A Moveable Feast

I sat down at my desk and opened my Kindle to do some reading before I went bed. I have developed a routine that involves reading some of Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast each night. I can’t remember when exactly I started doing this. The thing that happens when you’re at home all the time and never go outside is that the weeks fly by and yet the months are unbearably long. I knew that I would eventually finish the book and it would all be over, but the routine would be good while it lasted.

I usually read books at a decent speed of around four hundred to five hundred words per minute. That is about as fast as I can read while still being mindful of what I am reading. Reading at that pace felt productive. But when I read A Moveable Feast that fast, the whole thing felt forced and unnatural. I decided that I would read this book slowly and let it flow at its own pace. I noticed that when I read slowly, I could forget about being productive and about everything. I thought that I should try to read more books this way.

On this night, I happened upon the chapter Hemingway wrote of his journey with the writer F. Scott Fitzgerald. I found Hemingway’s stories of Scott’s delirious antics quite entertaining. I also wondered how Hemingway knew so many famous writers. There was seldom an individual he mentioned who could not be found on Wikipedia. I figured that either it was that Hemingway knew all the great writers in Paris or that so many writers lived in Paris that you couldn’t help but stumble upon them or that it was normal to run into famous writers all the time. I wasn’t sure which was the case.

There was not much of the book left for me to read. I wondered if I should be happy that I had just finished a great literary work or that I should be sad that I could not read it for the first time again. I decided that I would be happy because everything is better that way.

When I read the prose of Hemingway, I found that I was drawn to his stories for reasons different than usual. It didn’t have the mystery and action that kept me glued to that stories of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie. But Hemingway’s writing was engrossing and hooked you in and made you wanted to read some more. There was nothing special about the stories in The Moveable Feast, and that was what made them special. I sat there reading and it was like eating good food.