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Saint-Germain-des-Prés, the 1940s. In the morning, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir walk into the Café de Flore, sit at their usual tables, and write. For hours. Around them, waiters pass, cups clink, conversations rise and fall. They barely look up.
During the war years, the café had one great advantage over their cold hotel rooms: it was heated. But they kept coming long after that. The café became their office, their living room, their place to think.
Why a café works
It seems strange. Shouldn't we need silence to concentrate? Not always. Many people find that a gentle, steady background of voices and cups helps them focus, as long as nothing in it is directed at them. The noise is company, not interruption.
A café also offers something a desk at home can't: a small sense of occasion. You chose to come. You ordered something. You sit among people who are also, in their own way, alone with their thoughts. There's a quiet permission in that.
How to think in a café, the Parisian way
1. Choose a table facing the room. Watching life pass gives your mind somewhere to rest between thoughts. 2. Bring paper, not a laptop. A notebook keeps you from checking emails and invites slower thinking. 3. Order one thing and take your time with it. In Paris, nobody will rush you for lingering over a single coffee. 4. Give yourself one question. Not a to-do list: one real question you want to think about. Write it at the top of the page. 5. Let the room do its work. When you're stuck, look up, watch someone, listen. Then go back to the page.
Your own Café de Flore
It doesn't need to be famous. The best thinking café is the one near you with good light, a corner table and a waiter who leaves you in peace. Return to it often enough and it will start to feel like yours.
Places worth thinking in
The Digital subscription is full of them: cafés, bookshops, museums and gardens, along with recommendations on books, opera and music, at least one video each month, photo stories and the digital edition of "(meditating) On Art". A guide to the rooms where good thoughts happen.
Remember to take as much time as you need, and meet me at the next one.
Love, Evi