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Anjali was in her favorite place to work on Saturdays, La Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris. It was built in 1550. In the main reading room, the ceiling was supported by beams hewn and gilded by human hands nearly five hundred years ago. Anjali looked up. Above her, staring back at her, was a cherub’s face painted on a beam by an anonymous artist who, though no one would ever know his name, took pains to give the cherub’s face beautiful contours and a lively expression.
This library was part of a huge patrimoine architectural in France, Anjali thought, of castles—almost every village had one—and cathedrals, churches, libraries, and town halls that, on her computer screen, were incredibly beautiful, incredibly old, and undoubtedly expensive to maintain.
She looked around. The library was full of Sorbonne students, as it had been for more than four and a half centuries. All of them had highlighting markers beside them. But a few had as many as six lined up, each a different color. They were underlining the texts they were studying in pink, blue, yellow, green, orange, and purple. The pages looked like rainbows by the time they were done.
Anjali turned her attention back to her laptop. Writing was difficult. So she checked her email, feeling disconnected, thinking that, instead of being in a library trying to write some entertainment, maybe she should be at a homeless shelter, volunteering, doing something real for people.
Carol’s email arrived, and she knew instantly it was a rejection. It’s your own fault, she scolded herself. You have to believe totally in your work. If you don’t believe in it, whoever reads it will be able to tell, and they’ll reject you as fast as they can.
She read the message. Not ready for prime time. Devastating. She felt like someone had clobbered her with one of the gilded beams.
She stared out the window at the library’s jardin for a while, then summoned the strength to write an email to her mother. Anjali forced herself to make it cheerful-sounding. That done, she turned back to her manuscript. She resolved to dig deeper within herself, to really rake up the blood and guts, and then to bleed them onto the page, as Hemingway had said. Maybe he’d said it while he lived in Paris. She bent her head and persevered.
