Père Lachaise in Paris, or Montparnasse. Alta Mesa in Palo Alto. These cemeteries tell the truth.
Not the sanitized, Wikipedia version. The real story. Who mattered. Who got forgotten. Who died broke after changing the world. Who lived exactly as they wanted and paid for it.
These aren’t just burial grounds, they’re archives of ambition, failure, genius, and compromise. The people here didn’t play it safe. They made art, started movements, challenged power, loved the wrong people, said the wrong things, lived too hard, died too young.
Some got their flowers while they were alive. Most didn’t. The recognition came later, always too late, still too little, long after they were already in the ground.
For some reason or another, these people were important to me. They influenced me. Changed how I saw things. Changed what I wanted to be, what I wanted others to be. A writer who found beauty in decay. A photographer who saw Paris at night. A playwright who treated an eight-year-old like an actual person. A war photographer who refused to look away. Each in there own unique way showed me what was possible, not the safe version, the real version. The one that costs something.
Visiting these graves? It’s not about saying thanks. It’s about meditating on my own existence. On the meaning of it all, if there is any. On my failures. My successes, such as they are. On what I’ve done and what I haven’t done and what time I have left.
Graveyards make you confront yourself. Honestly. Urgently. You can’t bullshit when you’re standing in front of a tombstone. These people, brilliant, flawed, human, ran out of time. So will you. So will I. What am I doing with the time I have? What matters? What’s just noise?
Standing there with my heroes buried in front of me, I’m really asking: what the fuck am I doing with my life?
They’re inspiration and cautionary tales, both. The ones who changed everything but died broke. The ones who compromised and survived. The ones who refused to bend and paid for it. The ones who burned bright and burned out at 27. The ones who kept going into their eighties. Success and failure, genius and self-destruction, all of it’s here under the stones.
What path do you take? What’s worth the cost? What do you refuse to give up, even if it destroys you?
The graves don’t answer. They just ask the question, over and over…
This is a lifelong project. There are hundreds more graves I want to visit. Hundreds more people who mattered in some way to me, who changed things for me, who deserve to be remembered. I’ll keep going as long as I can.
Because existence is fragile. We’re all temporary. The people buried here, geniuses, revolutionaries, artists, they’re gone. What remains are the works they left behind and these stones marking where they ended up. That’s it. That’s all any of us get.
Gerta Pohorylle. Born August 1st, 1910. Dead July 26th, 1937. Twenty-six years old.
German Jew. War photographer. But before she was Gerda Taro, she and Endre Friedmann, another photographer, another refugee, cooked up a scheme. They invented Robert Capa. A fictional American photographer whose work they could sell for more money because, well, Americans got paid better than a couple of broke European Jews in Paris.
They both worked under the Capa alias at first. A lot of that early iconic work? Hers. His. Theirs. Hard to say where one ended and the other began.
Then they split the alias. She became Gerda Taro. He kept Capa. They started publishing independently, but they stayed together, professionally, romantically, messily. He proposed. She said no. They kept going anyway.
She covered the Spanish Civil War with a camera when most people had the good sense to run the other direction. First woman photojournalist killed on the frontline. That’s the distinction. That’s what she gets remembered for, not just her work, but how she died doing it.
They buried her at Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris. Alberto Giacometti designed her grave. The sculptor made a falcon, Horus, the Egyptian god, to mark where she’s buried.
The epitaph is in French and Catalan: “So nobody will forget your unconditional struggle for a better world.”
Twenty-six years old. Camera in hand. Died trying to show people what war actually looks like.
Capa became a legend. Taro became a footnote for decades. But she was there first. She helped invent him.
Perhaps the only misplaced curiosity is that which persists in trying to find out here, on this side of death, what lies beyond the grave.
Colette, Le Pur et l’Impur (The Pure and the Impure), 1932
Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette. One name, like she didn’t need anything else. French writer, novelist, performer, scandal. She wrote about desire, about women’s lives, about the body and pleasure and all the things polite society pretended didn’t exist. Gigi. The Claudine novels. Fifty novels, dozens of short stories. She didn’t stop.
She married three times. Had affairs with men and women. Performed in music halls, half-naked, while her first husband sold her books under his own name. She took the work back eventually, reclaimed it, kept writing.
She lived exactly as she wanted, which in early 20th century France, hell, anywhere, meant pissing a lot of people off.
When she died in 1954, they gave her a state funeral. First French woman writer to get one. The Catholic Church refused to participate because of how she’d lived. Their loss.
Now she’s here, in Père Lachaise, same cemetery as Gerda Taro, as Oscar Wilde, as Edith Piaf, as so many others who lived and died on their own terms.
“Hello father, mother
Hello dear parents,
And of course Céline
Whom my heart so dearly loves”
His father answers:
“But your Céline is dead,
But your Céline is dead
She died calling out to you
Her body is underground
And her soul in heaven”
Then the gentleman goes
To cry on her grave:
“Céline, my Céline
Talk, talk to me!
My heart despairs
Of not seeing you anymore…”
Céline answers him:
“My mouth is filled with earth,
My mouth is filled with earth…
Yours is filled with love!
I still cherish the hope
Of seeing you again someday…”
Edith Piaf
Edith Piaf. A few steps away from Colette… a world apart.
Four foot eight. Eighty pounds soaking wet. A voice that could break your heart from across a room, across a continent, across seventy years.
Born on a sidewalk in Belleville, or so the story goes. Raised in poverty, sang in the streets for coins. Got discovered, became a star, became the star. La Môme Piaf. The Little Sparrow.
‘La Vie en Rose.’ ‘Non, je ne regrette rien.’ I regret nothing. That one’s the kicker, because her life was nothing but regret. Dead lovers. Addiction. Car crashes. Pain that would’ve flattened anyone else.
She kept singing.
Died at 47. Worn out, used up, but on her own terms. The Catholic Church refused her a funeral mass too, seeing a pattern here, but thousands showed up anyway. They lined the streets. They knew what she was.
At her grave now, it’s quieter. The flowers people leave, the notes, the tributes. Everyone wants a piece of her, still.
That voice. That voice. It came from somewhere deep, somewhere most people do not want to go. She went there every night and came back with songs that made you feel alive and destroyed at the same time.
No regrets. She meant it.
