first of all,
i’d like to let you know how much fun i’m having writing this blog. it has become a hobby, a past-time, a creative outlet. i am filled with so much passion for so many things, it’s nice to release it somehow, if only to myself. so what may seem random to you, is not so much to me. that brings us to today, monday and some random musings on paris.
i’ve never been to paris…
but i’ve always wanted to go. i blame the urge on my first boss (actually president of the ad agency) who introduced me to the book “a moveable feast” by ernest hemingway. are you a fan? it was actually published 2 or 3 years after hemingway died. it was started by him then compiled by his 4th wife and widow from trunkfuls of his writing when he was in paris. i heard somewhere that if you read the book aloud to a blind person, they would be able to clearly visualize what paris was like. i imagine that would be the same for someone who had never been to paris, like moi. the name from the book came from a friend of his who played a part in the editing. hemingway told him this about paris:
If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man,
then wherever you go for the rest of your life it stays with you,
for Paris is a moveable feast.
“All of the sadness of the city came suddenly with the first cold rains of winter, and there were no more tops to the high white houses as you walked but only the wet blackness of the street and the closed doors of the small shops, the herb sellers, the stationery and the newspaper shops, the midwife – second class – and the hotel where Verlaine and died where I had a room on the top floor where I worked.” -Ernest Hemingway, “A Good Cafe on the Place St.-Michel,” A Moveable Feast
“But you knew there would always be the spring, as you knew the river would flow again after it was frozen. When the cold rains kept on and killed the spring, it was as though a young person had died for no reason.”
-Ernest Hemingway, “People of the Seine,” A Moveable Feast
“But for a long time it was enough just to be back in our part of Paris and away from the track and to bet on your own life and work, and on the painters that you knew and not try to make your living gambling and call it by some other name.“
-Ernest Hemingway, “The End of an Avocation,” A Moveable Feast
“When spring came, even the false spring, there were no problems except where to be happiest. The only thing that could spoil a day was people and if you could keep from making engagements, each day had no limits. People were always the limiters of happiness except for the very few that were as good as spring itself.” -Ernest Hemingway
When I woke with the windows open and the moonlight on the roofs of the tall houses, it was there. I put my face away from the moonlight into the shadow but I could not sleep and lay awake thinking about it. We had both wakened twice in the night and my wife slept sweetly now with the moonlight on her face. I had to try to think it out and I was too stupid. Life had seemed so simple that morning when I had wakened and found the false spring…But Paris was a very old city and we were young and nothing was simple there, not even poverty, nor sudden money, nor the moonlight, nor right and wrong nor the breathing of someone who lay beside you in the moonlight” – Ernest Hemingway, a moveable feast
i guess you could say that this is imaginary appreciation of paris. at least until i get a chance to go.
