“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.”
~ Ernest Hemingway
Small old apartment with
a skylight
Resplendent bohemian – a
place to loaf
Work at anything,
To make
money to get by
Write
Sit outside at café’s and
drink coffee, red wine and absinthe
Walk along the Seine
Let the city fill and
infatuate my senses
Expatriate, lover,
explorer
A journey that may never
be returned from.
“I've seen you, beauty, and you belong to me now, whoever
you are waiting for and if I never see you again, I thought. You belong to me
and all Paris belongs to me and I belong to this notebook and this pencil.” ~ Ernest Hemingway
"Paris is the city in which one loves to live. Sometimes I
think this is because it is the only city in the world where you can step out
of a railway station—the Gare D’Orsay—and see, simultaneously, the chief enchantments:
the Seine with its bridges and bookstalls, the Louvre, Notre Dame, the
Tuileries Gardens, the Place de la Concorde, the beginning of the Champs
Elysees—nearly everything except the Luxembourg Gardens and the Palais Royal.
But what other city offers as much as you leave a train?"
~ Margaret Anderson
"Zelda had a
very bad hangover. They had been up on Montmartre the night before and had
quarreled because Scott did not want to get drunk. He had decided, he told me,
to work hard and not to drink and Zelda was treating him as though he were a
kill-joy or a spoilsport."
~ Ernest Hemingway, "Hawks Do Not Share," A Moveable Feast
"To err is human. To loaf is Parisian."
~ Victor Hugo
"The Frenchman is first and foremost a man. He is likeable
often just because of his weaknesses, which are always thoroughly human, even
if despicable."
~Henry Miller
"The best of America drifts to Paris. The American in
Paris is the best American. It is more fun for an intelligent person to live in
an intelligent country. France has the only two things toward which we drift as
we grow older—intelligence and good manners."
~ F. Scott Fitzgerald
"On a cold
windswept street, this was a warm, cheerful place with a big stove in winter,
tables and shelves of books, new books in the window, and photographs on the
wall of famous writers both dead and living. The photographs all looked like
snapshots and even the dead writers looked as though they had really been
alive."
~ Ernest Hemingway, "Shakespeare and Company," 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. In those days, though, the spring always came finally but it
was frightening that it had nearly failed."
~ Ernest Hemingway, "People of the Seine," 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,
A Moveable Feast
A text is like a body, a country, a language. You can know
it on the surface, what you see at first, how it is first read. There is the literal text/body that you see - yet, to see the literal is not to know the text/body. It must be explored and
journeyed over and your heart must fall in love with it to know it fully. And
still there is the punctuation of life that gives form to our stories, defining the
parameters of our souls and existence.