“My friends, I address you all tonight as you truly are; wizards, mermaids, travelers, adventurers, magicians… Come and dream with me”
Georges Méliès, filmmaker, A Trip to the Moon
Georges Méliès. The guy who invented movie magic before anyone knew what the fuck that was.
Stage magician. Owned a theater in Paris, made people believe in impossible things. Then 1895, he sees the Lumière brothers’ films and his brain explodes. Gets a camera. Starts making movies. But not boring shit, trains arriving at stations, workers leaving factories. Hell no. He wants magic.
He figures out stop-motion by accident when his camera jams. Realizes he can make things appear and disappear. Multiple exposures. Dissolves. Hand-painted color, frame by goddamn frame. He builds sets that look like fever dreams. Creates entire worlds.
1902: A Trip to the Moon. That rocket hitting the moon in the eye. That’s his. Five hundred films. He invented special effects. Invented cinema as art, as hallucination, as the impossible made possible.
Then the world chewed him up and spit him out.
Feature films. Hollywood. Bigger budgets, different tastes. His theater goes under. His films? Most of them melted down during World War I. For boot heels. For fucking boot heels for soldiers.
By the 1920s he’s running a toy stand in Montparnasse station. The man who showed the world how to dream on film, hawking wind-up toys to commuters who don’t know who he is, don’t care, just want to catch their train.
They rediscovered him in the ’30s. Gave him a medal, some recognition. He died in 1938.
Too little, too late.
It’s always too little… and too late.
It is the human habit to think in centuries from a grandparent to a grandchild because it just does take about a hundred years for things to cease to have the same meaning as they did before.
Gertrude Stein, Narration: Four Lectures by Gertrude Stein
Gertrude Stein shares the grave with Alice B. Toklas. Of course she does.
American writer, poet, expat. Left Pittsburgh, left America, landed in Paris in 1903 and never really left. Set up shop at 27 rue de Fleurus with Alice and held court. A salon. Everyone came through. Picasso. Matisse. Hemingway when he was young and broke and hungry. Fitzgerald. They all showed up, drank her booze, looked at her art collection, listened to her talk.
And she talked. Brilliant, difficult, impossible. She wrote like no one else, experimental, repetitive, maddening. “Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.” People still argue about what the hell she meant. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, which is really her autobiography but told through Alice’s voice because why make it simple?
She and her brother Leo, they championed the artists no one understood yet. Bought their work when they were nobody. Picassos, Matisses, Cézannes hanging on the walls when these guys were still struggling. She had an eye. She had taste. She had ego the size of France.
Leo eventually split. Took his share of the collection and moved back to California. Palo Alto. So some of the greatest art of the 20th century, paintings that would later sell for tens of millions, ended up in fucking Palo Alto because of a sibling rivalry.
World War II, Gertrude stayed. Jewish woman in occupied France, and she stayed. How? Connections. Luck. Compromises that still make people uncomfortable. She survived.
Died in 1946. Alice lived another twenty years, lost and broke, the art collection sold off to pay bills.
Now they’re buried together. Stein and Toklas. Forever.
Love, genius, compromise, survival. Masterpieces in Palo Alto. It’s all connected.
Me voici devant tous un homme plein de sens
Connaissant la vie et de la mort ce qu’un vivant peut connaître
Ayant éprouvé les douleurs et les joies de l’amour
Ayant su quelquefois imposer ses idées
Connaissant plusieurs langages
Ayant pas mal voyagé
Ayant vu la guerre dans l’Artillerie et l’lnfanterie
Blessé à la tête trépané sous le chloroforme
Ayant perdu ses meilleurs amis dans l’effroyable lutte
Je sais d’ancien et de nouveau autant qu’un homme seul pourrait des deux savoirYou see before you a man in his right mind
Worldly-wise and with access to death
Having tested the sorrow of love and its ecstasies
Having sometimes even astonished the professors
Good with languages
Having travelled a great deal
Having seen battle in the Artillery and the Infantry
Wounded in the head trepanned under chloroform
Having lost my best friends in the butchery
As much of antiquity and modernity as can be known I know
Guillaume Apollinaire, “La jolie rousse” (The Pretty Redhead), line 1; p. 133.
Guillaume Apollinaire. Born Wilhelm Albert Włodzimierz Apolinary Kostrowicki in 1880. Try saying that three times fast. He didn’t. Changed it to something French, something that rolled off the tongue, something that fit.
Poet. Playwright. Art critic. He was there, in the middle of it all. Paris, early 1900s. Knew Picasso, Gertrude Stein, all of them. He championed Cubism when people thought it was garbage. Defended the avant-garde. Coined the term “surrealism.” He saw where art was going before anyone else did.
His poetry broke rules. Threw out punctuation, experimented with form, made shapes on the page, calligrammes, he called them. Words arranged as pictures. Nobody was doing that.
Then World War I happens. He volunteers. Fights for France even though he wasn’t born French. 1916: shrapnel to the head. He survives the wound, barely.
November 9th, 1918. Two days before the Armistice. Two goddamn days before the war ends. Spanish flu kills him. Thirty-eight years old.
He almost made it. Almost saw the end of the war he volunteered for, almost saw the peace, almost got to keep writing.
Almost.
Apollinaire made something. Then he was gone.
We have not died in vain
Honoré Daumier, title/caption in Daumier’s print; in the last publication of ‘La Caricature’, 27 August 1835.from: Daumier, the Man and the Artist, Michael Sadleir; Halton and Truscott Smith LTD, London, 1924, p. 9
Honoré Daumier. French printmaker, caricaturist, painter. Born 1808. Died 1879, broke and nearly blind.
Four thousand lithographs over his career. Four thousand. Satirical cartoons ripping apart French politics, the bourgeoisie, the legal system, everyone who had it coming. He drew fat lawyers bilking clients. Politicians as pigs. The king as a bloated monster swallowing the wealth of France.
That last one got him six months in prison. 1832. Drew King Louis-Philippe as Gargantua, literally depicting him as a giant creature eating money and shitting out government favors. They locked him up for it. Six months. Didn’t stop him.
He kept drawing. Kept lampooning. The powerful, the corrupt, the self-satisfied bourgeois assholes who ran everything. He saw what they were and he put it on paper for everyone to see.
