yeah yeah yeah go to paris already (but don't write about it)

When I was a teenager I wanted to be a foreign correspondent. I thought that would be the coolest job ever.

And, when I was a teenager I had a favorite writer. He just died, and that I is why I think of this right now. The writer's name is Stig Claesson. (Sadly none of his work seems to be translated.)

Stig Claesson was a writer, and an artist. He grew up in Sweden. He was young in the late 1940s when the second world war had just ended. Finally it was possible to travel again, and he wanted to get out. So he left.

He has written about helping to rebuild Europe by hard physical labor, and he has written about happy carefree days in Paris. He and his friends spent years building bridges, digging ditches, traveling, writing, drawing, being poor, and being drunk.

To me that sounded great.

Somewhere in one of those books Stig Claesson reflects that everywhere he went in those years, all over Europe, he would meet the same kind of person. A fresh faced young man or woman, traveling just like him, writing stories about Europe for a small newspaper back home, wherever that might be.

All over the world, Claesson said, you find these people, busy writing home about their lives.

That idea stuck in my head. It seemed to me he was saying that instead of living a life, people were writing about it. I am not sure if he would include himself in that. Maybe not. He probably considered himself part of the scene, and the others merely traveling through.
Stig Claesson is also known for his stories about slightly eccentric and stubborn people living in the Swedish countryside. The stories are tender, respectful, and patient portraits of the ways people are connected to their surroundings.

I think Swedes like to think of those people as quintessentially Swedish. They are not. That's just how people are, everywhere. And I guess the lesson is that after you've been to Paris, you may know to appreciate them.