A Movable Feast
-Ernest Hemingway-
Many have said that this text lovingly portrays the very best moments of Hemingway's life. The pages represent a small window of time when he and his lovely first wife were"very poor and very happy." It seems a small tragedy that these pinnacled moments should happen all at once when the author was so young. While many might agree that often the "best" moments in memory are those when we are most innocent, and the most unaffected by the rush hour of humanity, it is a shame to think that a person's contentedness has such a definitive beginning and end. To think that all bright spots are nothing but the reaching back into an increasingly elusive past, makes it easy to envision why Hemingway's life ended the way that it did. In order to live in the most brilliant memories, a person would be forced to withdraw or numb themselves (in the case of Hemingway, via alcohol) to the present.
While some may read this text as merely a tender recollection of the highlight of a great writer's life, I see it as the revelation of personal tragedy: a life continuously lived in a few moments encapsulated on the page. Published posthumously in 1964, this "tender" text takes its title from a nostalgic exchange between Hemingway and a close friend:
"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 movable feast." -Hemingway to a friend, 1950-
I find this more brutaly telling than sweetly reminiscent. Paris is not just a fond memory for Hemingway, it is a constant reality. It represents the richest moments of his life, carried around in his shirt pocket, inevitably weighing on the present. If Paris travels with him everywhere, then he can never fully be any place else. Was he lucky to live there in his happy youth, or did it become a fixation that would always haunt him, taking him constantly back to a time when he was on the brink of his own, now lost, potential? His writing continued to harbor a greatness of intellect and creativity of form, but what of his life outside of his writing? What good were all of those incredible novels and bouts of success if, up until his suicide, he was wandering the streets of a Paris he once knew, searching for the person he once was, and the "very poor and very happy" existence that peaked too soon?
