"I should add that I very much enjoy certain cities especially Paris, New York and Chicago"
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The aside sounds like a gentle correction to the myth of Jim Harrison as a man who belonged only to the backcountry. Known for novels and poems steeped in Michigan woods, rivers, and the American West, he also cultivated a fierce urban appetite. The key word is "certain". He did not embrace cities wholesale; he chose places that matched his sensibilities of appetite, art, and intensity.
Paris fits his lifelong devotion to French literature and gastronomy. Harrison steeped himself in Rimbaud and Neruda, and his food essays celebrate long lunches, rough country wines, and the sensuous rituals of eating. Paris offers a lineage of poets and a daily theater of cafés and markets, a city paced for walkers who watch and graze. New York names the practical and electric axis of American letters. Editors, magazines, film adaptations, and a teeming anonymity that allows a writer to vanish into crowds suit a man who prized both company and solitude. Chicago brings the Midwest into the triad, anchoring the cosmopolitan to his origins. Its blunt, muscular beauty, lake light, blues bars, and working-class taverns mirror the grit and humor in his prose, while the city’s literary heritage makes it a natural harbor for a writer with an ear for the vernacular.
The sentence’s modesty—"I should add"—suggests he is pushing back against being typecast as a hermit of rivers and bird dogs. He loved wilderness and small towns, yet he also cherished streets dense with bookstores, museums, and late-night kitchens. These three cities share walkability, deep immigrant histories, and a profusion of art and food—places where appetite becomes a way of thinking. For Harrison, enjoyment is an ethics as much as a pleasure: a commitment to fully inhabited life. Paris, New York, and Chicago are not exceptions to his ethos but confirmations of it, urban terrains where his sensuous, attentive intelligence could roam.
Paris fits his lifelong devotion to French literature and gastronomy. Harrison steeped himself in Rimbaud and Neruda, and his food essays celebrate long lunches, rough country wines, and the sensuous rituals of eating. Paris offers a lineage of poets and a daily theater of cafés and markets, a city paced for walkers who watch and graze. New York names the practical and electric axis of American letters. Editors, magazines, film adaptations, and a teeming anonymity that allows a writer to vanish into crowds suit a man who prized both company and solitude. Chicago brings the Midwest into the triad, anchoring the cosmopolitan to his origins. Its blunt, muscular beauty, lake light, blues bars, and working-class taverns mirror the grit and humor in his prose, while the city’s literary heritage makes it a natural harbor for a writer with an ear for the vernacular.
The sentence’s modesty—"I should add"—suggests he is pushing back against being typecast as a hermit of rivers and bird dogs. He loved wilderness and small towns, yet he also cherished streets dense with bookstores, museums, and late-night kitchens. These three cities share walkability, deep immigrant histories, and a profusion of art and food—places where appetite becomes a way of thinking. For Harrison, enjoyment is an ethics as much as a pleasure: a commitment to fully inhabited life. Paris, New York, and Chicago are not exceptions to his ethos but confirmations of it, urban terrains where his sensuous, attentive intelligence could roam.
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| Topic | Travel |
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