I just got "The Moveable Feast" from my library yesterday and then remembered that we are leaving on a 2 weeks vacation on the 7th so I guess I won't be joining you for that discussion unless you are still open when we return.

All day long I have been passing them, dirty, tired, unshaven, wind bitten-soldiers, hiking along the trails across the brown, rolling, barren Thrace countryside. No bands, no relief organizations, no leave areas, nothing but lice, dirty blankets, and mosquitoes at night. They are the last of the glory that was Greece. This is the end of their second siege of Troy.

All day long I have been passing them, dirty, tired, unshaven, wind-bitten soldiers, hiking along the trail across the brown, rolling, barren, Thrace countryside. No bands, no relief organizations, no leave areas, nothing but lice, dirty blankets, and mosquitoes at night. They are the last of the glory that was Greece. This is the end of their second siege of Troy.

He writes of the outdoors, of fishing and hunting, of bullfights and war. Indeed, some readers, such as J.B. Priestley who speak of the writer’s “swaggering masculinity,” protest against this constant activity and find it pose. Hemingway writes of elemental people in elemental situations in a manner characteristically brutal, clear, and precise. His character moves through violence. He writes frequently of love, but in a manner best termed “hard boiled.” His modernism is shown in his realistic, sometimes naturalistic, treatment of subjects which in the hands of other writers would likely be turned into romantic stories of adventure. His frank diction, his refusal to end stories happily, his keen regard for specific details- these are, however, essentially realistic qualities.

One of the things one well-traveled young man said that has left a lasting impression on me was: "If you want to experience man-made beauty, there is no place like Europe with its architecture, history, art and music; if you want to see wild God-made beauty there is simply no place like the U.S.A.

Is there not an "idle art" just as there is an "idle rich"? Both do nothing but cultivate the insanity of their own desires, both cultivate strange indulgences. The literary idiocy of Gertrude Stein only reflects the madness of the whole system of capitalist values. It is part of the signs of doom that are written largely everywhere on the walls of bourgeois society.

1. remember something ceremonially: to honor the memory of somebody or something in a ceremony

All day long I have been passing them, dirty, tired, unshaven, wind-bitten soldiers, hiking along the trail across the brown, rolling, barren, Thrace countryside. No bands, no relief organizations, no leave areas, nothing but lice, dirty blankets, and mosquitoes at night. They are the last of the glory that was Greece. This is the end of their second siege of Troy.

I still had the lyric facility of boyhood that was as perishable and as deceptive as youth was. I knew it was probably a good thing that it was lost, ---

Death is not the ultimate fear: the Hemingway hero knows how to confront death. What he truly fears is "nada" - existence in a state of non-being. Hemingway's characters are alone. He is not concerned with human relationships as much as with portraying man's individual struggle against an alien, chaotic universe. His characters exist in the "island condition," Stephen L. Tanner has noted. He compared them to islands of an archipelago "consistently isolated [and] alone in the stream of society. (Biography Resource Center)>

His characters exist in the "island condition," Stephen L. Tanner has noted. He compared them to islands of an archipelago "consistently isolated [and] alone in the stream of society. (Biography Resource Center)

I went on up the street looking in the windows and happy with the spring evening and the people coming past. In the three principal cafés I saw people that I knew by sight and others that I knew to speak to.

I passed the collection of inmates at the Rotonde and scorning vice and the collective instinct crossed the boulevard to the Dôme. The Dôme was crowded too, but there were people there who had worked.

But I do sometimes wonder If Hemingway did not paint him (Fitzgerald) in a most unfavorable light more as a character in his story than as the way he actually was in life?

But from what I read the world changed rapidly with the end of World War I and these changes are reflection in Fitzgerald's books.

"Long after midnight the towers and spires of Princeton were visible, with here and there a late-burning light—and suddenly out of the clear darkness the sound of bells. As an endless dream it went on; the spirit of the past brooding over a new generation, the chosen youth from the muddled, unchastened world, still fed romantically on the mistakes and half-forgotten dreams of dead statesmen and poets. Here was a new generation, shouting the old cries, learning the old creeds, through a revery of long days and nights; destined finally to go out into that dirty gray turmoil to follow love and pride; a new generation dedicated more than the last to the fear of poverty and the worship of success; grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken...."

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald. This Side of Paradise

But this is how Paris was in the early days when we were very poor and very happy.

"A Moveable Feast (1964) was the first of Ernest Hemingway's posthumous publications, edited into final form by his widow, Mary Hemingway, who claimed to have done virtually nothing to the manuscript except correcting the spelling of some Paris street names. That claim, however, has been questioned in the years since the book's publication. A Moveable Feast is a memoir of Hemingway's early days in Paris, introduced by a preface in which the author tells the reader that, if he or she wishes, 'the book may be regarded as fiction'. This disclaimer (and several similar statements that exist among the manuscripts) may have been intended to deflect criticism that Hemingway anticipated because of his acidulous portraits of friends and acquaintances from the period."

Source:

Literary Encyclopedia

"In the forward, Mary Hemingway has written that Hemingway began the book in the summer of 1958 and made some revisions to it in the fall of 1960 - and it concerns the years 1921 to 1926 in Paris, or about 70 years ago as time flies."

Source:

Hemingway in Montparnasse