The Cold, Elemental Grace That Knows When to Take a Hint

Writing can be a way of exercising one’s demons. It can relieve a specific anxiety, or reveal the answer to a question. In these and other ways, writing can be a point of contact with the half-known world, a way of accessing the powers and truths that shape our world but lie just beyond our ability to put them into words, or a way of revealing what Joy Williams calls “the cold, elemental grace that knows us.”

What I’m trying to say is, in the three days since I wrote about the fact that on a daily basis people in Paris were asking me for directions in French, no one — not one person — has asked me for directions.

It’s as if I inadvertently reached out to the cold, elemental grace that knows us and effectively asked it to please cut it out.