When we go to another place, what are we hoping to find? I guess it depends on who we are and what we value. Do we want to see different things? Feel different air? I think, to an extent, when we travel we are looking for simple variety, but in a place like this, like Paris, I think there is something more at stake. After all, what is the mythology of this place? There is more than steel and stone on the banks of the Seine. It is a city of intellectual vibrancy probably unmatched through the entire world.

The other day we went to St. Germain de Pres in the 6th arrondissement of Paris and we came across Les Deux Magots, a self-proclaimed “Café Littéraire”. It is an image I am deeply familiar with, of the exchange of ideas, of the coffee-steamed air practically electrified by great minds. The great minds of the 20th century gathered here. For the first time I got more than just a hazy image of the places these people I admire frequented in Paris. And past the initial reference towards this place, I found it to be just another cafe. It was in a beautiful area, but there wasn’t anything particularly inspiring or enervating about the place itself.

I realized, then, that these communities of intellectuals whose works have made me cry and laugh and lose sleep were not indeed attracted to Les Deux Magots. They were attracted to each other. Many of the people I am thinking of were expats (James Joyce, Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein) who, to come here, had to forsake their home countries and the familiarity and safety those places bring, all in the name of finding likeminded people. I am comforted by this idea of intellectual communities as centered around people, instead of places. It makes me think that of all the wonderfully smart, lively, courageous people I have surrounded myself with, we have created our own little circle of minds in Los Angeles. There is nothing inherent about Paris that makes these kinds of ideas possible (or if there is, it’s probably negligible), but there is a spirit of freedom that we must allow ourselves to have. Because of this mythology, it can be easy to say that the ideas born here have extra weight. But it is a fact in the birth of the ideas that they must be allowed to hold their whole weight. One must allow for the risk of minor pretension to let the truly genius ideas be set free. One must never equivocate or shut themselves down through doubt. The greatest inhibition towards intellectual freedom is self-doubt, and to be immersed in a place like Paris, to be counted among such a people, I don’t know how anyone could doubt themselves.