Subject: Re: the missing plaques
From: Tim O'Connor (oconnort@nyu.edu)
Date: Fri Oct 06 2000 - 12:22:22 GMT
On Fri, Oct 06, 2000 at 04:53:02PM +0100, Scottie Bowman wrote:
> Tim, isn't this the most damnable thing?
>
> Ernest whose Paris is, for so many of us, the first Paris
> they ever truly saw, who first showed us how it would
> be to sit there on the terrace of the Rotonde in the evening
> & watch all the fine girls passing, who first 'whittled
> a style for his time from a walnut stick in a carpenter's
> loft in the streets of that April city...'
Yes, all I knew of Paris before I visited there was what I had learned
from A Moveable Feast, The Sun Also Rises, and, secondarily, from
Proust.
When I got there, I hiked all over the streets Hemingway had
mentioned, in search of anything like the apartment over the sawmill
(the building no longer exists).
The only memorable whiff of the past was walking up the Rue Cardinal
Lemoine and hearing a tinny recording of Leonard Cohen coming out of
one of the windows. It was not a bad substitute for a Hemingway
experience, I admit, but it didn't satisfy my Hemingway craving.
I have also gone to the Closerie des Lilas, though both the setting
and the prices have always scared me off each time I went. I could
have afforded a cafe, probably, but I felt deeply self-conscious,
walking in the footsteps of the old man, and feeling as if everyone
could see that in me.
Even though I have had sadder and less happy times in Paris since
then, I still remember being naive and energetic about seeing in real
life the places I had only read about. Even now I get hungry for
German potato salad when I pass Lipp's Brasserie...
... but when I make it, there's always too much olive oil, which I
feel obliged to mop up with bread, and then after all that I no
longer wonder at why Hemingway was "a natural heavyweight."
Scottie, thanks for reminding me yet again why I keep a copy of A
Moveable Feast next to the keyboard of every one of my desks. (I have
three.)
--tim
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