You know what he got for it? Not much. Died poor. Went blind at the end. His sight… the thing he needed to do his work… just… gone.
After he died, suddenly everyone realized he was a genius. Museums bought his work. Critics called him a master. Too fucking late. Like all the ones who told the truth, paid for it, and got their flowers when they couldn’t smell them anymore.
That’s how it works.
To seek in nature the fairest forms and to find the movement which expresses the soul of these forms — this is the art of the dancer. It is from nature alone that the dancer must draw his inspirations, in the same manner as the sculptor, with whom he has so many affinities. Rodin has said: “To produce good sculpture it is not necessary to copy the works of antiquity; it is necessary first of all to regard the works of nature, and to see in those of the classics only the method by which they have interpreted nature.” Rodin is right; and in my art I have by no means copied, as has been supposed, the figures of Greek vases, friezes and paintings. From them I have learned to regard nature, and when certain of my movements recall the gestures that are seen in works of art, it is only because, like them, they are drawn from the grand natural source.
My inspiration has been drawn from trees, from waves, from clouds, from the sympathies that exist between passion and the storm, between gentleness and the soft breeze, and the like, and I always endeavour to put into my movements a little of that divine continuity which gives to the whole of nature its beauty and its life.
Isadora Duncan, As quoted in Modern Dancing and Dancers, 1912 by John Ernest Crawford Flitch, p. 105.
Isadora Duncan. Born in San Francisco, 1877. Died in Nice, 1927, strangled by her own scarf.
She invented modern dance. Barefoot, flowing tunics, hair loose. While everyone else was doing rigid ballet bullshit, she was moving like a human being, free, natural, expressive. Danced to Beethoven, to Chopin. Made it look like breathing.
Free love. Bohemian life. Had kids out of wedlock, didn’t care what anyone thought. Lived in Europe, danced for packed houses, changed everything about how people understood movement and the body.
1913: her two children, Deirdre and Patrick, drown in the Seine. The car they’re in with their nanny stalls on a bridge, rolls backward into the river. Both kids gone. Just like that.
She never really recovered. Kept dancing, kept living, but something broke that day and didn’t come back.
September 14th, 1927. Nice, France. She’s riding in an open car, wearing a long silk scarf. Her signature. She says “Adieu, mes amis. Je vais à la gloire!”
“Farewell, my friends. I go to glory!”
The scarf catches in the wheel. Snaps her neck instantly. Fifty years old.
The thing that made her iconic, that flowing, dramatic scarf, killed her in the most absurd, horrible way possible.
Genius. Tragedy. A death so perfectly, cruelly ironic it almost feels made up.
But it’s not.
Death makes angels of us all
and gives us wings
where we had shoulders
smooth as raven’s
claws
Jim Morrison, An American Prayer, 1978
The Lizard King. Mr. Mojo Risin. Dead in a Paris bathtub, July 3rd, 1971.
The Doors. Venice Beach. UCLA film school dropout who could write, who could sing, who looked like a Greek god and sounded like he was channeling something ancient and dangerous. Leather pants, no shirt, poetry and rock and roll and sex and death all wrapped up in one beautiful, doomed package.
He wanted to be a poet. A serious artist. Instead he became a rock star, which meant everyone wanted a piece of him and nobody gave a shit about the poetry. The audiences wanted the spectacle, the arrests, the controversy, the chaos.
By the time he got to Paris, he was done. Bloated, bearded, trying to disappear into the city, trying to write, trying to be something other than Jim Morrison, rock god.
July 3rd. Found dead in the bathtub of his apartment at 17 rue Beautreillis. Pam Courson, his girlfriend, found him. She’d be dead three years later. Heroin.
Now his grave is the most visited in the cemetery. Fans leave joints, bottles of whiskey, love notes, graffiti. The neighbors, Chopin, Balzac, Proust, must love that.
Twenty-seven years old. The same age as Pigpen.
The poetry’s still there if anyone wants to read it.
Most people just want the myth.
If at least, time enough were alloted to me to accomplish my work, I would not fail to mark it with the seal of Time, the idea of which imposed itself upon me with so much force to-day, and I would therein describe men, if need be, as monsters occupying a place in Time infinitely more important than the restricted one reserved for them in space, a place, on the contrary, prolonged immeasurably since, simultaneously touching widely separated years and the distant periods they have lived through — between which so many days have ranged themselves — they stand like giants immersed in Time.
Marcel Proust, The Past Recaptured, 1927
Marcel Proust. 1871 to 1922. Fifty-one years, most of them spent indoors.
Asthmatic. Sickly. Spent the last years of his life in a cork-lined bedroom in Paris, writing in bed, sleeping during the day, working at night. Obsessed with memory, with time, with how the past lives inside us whether we want it to or not.
In Search of Lost Time. Seven volumes. 3,000 pages, give or take. One of the longest novels ever written. Took him fourteen years. He died before he finished editing it.
Everyone knows the madeleine. The little cake dipped in tea that unlocks his entire childhood. Taste as time machine. Flavor as memory. That moment, that’s Proust. The idea that the past isn’t gone, it’s just waiting for the right taste, the right smell, the right sensation to bring it all flooding back.
He wrote about aristocratic French society, love, jealousy, art, homosexuality… coded, careful, because this was early 1900s France and you couldn’t just say it. He said it anyway, just in a way that required paying attention.
The first volume? Rejected by publishers. André Gide at Gallimard turned it down without reading it. Proust had to self-publish. Later, Gide admitted it was the biggest mistake of his career.
Now it’s considered one of the greatest novels ever written. Modernist masterpiece. Essential. The kind of book people say they’ve read but haven’t.
The sickly kid who barely left his room wrote 3,000 pages about memory and time and everything that matters.
The madeleine. That fucking madeleine. He understood something the rest of us spend our whole lives trying to figure out.
On ne meurt qu’une fois; et c’est pour si longtemps!
We die only once, and for such a long time!
Molière, Le Dépit Amoureux , 1656, Act V, sc. iii
Molière. Jean-Baptiste Poquelin if you want to get technical. 1622 to 1673. French playwright, actor, the guy who invented modern comedy and pissed off everyone who mattered while doing it.
