Paris to Aphrodite

Photo: Georgia Scott

A Moveable Feast was my favorite reading this month. It's time travel to Paris in the 1920s but best of all has Hemingway's writing thoughts. His difficulty in getting words down on paper surprised me. My ease as a reader of his novels and stories had me fooled. Yet, these words alone reveal the struggle that he had to overcome. "Write the best story that you can and write it as straight as you can," he must remind himself. Confidence and clarity. They can't be beat. Sometimes though, we forget and need reminding. 

The problem is writers work in isolation. We don't form combos like musicians or share studios like other artists. We sit alone over desks that we wish were tables around which friends bring jokes and drinks. We are fun loving people who like to stay out late who find ourselves staying up alone when we are woken by our thoughts. The empty pad of paper before us is our boxing ring. It waits for new words like fresh challengers. Keep them coming, we breathe. Bring 'em on. But time can have other plans for us. 

"Maybe away from Paris I could write about Paris as in Paris I could write about Michigan," Hemingway writes. "I did not know it was too early for that because I did not know Paris well enough. But that was how it worked out eventually." Thirty years and five thousand miles later, in Ketchum, Idaho and Havana, Cuba, the words would come.

Paris would wait until Hemingway was ready. Paris with her undulating curves is all woman. She is enchanting in contrast to Rome whose ruins stand like gladiators with swords. Some cities evince power. For others, it is love. Paris is the second. From an unknown girl at a cafe table to famous writers, Hemingway sketches those he saw and got to know. Tender toward F. Scott Fitzgerald yet honest about his self destructiveness, there are passages which burned my fingers to turn the page and are seared into my heart.

Time travel is as obvious as the face on a clock. But a lapse of time is harder to detect. There is no referee counting to ten when writers go quiet. No one shouts to get up or stay down. Years can pass as we lay on that mat. Yet time may be what we need most of all. What are thirty years if you can make sense of it all? Been there. Done that. Aphrodite's Swimsuit is my Paris.