do with Paris. How the city metaphorizes for a way of being in the world. For risk. For art and drama and opera. I tell him it’s my favorite book, my guide to the cities of the interior. So, we talk. He recommends an agency I’ll never contact and a list of writers I’ll go on to read. I’ll come back home and keep hammering away at the PhD. I’ll follow my own path through the forest, dreaming up a book about pilgrims and puritans and the twisted American wilderness metaphorizing for my inner landscape. What I don’t know is how the next day, after a day of jet-lagged Paris wandering, the inevitable Shakespeare and Co. visit will present itself. I’ll buy a book for the stamp in the book, because when one is in Paris for a long weekend, one always buys a book in memory of Sylvia Beach. I’ll choose Winterson’s Atlas fable, her only book I have not yet read. And when I check out, the clerk will say, oh Winterson, she’ll be here tomorrow. And indeed, she will be, for a closed-door event upstairs. The clerk says, if you come by around 8 you might catch her. So, I’ll come back tomorrow and find her just hanging in the store and as I’ve been fortified by a left bank cocktail, I’ll muster the courage to approach her and say sheepishly that her books are on my top shelf, which is another way of saying, they’re the grail. I tell her they’re there next Woolf and Stein and Barnes and the Modernist pantheon, though I imagine this isn’t news to her, that a fan like me places her on the shelf besides the greats, which I know are her greats too. She’ll say thank you and smile and I’ll swiftly exit. I’ll walk out into the night and wonder if the mysterious stranger from the plane, who is no longer a mysterious stranger, will also stumble into her. I’ll think about it for years, like a lucky stone buried deep in my pocket. Like a talisman of some cosmic truth, a sapphire from the deep mines of Ceylon. It will become a figure for the way literature fields magic. From a pilgrim on a creek to a queen of the Parisian night to Atlas holding the weight of the world on his shoulders. I’m telling you stories. Trust me.
About the Writer:
Jesse Curran is a poet, essayist, scholar, and teacher who lives in Northport, NY. Her essays and poems have appeared in dozens of literary journals including About Place, Ruminate, After the Art, Allium, Blueline, and Ruminate. She teaches in the Department of English at SUNY Old Westbury.
Image: City at Night by Alexandra Ekster (1882-1949). Oil on canvas. 88 x 71 cm. 1913. Public domain.
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