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.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast
― Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast
Taking a quote out of its original
context often results in misinformation.
For example, this quote was not taken from the book itself, but from a
letter that Hemingway wrote in 1950, 11 years before his death. His 4th
wife, Mary and his biographer friend, to whom the letter had been addressed,
used it to title the posthumously published memoir. Hemingway’s father, a doctor, wanted his son
to follow in his footsteps. Yet, Ernest
knew he had to write. A Moveable
Feast is the story about how he launched his career while living in Paris,
mentored by Gertrude Stein and immersed in a literary community that included
James Joyce, Ezra Pound and F Scott Fitzgerald, to name a few. He was writing A Moveable Feast at the
time of his suicide. Ironically, despite
young Hemingway’s stolid determination to forge his own path through life, he
ended up exactly the same way his father did. Both men killed themselves with a
shotgun.
Sadly, the later years of Hemingway’s
life were plagued by serious health problems, heavy drinking, family strife and
depression. His last major work of
fiction, The Old Man and the Sea, was
published in 1952. It was the discovery
of a trunk of his early writings in the basement of the Paris Ritz hotel that
spurred the memoir he was working on when he died. His son Patrick identified this quote as the
last thing that his father wrote which he apparently had intended as a forward
to the work, “This book contains material from the remises of my memory and of
my heart. Even if one has been tampered
with and the other does not exist.” It
seems as if the older man experienced a wave of inspiration, but also of disappointment,
when confronted by the sparkling years of his youth. The passion he once felt so strongly had
waned and given way to despair.
I too, moved
to France in my twenties, perhaps in part like Ernest, to escape a career more
respectable than that of part-time, ex-pat, English teacher. There, in Bordeaux, I experienced my first adult
communication from God. When I remember
it now, I picture a normal Sunday afternoon. I know the exact date: May 19th,
2002, because it was the Feast of Pentecost, a moveable feast, like
Easter. I went out to Lunch with some girlfriends and discussed my plans
to stay in France for a 2nd year. Walking home afterwards, the
sun shone down on me from a bright blue sky.
I looked up at it and took in a horizon filled with the pink angles of
terracotta tiled roofs. I hadn’t gone to Church that day or any other day
in a long time, but suddenly I was filled with a certainty that God exists and
that I was exactly where I was meant to be.
As
soon as the feeling of certainty washed over me, a wave of doubt threatened to
smash it. I hurried my steps and almost
ran up the stairs in the crumbling, centuries old stone building where I had a
tiny, but recently refurbished, attic nook apartment. I picked up the phone and called home, to St.
Louis. I left an excited message on the
answering machine, then hung up, immediately feeling stupid. I knew it would sound crazy, just like I
always feared I was perceived. Just a
few weeks before, my Mom had told me how my Dad and brother laughed and laughed
while reading my letter, the one where I outlined my dream of being a writer. I had included a simple, hand drawn chart,
complete with arrows and question marks.
Of course the scientists would be amused, I remarked bitterly to my
Mom. “No, no, Amy. They thought it was cute,” she defended, not meaning to intensify the blow.
In today’s world, people are taught not
to trust their feelings. Similarly, creative
thoughts are deemed, at best, too impractical to deserve nurturing. For the
most part, unless one is lucky enough to be part of an artistic community
‘thinking outside the box’ is not tolerated. René Descartes (1596-1650) lived at the time
of the Spanish Inquisition. Though he
was a profoundly spiritual man, he went to great lengths to hide the true
nature of his spirituality fearing retribution from the Catholic Church. But Descartes did keep meticulous records,
written in code, of his more unconventional studies and beliefs. On the night of November 10, 1619 (The Feast
of St. Martin) he discovered his life’s purpose in a series of three
dreams. Descsrtes’ interpretation of
these dreams is explained in the following excerpt from the book, Descartes’ Secret Notebook, by Amir D.
Aczel:
Descartes’
charge was to develop his geometry – to bring its ancient Greek principles to
the seventeenth century, in which he lived, and ultimately to bequeath to
the world the new science he would create: analytic
geometry. (59)
Descartes
believed the 3 dreams to be spiritually inspired and according to him, they
resulted in the famous mathematical treatise, Discourse on the Method, published almost 20 years later, in 1637. This highly influential work would lay the
foundation for the fields of physics, engineering and modern technology. His proposition, “I think, therefore I am,”
brought mankind fully into the age of reason, when man’s intellect reigned
supreme. Yet, this famous quote has been taken out of context. Many would-be philosophers quote it as if to
say that human thought is a superior force of nature. However, Descartes’ original intent was quite
different. The 'I think' was meant to imply doubt
which then started the following chain of philosophical thought:
Doubt
implies uncertainty. And uncertainty implies imperfection. Human beings and everything in their
environment are imperfect. But the idea
of the imperfect implies the existence of something that is not imperfect. That
which is not imperfect is, by definition, perfect. And perfection belongs to God. (Aczel, p.
