Above my work desk in my apartment hangs one of three frames I own. It’s a poster with the words, “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” Below those words is a name we’ve all heard before, Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway has been—and continues to be—a source of inspiration for me since college days. His book, The Old Man and the Sea can single-handedly be attributed to why I switched my major from Computer Science to English. So, what about Hemingway and why Paris? Well, I’ll tell you. Since finding a fascination in the works of Hemingway, I’ve grown to love literature, writing, and reading. My senior paper in college was about his novel The Old Man and the Sea, and how it relates to life in Cuba and the role of a man being the provider. You can find that paper here. That love for Hemingway and his prose continued. I even went to the place he grew up in Oak Park, Illinois. I wrote about that here. So, why Paris, well, Hemingway spent his formative years as a writer in Paris. That time of his life is well documented in another of my favorite books (which I’m currently re-reading), A Moveable Feast.
A Moveable Feast talks a lot about his struggles in becoming a writer. How much time it would take him to form ideas, put words into sentences, sentences into paragraphs; enough to eventually form a novel. During this time, he understood that a story can be made even when there’s no “story”, and instead of waiting for that perfect story to form, he quickly understood that all there is to writing is sitting down at a typewriter and bleed. He goes on to encourage himself to by saying “All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.” Another famous quote by Hemingway.
So, did I come to Paris in the hope of being struck with some Hemingway-esque inspiration? Well, no. But, Paris is a city that oozes creativity, romanticism, and natural beauty (more of which I’ll write about later). There aren’t many other cities that form a holy trifecta like Paris. The idea for a book may or may not come while I’m here. It may not even come for months or years after but just like how a plant thrives apropos to the type of soil it’s placed in, Paris is one of the crème de la crop of soils for a writer, and places to plant that seed. Paris, for me, is that opportunity to sit down at a typewriter and bleed.
I have no expectations for Paris. I don’t even have a well-defined itinerary besides a few museums and maybe one live show but what I do hope I get out of this trip is the inspiration to continue writing. To hone and practice a skill that continues to give me pleasure and some sort of fulfillment. To that end,
“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.
la vie en rose,
Daviel
This inspires to me to have a journal and a blog like this that romanticises my tragic life.