Journey to the End of Time by Alex Miller
- Allen & Unwin
- 1 day ago
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Read an extract from Journey to the End of Time by Alex Miller.
Journey to the End of Time is a rich and wide-ranging collection of short stories, essays, journal entries and poetry drawn from decades of award-winning author Alex Miller’s life.
The collection moves across time, memory and artistic influence, engaging deeply with the people and works that have shaped Miller's life. Miller’s writing also reflects on the act of storytelling itself, tracing how lived experience becomes material for art.
Read on for the short piece that inspired the title, Journey to the End of Time, tracing Miller’s departure from Paris and the path that led to meeting his wife Stephanie.
Journey to the End of Time
I was renting a small flat on the sixth floor of an old apartment block in rue Saint-Dominique in the 7th arrondissement. It was the beginning of winter in 1974 and I'd been living in Paris almost a year, writing my second book and attending the Alliance every weekday morning for French lessons. I'd made good friends in Paris and was happy there. I was living on the money I'd made from the sale of my farm in New South Wales and had no need to work. Each morning I walked to the Alliance and in the afternoons I sat at my desk by the window in my small sitting room overlooking the courtyard and worked on my novel. In the evenings I went out to bars and to the theatre with my lover, Ann, an Australian who was studying French literature at the Sorbonne. On weekends, when it was fine, she and I went together into the countryside. It was a very good life I had in Paris. I had no thought of changing it.
The people who owned my flat, Madame and Monsieur Lémieux, a retired couple, lived in the apartment on the floor below me. Madame Lemieux often brought up to me a share of their evening meal. They liked me and wanted me to stay and had asked me to buy the flat from them. They would keep it vacant for me, they said, while I returned to Melbourne and sold my house. In 1974 the exchange rate was eight francs to the dollar, which placed the Paris flat well within my reach.
Ann came to Charles de Gaulle with me to see me off. We held hands across the table and drank coffee and talked of my return in a couple of months. When it was time for me to board my flight to Melbourne, we embraced and said, 'Till soon! Till very soon!' I looked back at the gate and she raised a hand to her lips and blew me a final kiss.
My house in Port Melbourne, an unfashionable suburb in those days, stubbornly refused to sell. The agent said it was a difficult house. I was eating into my capital and after three months I decided to get a job. As an arts graduate, teaching was the obvious choice. I began work at Brunswick Tech on a fine February morning at the end of the long summer school vacation.
Walking up the stairs a flight ahead of me in the main building of the school that morning was a young woman. She was wearing green slacks and cork sandals with a top in bright Indian cotton. She turned and looked back, her dark eyes challenging me. My heart contracted, as if a strong fist gripped the deep muscles of my very being. I knew at once that she was the woman whose love and companionship would complete my life. How I knew all this, how I read it in that one glance, I can't say. It turned out that she had felt as I had. It took us six weeks to find the courage to speak to each other. Her name was Stephanie. Forty-three years later we are still on our journey together to the end of time.
'Why Paris Wasn't the City of Love for Alex Miller',
Qantas Magazine, 18 January 2018
Journey to the End of Time
by Alex Miller
A deeply personal collection of stories, essays and poems from award-winning author Alex Miller's six-decade writing life.
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