Gertrude Stein on Paris

Here’s Gertrude Stein, from her 1940 book “Paris France,” on the subject of why Paris was the place where her artistic revolution and those around her happened:

The reason why all of us naturally began to live in France is because France has scientific methods, machines and electricity, but does not really believe that these things have anything to do with the real business of living. Life is tradition and human nature.

She also wrote:

So it began to be reasonable that the twentieth century whose mechanics, whose crimes whose standardisation began in America, needed the background of Paris, the place where tradition was so firm that they could look modern without being different, and where their acceptance of reality is so great that they could let anyone have the emotion of unreality.

And, facing the unhappy intersection of artists and thinkers with politics—the attempt to realize “the emotion of unreality”—she wrote:

It could be a puzzle why the intellectuals in every country are always wanting a form of government which would inevitably treat them badly, purge them so to speak before anybody else is purged. It has always happened from the French revolution to to-day. It would be a puzzle this if it were not that it is true that the world is round and that space is illimitable unlimited. I suppose it is that that makes the intellectual so anxious for a regimenting government which they could so ill endure.