157)
Thus,
Descartes’s Discourse includes a
mathematical proof of God’s existence.
Man’s thoughts are imperfect which proves the existence of God’s
perfection. Ironically Descartes famous quote is used to prove the power of
human thought, when he in fact was arguing for the supremacy of the Divine.
The 17th century marked a complete
turning point in human thought. Scholars
began to favor a world view based on that which could be observed, measured,
understood, and controlled by the power of the human mind alone. On the other hand, in the ancient world, Greek
philosophers like Socrates and Pythagoras sought knowledge of the world around
them by looking inward, via contemplation and meditative thought. Karen Armstrong explains this in her book A Case for God:
In the
ancient world, people experienced an idea as something that happened to
them. It was not a question of the “I” knowing something; instead, the
“Known” drew one to itself. People said, in effect, “I think- therefore
there is that which I think.” (67)
Leading up to the 17th century,
scholars sought Divine inspiration in order to discover the Truth. A person gained understanding of life by
cultivating one’s life of prayer and meditation. In this way, the ancient Western
civilizations resembled the early Eastern religions. As older texts were updated and translated
and recopied, however, changes were made, or the original context was
lost. Armstrong also explains the famous
“I am that I am,” quote from the burning bush on Mt. Sinai, “Ehyeh asher ehyeh (I am that I am) is a
Hebrew idiom that expresses deliberate vagueness… So when Moses asked God who
he was, Yahweh in effect replied: “Never Mind who I am!” (The
Case for God, 39) Though modern
biblical scholars interpret the quote to mean that God is being, an awareness of Hebrew dialect points to a far less
philosophical connotation. The God of
the Old Testament was like a cranky father, eager to get to the point (in this
case, the 10 commandments).
Shavuot is the Jewish holiday
commemorating the giving of the law on Mount Sinai. It follows Passover like Pentecost follows
Easter in the Christian Church. Pentecost
and before that, Shavuot, took the place of an important harvest festival in
the Ancient World. In Greek, Pentecost
means ‘fiftieth day’ since the first wheat was ready for harvest 50 days after
the planting. Similarly, Easter and Passover are
the more modern versions of the fertility festival at the planting. This explains why modern, secular Easter celebrations incorporate bunnies and eggs
(symbols of fertility). In a
metaphorical sense, the seeds of Faith are planted on Easter and Passover and
then they are harvested when God or the Holy Spirit visits on Pentecost or
Shavuot.
Pentecost is also known as the birthday
of the Church and is the commemoration of the Holy Spirit descending on the
disciples fifty days after Jesus’ crucifixion. Last
year I went to Church on Pentecost and was struck by this reading from 1st
Corinthians 12:3b-13:
No one
can say “Jesus is Lord” except by the Holy Spirit. To each is given the
manifestation of the Spirit for the common good. For just as the body is
one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one
body, so it is with Christ. For in the one Spirit we were all baptized
into one body – Jews or Greeks, slaves or free – and we were all made to drink
of one Spirit.
I took it to mean that everyone is
meant to pray to one and the same God.
However, when reading another book, Misquoting
Jesus, The story behind who changed the Bible and why, by Bart D. Ehrman, I
found this:
The word Spirit (Pneuma) would have been
abbreviated in most manuscripts as PMA, which understandably could be-and
was-misread by some scribes as the Greek word for “drink” (POMA); and so in
these witnesses Paul is said to indicate that all have “drunk of one drink.”
(91)
Further evidence for the existence of numerous different biblical interpretations exist. Considering that it has
been around for 2000 years and translated time and again, the possibilities seem infinite. All languages have the capacity to be highly nuanced due to factors that range from dialect to idiomatic expressions and on to translator discretion. One of these factors alone can completely change
the meaning of a passage, so when the factors are added together, the potential
for variation in meaning is compounded exponentially.
When
Hemingway wrote to his editor friend about Paris as a moveable feast, I believe
he meant that spending time in France was something that would feed him for
years after he moved away. Yet while the lost trunk of his early Paris writings
inspired a memoir, it also led to his suicide.
Hemingway wrote in A Moveable
Feast, “By then I knew that everything good and bad left an emptiness when
it stopped. But if it was bad, the
emptiness filled up by itself. If it was
good you could only fill it by finding something better.” (52, restored version,
2009) Apparently it was not possible for
Hemingway to improve upon those Paris years.
It would appear that, when confronted with his life in Paris, he
realized nothing better would ever replace it and so he shot himself. Like Hemingway, I miss France and constantly yearn
to go back. Also, like Hemingway, I struggled with alcohol. Luckily for me, I stopped
drinking when I had my children. Yet the
emptiness didn’t fill up by itself. For
me it was replaced by something far better, by God.
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