ESCAPISM

I knew it was coming -- that those lovely cool nights and tolerable days had been a mere tease, and that we were sure to swing back into "hellishly hot" for a while longer -- but that didn't prevent me from getting dang depressed when it happened!  Speaking of depression, my thoughts have been unusually morose of late.  Between reading The Lotus Eaters, which got me to thinking about Viet Nam, and watching the movie Taking Chance, which got me to thinking about Afghanistan, fretting about all these fires, the poor men and women who are fighting them, and all those that have been displaced, plus the hubbub over 9/11, well, let's just say I needed a little escape.  So, I decided to go back to France -- only this time, I'm traveling by book!

If you have seen the movie Midnight in Paris (if you haven't, why not?!) you are sure to appreciate these two books I found at the library the other day, though you may not want to read them simultaneously, as I am doing.  All this jumping back and forth between eras has me feeling like Dr. Who's sidekick, which, come to think of it, is probably just how Owen Wilson's character in the movie felt!  Like me, you probably left the theatre wishing you knew a bit more about the two eras he "jumped" to, and the characters he met there.  I went to the library intentionally looking for one of these.  Stumbling upon the other was just a delicious gift of synchronicity!

The first -- the one I went looking for -- is A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway's memoir of his time in Paris with his wife Hadley, during the 20s, when he first devoted himself to writing fiction, and became part of the expatriate community, along with Gertrude Stein, Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald, and Ezra Pound.  "It was in that room too that I learned not to think about anything that I was writing from the time I stopped writing until I started again the next day.  That way my subconscious would be working on it and at the same time I would be listening to other people and noticing everything, I hoped; learning, I hoped; and I would read so that I would not think about my work and make myself impotent to do it."

The other book -- the lucky fluke -- is Luncheon of the Boating Party, a novel by Susan Vreeland.  It too is set in Paris, but in the late 1800s, during the birth of La Vie Moderne.  It introduces us to Auguste Renoir and his cohorts in the Impressionist movement, and centers around his struggle to bridge the gap between two worlds, to create the masterpiece that would at last give them some credibility in the art world.  "Crossing the river on the Passerelle des Arts, Auguste was seized by a thought.  He was straddling more than just the Seine.  The iron and wood footbridge stretched from the Louvre on the Right Bank to the formidable, gold-ribbed dome of the Institut de France housing the Academie des Beaux-Arts on the Left Bank.  The new art was a Right Bank school growing out of ragtag Montmartre and the suburban riverside to the west, as far from the classical, tradition-bound Left Bank Academie as it could get.  Yet the painting that swirled in his mind, even though modern in subject, required the skill of the classicists.  He felt as giddy as he had as a youth the moment before touching the first breast offered to him."

Well, I must be off.  I feel a time jump coming on.  Abientot!  See ya later!