A Paris trinket

[mlr]

..finished reading 'A Moveable Feast' for the second time - the first being in High School.

"What did I know best that I had not written about and lost? What did I know about truly and care for the most? There was no choice at all. There was only the choice of streets to take you back fastest to where you worked. It went up Bonaparte to Guynemer, then to the rue d'Assas, up the rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs to the Closerie des Lilas."

"...try to make instead of describe..."

"Watching her face you could see her mind leave the table and go to the night's party and return with her eyes blank as a cat's and then pleased, and the pleasure would show along the thin line of her lips and then be gone. Scott was being the good cheerful host, and Zelda looked at him and she smiled happily with her eyes, and her mouth too, as he drank the wine. I learned to know that smile very well. It meant she knew that Scott would not be able to write."

"During our last year in the mountains new people came deep into our lives and nothing was ever the same again. The winter of the avalanches was like a happy and innocent winter in childhood compared to the next winter, a nightmare winter disguised as the greatest fun of all, and the murderous summer that was to follow. It was the year that the rich showed up."


In Paris, on Friday afternoon after a full day of walking, I made the trek to Shakespeare and Co. It was good to have found it, but I found it a little disappointing. I didn't know that day, but this wasn't the original store or location - the one that published 'Ulysses'. Although the new store has its own history and literary associations. I looked for something to buy but didn't find anything that would be significant to me. The store has a smaller room beside it that was a first edition store. So I looked in there for a few minutes. I was hoping to find a Gertrude Stein or something, but all I found in that direction were two copies of the first British edition of 'A Moveable Feast'. One was 175€ and the other 200€. I paused, and thankfully decided that was too much. As soon as I could get online, I found a copy of the same edition at abe.com for $41. I was too busy to read it when it arrived, but picked it up last week.

I hated High School. Except for a few friends whose friendships have lasted a lifetime, and one or two teachers, it was a nightmare, and I have tried to abolish the memory of it. Reading was one of the ways I learned to escape. 'The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas' and 'A Moveable Feast' were two books that I loved. Rereading AMF now, I can see how the book and author would be disparaged in the academia of our time. But it still is a lovely book. And the portrait that Hemingway paints of himself, of a drinking man, who knows what to say and not what to say, who skis and gambles is still appealing.