My Own Moveable Feast

This weekend I finished reading A Moveable Feast, by Ernest Hemingway. This book is a set of memoirs written about the famous author’s years living and writing in Paris during the 1920s. There are so many things about this book that make my head spin, because of how amazingly wonderful it is. Hemingway, at least in this book (since it’s the only one of his I’ve read so far—many more to come of course) is a name dropper. There are so many other famous and renowned expatriate writers and personalities mentioned in this book, with whom Hemingway had much interaction, including Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, and F. Scott Fitzgerald (by the way, he and Zelda were a mess). I can’t imagine being in a more perfect place at such an amazing time—interacting with all these remarkable people and being influenced by them in so many different ways. I think I will say it—I want his life.

One of the things I’m most excited about in moving to Paris is writing. I want to write, and I think reading this book helped me realize, that I want to be a writer. Wow. I’ve figured life out; well, not quite. I never thought that I would want to be a writer, and now that I’ve been thinking about it for the past few days, it is certainly not something that is going to make me very rich in life, but I think it is something that will make me happy, and that is all one ever really wants in life—to be happy. For the longest time I wanted to be an actor. Those plans changed a while ago. So, I’ll be a starving artist in a different kind of way now.

Now what am I going to do? In the past, I’ve been mostly a poet. I don’t want to be a poet. Not that I wouldn’t mind continuing to write poetry; in fact, I do it quite often. I want to write a book. So, I am going to write a book about Paris. I am going to write my own Moveable Feast. I obviously can’t write it yet, because I haven’t yet been to Paris, but I think as soon as that plane takes off on 3 September, my pen will be on a notebook writing the first dew lines of a masterpiece.

In the meantime, I’ll be sitting in the Olin Library, dreaming.