Ernest Hemingway famously wrote, “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.”

Each day as I ride the metro all over Paris- with increasing agility although I always, always fumble over the manual door handles- I have been reading Hemingway’s novel about Paris, A Moveable Feast. The book, which recounts the day to day activities of Hemingway’s life as a 25 year old writer scraping to get by in the City of Light, has been thrilling and enlightening to read.

Hem, as his friends seem to have called him, dedicates each short chapter to something small and simple about Paris. The first, for example, is called “A Good Café on the Place St-Michel” and describes the conditions in which he liked to write, the lighting in the café, the beautiful passersby, and the empty, almost-sad feeling he would get after he finished writing a good story. His stories about mundane aspects of life and his strikingly simple prose (something, I have learned through the book, which he worked tremendously hard to achieve, often eliminating every unnecessary word in his works, phrase by phrase, attempting to make the “truest sentence” he could) is somehow enthralling and I find myself eagerly turning the page to discover whether he’d get coffee with or without cream or if he would go to the horse races or straight home after lunch.

More than that, though, I have found so much in this little book that I can relate to. As depicted in Midnight in Paris, Hemingway would often stop by the famous writer Gertrude Stein’s apartment to talk about his writing or the works of his friends, who happened to be some of the most well-known artists of all time- Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot (whom he called “Major Eliot” for some reason) and Pablo Picasso. The apartment was on 27 rue de Fleurus, directly across the street from the Sweetbriar program office. Each day as I walk to my phonetics class or to the amazing boulangerie down the street, I literally take the same path that Hemingway and countless other American legends walked down.

Even without the nerdy, literary star-struck feeling I get while reading A Moveable Feast, each day I am coming to understand more the feelings Hemingway had while he was writing this book. He speaks often of hunger. Not only his literal hunger which was made more evident by each warm, welcoming café whose sparkling patisseries in the windows seem almost too perfect to eat, but also a hunger of a deeper, more complex nature. Paris is so beautiful and yet in some ways so unattainable that one almost always feels as if you will never get enough, or never fully digest it.

But for now, I’m happy with the little movable feast I’ve been consuming, walking down the rue de Fleurus with a perpetual smile on my face, Hemingway in hand.

 

Maeve Wall