He wrote satire. Sharp, vicious, brilliant. Went after the Church, the aristocracy, the hypocrisy of French society. Tartuffe, about a religious con man, got him in so much shit with the Catholic Church they banned it. Twice. He kept rewriting it, kept pushing. Louis XIV loved him, which was the only reason he didn’t end up in prison.
Actor too. Ran his own theater company. Performed in his own plays, which back then was considered low-class. Actors were barely above prostitutes in the social hierarchy.
February 17th, 1673. He’s on stage performing The Imaginary Invalid. Playing a hypochondriac. The irony is so thick you could choke on it. He collapses during the fourth performance. They get him home. He dies that night. Coughing up blood.
Here’s the thing: because he was an actor, and because he died without renouncing the profession, the Church refused to bury him in sacred ground. His widow had to beg the king to intervene. Finally, they let him be buried. At night. In secret. In an area of the cemetery reserved for unbaptized infants.
The guy who made France laugh. Buried like a criminal.
Later they moved him here. Gave him a proper grave.
Too little, too late.
Again. Always too late.
But do not all these miracles [the steam engine, the electric light, the telephone, the phonograph, the radio, bacteriology, anesthesiology, psychophysiology] pale when compared to the most astonishing and disturbing one of all, that one which seems finally to endow man himself with the divine power of creation: the power to give physical form to the insubstantial image that vanishes as soon as it is perceived, leaving no shadow in the mirror, no ripple on the surface of the water? (1900)
Nadar
Nadar. Gaspard-Félix Tournachon. 1820 to 1910. Ninety years. The bastard did everything.
Photographer, caricaturist, journalist, novelist, balloonist. Pick a lane? Fuck that. He did it all.
Portraits. That’s what he’s known for. Shot everyone: Baudelaire, George Sand, Sarah Bernhardt, Dumas, Berlioz. All the artists and writers and actors of 19th century Paris came to his studio. He didn’t just take their picture. He captured something. Made them look human and iconic at the same time.
First photographer to shoot from a hot air balloon. Aerial photography before anyone knew what that was. Built his own balloon… Le Géant, The Giant. Thing was massive. Took it up, looked down, saw Paris from above, took pictures.
First to photograph the Paris catacombs and sewers using artificial light. Down in the tunnels with the bones and the rats and the shit, dragging equipment, making it work. Nobody else was doing that.
1874: his studio at 35 Boulevard des Capucines hosts the first Impressionist exhibition. Monet, Renoir, Degas, all of them. They couldn’t get a gallery, so Nadar gave them space. Changed art history in his fucking photography studio.
Jules Verne based a character on him. That’s how larger-than-life this guy was.
Lived to 89. Died in 1910, having seen it all, done it all, photographed it all.
He probably knew half the people he’s buried with. Photographed most of them.
Ninety years. Most people don’t do in ninety years what he did in ten.
Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one’s head, and listen to silence. To have no yesterday, and no tomorrow. To forget time, to forgive life, to be at peace.
Oscar Wilde, The Canterville Ghost, 1887
Irish. Brilliant. Flamboyant. Dead at 46 in a cheap Paris hotel room, broke and broken.
Six foot three in Victorian England. You couldn’t miss him. Didn’t want to miss him. He walked into a room and owned it.
Playwright. Poet. Novelist. The Picture of Dorian Gray. The Importance of Being Earnest. Witty as hell. Sharp. Dangerous. Said things like “I can resist everything except temptation” and meant it.
Lived openly. Loved openly. Men, specifically, which in Victorian England was a crime. Not just socially unacceptable… an actual crime.
1895: the Marquess of Queensberry, father of Wilde’s lover Lord Alfred Douglas, publicly accuses him of being a sodomite. Wilde sues for libel. Massive mistake. The trial exposes everything. He’s arrested, tried, convicted of “gross indecency.”
Two years hard labor. Reading Gaol. They broke him. Physically, mentally, spiritually. The guy who wrote comedies about upper-class British society spent two years doing hard labor in prison for loving the wrong person.
Released in 1897. Went to Paris. Wrote The Ballad of Reading Gaol. Lived in poverty under an assumed name. Three years later, November 30th, 1900, he’s dying of meningitis in the Hôtel d’Alsace.
Legend says his last words were “Either that wallpaper goes, or I do.” Probably bullshit, but it sounds like him.
Dead at 46. Buried here. His tomb, designed by Jacob Epstein, a modernist sphinx, became covered in lipstick kisses from admirers. Thousands of them. They had to put up a glass barrier to stop people from destroying it with love.
Persecuted. Imprisoned. Exiled. Died in poverty. All for being himself.
Victorian England got its pound of flesh. The world lost a genius because he loved men.
And, curiously, he felt that he was something, somebody, precisely and simply because of that cold threat of death. The terror of the white world had left no doubt in him about his worth; in fact, that white world had guaranteed his worth in the most brutal and dramatic manner. Most surely he was was something, in the eyes of the white world, or it would not have threatened him as it had. That white world, then, threatened as much as it beckoned. Though he did not know it, he was fatally in love with that white world, in love in a way that could never be cured. That white world’s attempt to curb him dangerously and irresponsibly claimed him for its own.
Richard Wright, The Long Dream, 1958
Born in Mississippi, 1908. Black kid in the Deep South, Jim Crow at its most vicious. Sharecropper’s son. Hunger. Violence. The kind of racism that wasn’t subtle, wasn’t coded, it was a boot on your neck every single day.
He got out. Moved to Memphis, then Chicago. Joined the Communist Party because in the 1930s, if you were Black in America and you wanted to fight the system, that’s where you went. They were the only ones talking about racial equality like it actually mattered.
1940: Native Son. Changed everything. Bigger Thomas, a young Black man in Chicago, trapped by poverty and racism, commits murder. Not a hero. Not a victim. A human being destroyed by a system designed to destroy him. The book was raw, brutal, honest. White America lost its fucking mind. Black America finally saw itself on the page.
1945: Black Boy. His autobiography. Growing up in the South, the beatings, the hunger, the constant degradation. No sentimentality. No redemption narrative. Just the truth.
The Communist Party turned on him. Always happens. He left.
1947: he moved to Paris. Exile. Could not live in America anymore. The racism, the surveillance, the pressure, it was killing him. Paris gave him space to breathe, to write, to exist.
November 28th, 1960. Heart attack in Paris. Dead at 52.
