Riding the 38R with Jules Renard

The 38R bus (R is for Rapid) runs from the westernmost precinct of San Francisco to the Transbay Terminal downtown. I catch the 38 on Geary & 25th, a short walk from my home on 28th & Anza, and usually ride to its terminus, that rectangular maze bounded by Mission and Howard Streets downtown, where from I step off the bus and stagger around for a few moments; for though I always have a definite destination--for who would travel downtown just for the heck of it--I always act like I don't know where I'm going when I first step off the bus, until I get my downtown groove on and walk again with real purpose.

I take a strange joy, a joy verging on pride, in riding the bus, perhaps because I don't have to, though I always feel like I'm in the wrong seat, no matter where I sit. The bus is transportation in a foreign language. The pace of the ride lulls me into believing I'm progressive, democratic, a man of the people, though of course I know there is no such man. I like also to think I could write a pretty good book on the bus, though by the time the 38R reaches Divisidero it's much too crowded & noisy for the quiet contemplative life of a writer.

This is why most people who travel the 38R listen to music while they travel, the information from their earbuds softening the often jarring chiropractic experience induced by the rough pot-hole ride down Geary; or they text or read the news on their devices, whatever distraction makes them happy or whatever distraction they feel protects them from the crowd of otherwise crazy people riding the bus. I always bring a book to read.

The Journal of Jules Renard is good bus reading, for it too travels along in short bursts and gasps, feeling every bump, overhearing conversations in the salons of Paris and the butcher shop of Chitry, the French village Renard lived in all his life, as if they were equals. The book, comprised of a journal Renard kept from 1887 to a month before his death in 1910, is a mash-up of observed experience, jokes, gossip, meditations. Edited and translated by Louise Bogan, a great mid-century American poet (and I do mean great) and Elizabeth Roget, this edition of The Journal of Jules Renard was published by Tin House Books in 2017.

Renard's the kind of writer who writes the kind of passages you read and then read over to see whether they're as good as you thought they were when you first read them. And they most often are, often even finer on the second reading.

The beauties of literature. I lose a cow. I write about her death, and this brings me in enough to buy another cow.

Mallarme, untranslatable, even into French.

I cannot look at the leaf of a tree without being crushed by the universe.

We no longer know what love is. The thing itself is lost, drowned in a verbal deluge. It is impossible to come through to reality, which should be simple and clear.

Literature is an occupation in which you have to keep proving your talent to people who have none.

Silence. I hear my ear.