My Father, Montaigne, and the Art of Living (Catapult)

Whenever I’m in Paris, I visit the place on the Left Bank where my father lived while studying abroad in the 1950s. A philosophy student at the Sorbonne, he rented a room on rue Monsieur le Prince, a street off Boulevard Saint-Michel filled with Japanese and Vietnamese restaurants, bookstores, and hotels. Standing in front of my father’s building, I imagine him walking through the tall green doors on his way to a lecture on Socrates or Descartes, wearing his trademark button-down shirt and narrow tie. Sometimes, like my father used to, I stroll to the nearby Jardin du Luxembourg to watch children sail toy boats in the fountain and stylish couples dance to the bandstand orchestra; then I stop in at Café Le Rostand for an espresso. Eventually, I walk down the Boulevard Saint-Michel towards the Seine. Partway along, if you turn right on rue des Écoles, is a bronze statue of sixteenth-century philosopher Michel de Montaigne, facing the Sorbonne…

Read the rest in Catapult.