Buried here. An American writer who had to leave America to survive, who told the truth about race when no one wanted to hear it.
Native Son is still banned in schools across America. Still too dangerous. Still too true.
That’s how you know he got it right.
I think of death only with tranquility, as an end. I refuse to let death hamper life. Death must enter life only to define it.
Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit, 1944
Whatever one may do, one never realizes anything but a limited work, like existence itself which tries to establish itself through that work and which death also limits. It is the assertion of our finiteness which doubtless gives the doctrine which we have just evoked its austerity and, in some eyes, its sadness. As soon as one considers a system abstractly and theoretically, one puts himself, in effect, on the plane of the universal, thus, of the infinite. … existentialism does not offer to the reader the consolations of an abstract evasion: existentialism proposes no evasion. On the contrary, its ethics is experienced in the truth of life, and it then appears as the only proposition of salvation which one can address to men. Taking on its own account Descartes’ revolt against the evil genius, the pride of the thinking reed in the face of the universe which crushes him, it asserts that, despite his limits, through them, it is up to each one to fulfill his existence as an absolute. Regardless of the staggering dimensions of the world about us, the density of our ignorance, the risks of catastrophes to come, and our individual weakness within the immense collectivity, the fact remains that we are absolutely free today if we choose to will our existence in its finiteness, a finiteness which is open on the infinite. And in fact, any man who has known real loves, real revolts, real desires, and real will knows quite well that he has no need of any outside guarantee to be sure of his goals; their certitude comes from his own drive. There is a very old saying which goes: “Do what you must, come what may.” That amounts to saying in a different way that the result is not external to the good will which fulfills itself in aiming at it. If it came to be that each man did what he must, existence would be saved in each one without there being any need of dreaming of a paradise where all would be reconciled in death.
Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, 1947
Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. Buried together. Of course they are.
Met in 1929 at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. She placed second in the philosophy exam. He placed first. Barely. Some say she should’ve won. They became inseparable.
Existentialism. “Existence precedes essence.” We’re not born with predetermined meaning, we create it. We’re free, radically free, and that freedom is terrifying because it means we’re responsible for everything we do. No god. No fate. Just choice.
Sartre wrote Being and Nothingness. No Exit: “Hell is other people.” Turned down the Nobel Prize in 1964 because he didn’t want to be turned into an institution. The arrogance. The integrity. Both.
De Beauvoir wrote The Second Sex in 1949. Took on gender, womanhood, how society constructs what it means to be female. “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” Launched second-wave feminism before there was a name for it. Changed everything.
Their relationship. Open. Non-traditional. No marriage. No monogamy. Other lovers, always. They called it “essential” love versus “contingent” love. She was essential. Everyone else was contingent. They wrote each other letters constantly, laid it all out… the affairs, the emotions, the philosophy.
May 1968. Student riots in Paris. Sartre’s out there with them, seventy years old, getting tear-gassed, supporting the revolution.
He died in 1980. Fifty thousand people followed his funeral procession. She died six years later, 1986.
Now they’re here. Together. The philosopher and the feminist who refused every convention except their commitment to each other.
Freedom. Choice. Responsibility. Love on their own terms.
They lived it.
My images were surreal simply in the sense that my vision brought out the fantastic dimension of reality. My only aim was to express reality, for there is nothing more surreal than reality itself. If reality fails to fill us with wonder, it is because we have fallen into the habit of seeing it as ordinary.
Brassaï, Brassai, Paris
Born Gyula Halász in Transylvania, 1899. Came to Paris in the 1920s and fell in love with the city at night.
Not the Paris of postcards and tourists. The real Paris. After dark. The streets, the alleys, the brothels, the opium dens, the artists’ studios, the lovers in doorways, the prostitutes waiting under street lamps. The stuff respectable people pretended didn’t exist.
He taught himself photography to capture it. Borrowed a camera, hit the streets after midnight. Paris de Nuit, Paris by Night, published in 1933. Changed everything. Nobody was photographing like this. The graffiti, the working girls, the lovers, the late-night cafés. Foggy streets. Gas lamps. The city breathing.
Friends with Picasso. Henry Miller wrote about him, called him “the eye of Paris.” That’s what he was. He saw what everyone else walked past.
Didn’t just shoot the gutter. Photographed high society too, artists, writers, the ballet. But it’s the night work that matters. The photographs that showed Paris wasn’t just the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre. It was flesh and loneliness and desire and survival.
The guy who made art out of darkness, who loved the city most people only saw in daylight. Gone in 1984.
He saw Paris the way it actually was. Dirty, beautiful, alive.
Bientôt nous plongerons dans les froides ténèbres;
Adieu, vive clarté de nos étés trop courts!Soon we will plunge into the cold darkness;
Farewell, vivid brightness of our too-short summers!
Charles Baudelaire, “Chant d’Automne” (Song of Autumn)
Forty-six years. Most of them spent pissing off the French establishment and not giving a single fuck about it.
Les Fleurs du mal, The Flowers of Evil. 1857. Poetry about sex, death, decay, the city, beauty found in rot and darkness. Not the romantic, sanitized bullshit everyone else was writing. Real. Ugly. Gorgeous.
The government prosecuted him. Obscenity. Six poems banned. They fined him. Didn’t matter. The book became legendary. He’d shown what poetry could do if you stopped pretending life was pretty.
He was the original flâneur, wandering Paris, observing, documenting. Wrote about prostitutes, lesbians, drug addiction, his own self-loathing. Nothing was off limits.
Art critic too. Championed Delacroix, Manet, modern art when no one else got it. He saw things before anyone else did.
Translated Edgar Allan Poe into French. Made Poe famous in Europe. Saw a kindred spirit in the darkness.
His personal life? A disaster. Syphilis. Opium. Hashish. Debt everywhere. Mistress Jeanne Duval, his “Black Venus”, on and off for years.
1866: stroke. Paralyzed, couldn’t speak. Took him a year to die. Awful way to go for someone whose weapon was words.
The poet who found beauty in sewers and sin. Who wrote about the shadow side of Paris when everyone else was writing odes to spring flowers. Died in 1867, broke, destroyed by his own appetites.
He understood something: beauty and decay are the same thing. We’re all rotting. Might as well write about it honestly.
Like everything else I’ve ever done, there was a furious struggle to rise heavenward.
Brâncuși cited in: Finley Eversole, Art and Spiritual Transformation, 2009. p. 329
Born in Romania, 1876. Peasant family. Dirt poor. Walked, walked, from Romania to Paris in 1904. Over a thousand miles on foot because he couldn’t afford the train and he needed to get to where art was happening.
Sculptor. Started working for Rodin, the master, the legend. Quit after two months. Said “Nothing grows in the shadow of tall trees.” Had the balls to walk away from the biggest name in sculpture because he needed to find his own thing.
And he did.
Simplification. Pure form. Take away everything that doesn’t matter. Bird in Space, a bronze sculpture that’s just essence, just flight, just the idea of a bird without any of the literal bullshit. The U.S. Customs didn’t think it was art. Called it a manufactured object. Tried to charge him import duties. 1928, he sued. Won. Established that abstract art was actually art. Had to go to court to prove it.
The Kiss. Sleeping Muse. Endless Column. Each one stripped down to what’s essential. Influenced everyone who came after… minimalism, modernism, all of it traces back to this Romanian guy who walked to Paris.
Lived simply. Studio in Montparnasse. Made his own tools, his own furniture. Everything spare, everything intentional.
Left his entire studio to the French state. The whole thing, preserved exactly as he left it.
Buried here in 1957. The guy who walked a thousand miles to make art. Who quit working for the most famous sculptor in the world to become himself.
Nothing grows in the shadow of tall trees.
He knew that. Lived it.
My work has been essentially a dialogue with death, asking him, “Why? Why?” So only death can silence me. Only death can close my lips.
Eugène Ionesco, The Paris Review interview, 1984
Playwright who looked at the world after World War II and decided the only honest response was absurdity.
Theatre of the Absurd. That’s what Martin Esslin called it, the critic who gave it a name, wrote the book that defined the movement. Esslin was also a professor. My professor, actually. Called me stupid because my dyslexia fucked up my spelling. Guy could identify genius in Ionesco’s work but couldn’t see past a misspelled word to what a student was actually saying. That’s academia for you.
The Bald Soprano, 1950. Characters having conversations that don’t mean anything, saying things that don’t connect, language breaking down into noise. People sitting in a theatre watching it, realizing that’s how we all talk, empty words, social niceties, bullshit filling the air.
Rhinoceros, 1959. Everyone in a small town slowly turns into rhinoceroses. Conformity as disease. Fascism as contagion. One guy refuses to transform, stays human while everyone around him becomes a beast. The play’s about Nazism, about communism, about any ideology that turns people into a herd.
The Chairs. An old couple on an island, setting up chairs for invisible guests who never come. Waiting for meaning that doesn’t arrive. Beckett without the poetry, more brutal, more funny in a way that makes you want to scream.
Critics hated him at first. Audiences walked out. Then suddenly everyone got it. The emptiness. The meaninglessness. Language failing completely. Post-war Europe understood… after the camps, after the ovens, after six million dead, after the systematic industrial murder of human beings, what the fuck are you supposed to say? What words exist? There’s nothing. No language for that. No way to make sense of it. Absurdity wasn’t a choice. It was the only honest response to a world that had just revealed itself to be completely, utterly insane.
I do not photograph nature.
I photograph my visions.
Man Ray, quoted in PBS episode of American Masters
Emmanuel Radnitzky was born in 1890 in Philadelphia. A Jewish kid from a family of immigrants. Changed his name because America in the early 1900s wasn’t kind to Jewish artists with foreign-sounding names.
Painter, photographer, filmmaker. Dadaist. Surrealist. Moved to Paris in 1921 and never looked back. That’s where it happened, Montparnasse, the cafés, the studios, the parties. Everyone was there. Duchamp, his best friend. Hemingway. Stein. Joyce. Picasso.
Photography. That’s what he’s known for. But not regular photography, he fucked with it. Rayographs. Put objects directly on photographic paper, exposed them to light, created images without a camera. Shadows and shapes and abstract forms. Nobody was doing that.
Portraits of everyone. Photographed all the artists, all the writers, all the beautiful people. Made them look iconic. Made them immortal.
Kiki de Montparnasse. Alice Prin. His lover, his muse, his model. Le Violon d’Ingres, 1924… her back painted with f-holes like a violin. One of the most famous photographs of the 20th century. Their relationship was volcanic. Ended badly. They always do.
World War II, he fled to LA. Jewish artist in occupied Paris? He got out. But he came back in ’51. Kept working.
Died in 1976. Paris.
His epitaph says “unconcerned, but not indifferent.”
That’s it. That’s Man Ray. Didn’t give a shit about convention, about rules, about what photography was supposed to be. But he cared. He was paying attention. He saw everything.
Unconcerned, but not indifferent.
Ce qui remplit le temps c’est vraiment de le perdre.
The best way to fill time is to waste it.
Marguerite Duras, Wasting Time, from Practicalities, 1987 (trans. 1990)
Born Marguerite Donnadieu in Saigon, 1914. French Indochina. Colonial Vietnam. Grew up poor, her mother struggling to keep a farm that kept flooding, losing everything to the Pacific and corrupt colonial officials.
The Lover. 1984. That’s the one everyone knows. Fifteen-year-old girl, older Chinese man. Affair in 1920s Saigon. Her family desperate for money, him from wealth. Sex and colonialism and poverty and desire all tangled up. She was seventy when she wrote it. Stripped it down, made it raw. Won the Prix Goncourt.
But that’s late. Before that, decades of writing. Novels, plays, screenplays. Hiroshima Mon Amour, 1959. Alain Resnais directed, she wrote it. A French actress and a Japanese architect. Memory, trauma, the bomb, impossible love. One of the greatest films ever made.
Resistance fighter during World War II. Communist Party member until they kicked her out in 1950 for being too difficult. Always too difficult.
Experimental writer. Minimalist. Repetitive. Obsessed with desire, memory, loss, silence. Her sentences stripped down like bones.
Alcoholic. Destroyed herself with it. Nearly died multiple times. Kept writing through it, about it.
Everything stripped away except what hurts.
Pozzo: (suddenly furious). Have you not done tormenting me with your accursed time! It’s abominable! When! When! One day, is that not enough for you, one day he went dumb, one day I went blind, one day we’ll go deaf, one day we were born, one day we shall die, the same day, the same second, is that not enough for you? (Calmer.) They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more.
Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot, 1952
The bleakest bastard who ever put pen to paper, and somehow, impossibly, funny.
Waiting for Godot, 1953. Two guys waiting for someone who never comes. That’s it. That’s the play. Nothing happens. Twice. It changed theatre forever. Absurdism. Existentialism. The meaninglessness of existence laid bare on a stage with minimal props and maximum despair.
Endgame. Krapp’s Last Tape. Happy Days, a woman buried up to her waist in dirt, then up to her neck, still talking, still going on. That’s life, according to Beckett. We keep talking, keep waiting, keep going even when there’s no point.
Minimalist. Every word mattered. Cut everything that wasn’t essential. Silence was part of the language. Pauses meant something.
Lived in Paris most of his life. Wrote in French first, then translated himself into English. Why? Control. Precision. The discipline of working in a second language forced him to strip everything down even further.
World War II: Resistance fighter. Literally. Worked for the French Resistance, barely escaped the Gestapo. After the war, didn’t talk about it much. Just went back to writing about nothingness.
1969: won the Nobel Prize. Didn’t go to the ceremony. Sent his publisher instead. Fame made him uncomfortable.
I met him once in Paris with my father at his apartment. I was eight, maybe nine. He was kind. Funny. Charming, even. Talked to me like I was an actual person, not just some kid to be tolerated. The man who wrote about despair had warmth.
That encounter changed how I later read his work. I saw the Laurel and Hardy in it. The Buster Keaton. The physical comedy, the pratfalls, the ridiculous repetition. It’s not just despair, it’s absurd, and absurd is funny. The two tramps in Godot are vaudeville performers stuck in an existential nightmare. That’s the point.
And here’s what stuck with me: as an adult and now father, I try to listen to kids. Pay attention. Treat them with the same respect he showed me that day. Because he didn’t have to. He could’ve brushed me off, ignored me, done the polite nod and moved on. He didn’t.
A curious word, wanderlust. I’m ready to go.
I’ve already gone. Regretfully, exultantly. A prouder lyricism. It’s not Paradise that’s lost.
Advice. Move along, let’s get cracking, don’t hold me down, he travels fastest who travels alone. Let’s get the show on the road. Get up, slugabed. I’m clearing out of here. Get your ass in gear. Sleep faster, we need the pillow.
She’s racing, he’s stalling.
If I go this fast, I won’t see anything. If I slow down —
Everything. — then I won’t have seen everything before it disappears.
Everywhere. I’ve been everywhere. I haven’t been everywhere, but it’s on my list.
Land’s end. But there’s water, O my heart. And salt on my tongue.
The end of the world. This is not the end of the world.
Susan Sontag, “Unguided Tour”, The New Yorker (October 31st, 1977)
The kind of thinker who made people uncomfortable and didn’t give a shit about it.
Against Interpretation, 1966. Changed how people thought about art and criticism. Stop trying to decode everything, stop looking for hidden meanings. Experience art. Feel it. The essay was a grenade thrown into the academic establishment.
On Photography, 1977. Examined how cameras changed how we see, how we remember, how we consume suffering. Photography as voyeurism. Images as replacement for experience. Prescient as hell, wrote it before Instagram, before phones with cameras, before everyone became a photographer.
Illness as Metaphor, 1978. She’d just survived cancer. Wrote about how we talk about disease, the military metaphors, the moral judgments, the way we blame sick people for being sick. Stripped it all away. Said it plainly: illness is illness. Not a punishment. Not a metaphor. Just a thing that happens to bodies.
Public intellectual when that actually meant something. Spoke out against the Vietnam War. Against Serbian aggression in Bosnia… went to Sarajevo during the siege in 1993, directed Waiting for Godot while the city was under bombardment. That’s commitment.
Post-9/11, she wrote that America’s response was essentially “a self-righteous drivel and outright deception.” Got crucified for it. Didn’t back down.
Uncompromising. Difficult. Brilliant. Lived with photographer Annie Leibovitz for years, they were private about it, which was their business. Buried at Montparnasse Cemetery in Paris, not New York. Wanted to be here, with the writers and artists and thinkers.
Sontag demanded honesty. From art, from politics, from herself. Made enemies doing it. Didn’t care.
That’s integrity.
We Dadaists are often told that we are incoherent, but into this word people try to put an insult that it is rather hard for me to fathom. Everything is incoherent… There is no logic… The acts of life have no beginning and no end. Everything happens in a completely idiotic way. That is why everything is alike. Simplicity is called Dada. Any attempt to conciliate an inexplicable momentary state with logic strikes me as a boring kind of game… Like everything in life, Dada is useless… Perhaps you will understand me better when I tell you that Dada is a virgin microbe that penetrates with the insistence of air into all of the spaces that reason has not been able to fill with words or conventions.
Tristan Tzara, ‘Lecture on Dada’, 1922
Samuel Rosenstock, changed his name, moved to Zurich during World War I, and decided art was bullshit.
Dada. He founded it. 1916, Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich. While Europe was tearing itself apart, trenches, gas attacks, millions dead for nothing, Tzara and his crew said fuck it. Fuck art. Fuck sense. Fuck meaning. If the world’s going to be insane, we’ll be more insane.
Nonsense poetry. Random words pulled from a hat. Performances that were deliberate chaos. Anti-art as protest. If civilization led to World War I, then civilization deserved to be mocked, destroyed, pissed on.
“Dada means nothing.” That was the point. The name itself was chosen randomly, pulled from a dictionary. Meaninglessness as rebellion.
1920: moved to Paris. Brought Dada with him. Staged provocations, scandalous performances. Art world hated it, which meant it was working.
Then André Breton showed up. Wanted to organize Dada, give it structure, turn it into Surrealism. Tzara said no. You can’t organize chaos. You can’t institutionalize anti-art. They had a legendary falling out. Breton punched him at a performance. The friendship was over.
Surrealism happened anyway. Breton got his movement. Tzara kept doing his thing, writing, agitating, staying true to the original spirit of Dada even when everyone else moved on.
Joined the Resistance during World War II. Anti-fascist to the core.
Buried at Montparnasse Cemetery in 1963. The guy who said art was bullshit, buried with all the artists.
San Jose kid. Fourteen years old, he’s working a sheep ranch. Three years of dirt, animals, isolation. Then he apprentices with a photographer in San Jose. Learns the trade, opens his own studio. Four years of portraits, making people look good for posterity.
Gets bored. Moves into newspapers. San Jose Mercury News. Then buys The Napa Reporter. Starts The Mountain View Register. Tries running for public office a couple times. Loses. Nobody wants him.
Newspapers and politics aren’t doing it. So he goes back to San Jose, joins a stock theatre company. His words: “turned respectable and became an actor.”
What followed was decades of grinding. Stock. Repertoire. Vaudeville. Seventeen years at the Alcazar Theatre in San Francisco, over 700 parts. Seven hundred. Different character every week, sometimes multiple in a night.
1921, someone asks him about his acting theory. He says: “I don’t know anything. Learn all about acting and then forget it. Be natural. Believe in yourself.”
1906 earthquake hits. San Francisco’s done. He moves to New York.
Fourteen years later, he’s 54. Lightnin’, a play he’d been writing for forty years, finally gets produced. He stars in it himself.
It breaks every record. Eclipses everything Broadway’s ever seen. 1,291 consecutive performances. Three years and a day. George M. Cohan calls him America’s greatest character actor.
When it closes to go on the road, President Harding congratulates him. The mayor of New York and the U.S. Secretary of Labor lead a parade with the Police Band. Hundreds of actors escort him to Penn Station. They give him a championship belt, seriously… the world champion of playwriting and producing.
1922. 58. Dead.
His manager said it best: “A kindly man, of simple tastes, who gave much to the public and asked little in return. He really died on the Saturday night when he gave his last performance—and his greatest.”
Forty-four years of work. Four years of glory. That’s the ratio.
Ron “Pigpen” McKernan Pigpen was fourteen when he landed in Palo Alto. Found work at Dana Morgan’s Music Store downtown, where he met Jerry Garcia. Two kids in a music shop. You know how this goes.
McKernan, Garcia, Bob Weir, they started playing together. The Zodiacs. Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions. Names that sound like someone’s putting you on, but this was real. This was the beginning.
Bill Kreutzmann shows up on drums, and now you’ve got something. The Warlocks. Around ’65, Pigpen, because this is his story, he’s the one pushing them to go electric. Phil Lesh comes in on bass. They need a new name. The Grateful Dead.
And here’s the thing: Pigpen was the Dead. The original frontman. The best singer they had. Before Jerry became Jerry, before all the myth-making and the parking lot economy and the tie-dye industrial complex, it was Pigpen’s band.
Twenty-seven years old. Dead in Corte Madera.
A week before, he’d recorded something on a tape cassette. They found it in his apartment after.
Don’t make me live in this pain
no longerYou know, I’m gettin’ weaker, not
strongerMy poor heart can’t stand no more
Just can’t keep from talkin’
If you gonna walk out that door,
start walkin’I’ll get back somehow
Maybe not tomorrow, but someday
I know someday I’ll find someone
Who can ease my pain like you once doneb
They buried him in Alta Mesa Memorial Park. Across the street from Gunn High School. I went to Gunn.
Twenty-seven years old in the ground. The dead watching the living. The living, mostly, not noticing.
Everything is changed for you. But it is still the same, too. The loneliness you feel has come to you because you are no longer a child. But the world has always been full of that loneliness.
The Human Comedy
Saroyan wrote about this place. The Armenian families, the immigrant hustle, the particular loneliness and joy of Central Valley life. He got it. That beautiful, messy, complicated thing about America that most writers either romanticize into oblivion or treat like a sociology report. Saroyan just… told the truth. With style.
My partner Lindsey’s family comes from here. Her grandfather Irwin made packing crates for farmers, honest work, the kind that built this valley one box at a time. One day, Saroyan’s mother asked Irwin for a favor: give her boy a ride back to town. Sure, Irwin said. Why not? So Saroyan gets in. They drive. And when they get to town, Saroyan asks to be dropped off at the local brothel.
That’s the whole story. That’s the whole writer, really, the guy who won a Pulitzer Prize and told them to shove it because “commerce should not judge the arts,” then spent the afternoon at a whorehouse. The guy who wrote about grace and desperation with equal tenderness.
Because Saroyan understood something essential: we’re all just trying to make sense of this beautiful, heartbreaking mess. And sometimes, that’s enough. Sometimes, that’s everything
Kay Boyle didn’t fuck around.
1922, she shows up in New York with her mother’s blessing, not that she probably needed it, dead set on making it as a writer. And she did. By ’23, her first poem’s in print. “Morning” in Lola Ridge’s magazine Broom. Not bad for a couple of months work.
Then she marries this French guy, Richard Brault. What was supposed to be a quick trip to meet the in-laws in Brittany turns into eighteen years in Europe. These things happen.
Paris, late twenties. Boyle’s running with the American expat crowd, brilliant and broke and probably drunk, convinced they’re changing the world with words. Maybe they were. Harry and Caresse Crosby’s Black Sun Press puts out her first book in ’29. Short Stories. Simple title. Confident.
She dumps Brault, marries artist/writer Laurence Vail in ’31. Man Ray takes her picture, because Man Ray is awesome. The thirties are good to her. Stories, novels, poems. She’s building something real, a reputation that matters. Two O. Henry awards, ’35 and ’41. She was good at the short form. Brutal efficiency. No wasted motion.
1943, she’s back in the States, ditches Vail, marries a Baron. Joseph von Franckenstein.
You can’t make this shit up.
Then the late forties happen, and America loses its goddamn mind. McCarthyism. Witch-hunts. Both Boyle and Franckenstein get their careers torched, her gig as a foreign correspondent for The New Yorker, his State Department position, gone. Because that’s what we did to people who made us uncomfortable, who didn’t fit the narrative, who were, you know, interesting.
So naturally, Boyle gets more political. Her writing sharpens, gets angrier. She starts showing up, putting her body where her words are.
Franckenstein dies in ’63. She takes a teaching job at San Francisco State. Keeps writing, keeps protesting, keeps being who she is. Students love her. The establishment? Not so much. S.I. Hayakawa, yeah, that Hayakawa, the one who’d become a Senator, calls her “the most dangerous woman in America” in 1967.
She probably took that as a compliment.