On Ernest Hemingway's "A Moveable Feast"

As the book explores Paris (1920) in all its inherent splendour and drabness, it also felt like a disclosure of both favourable and unfavourable aspects that shroud over the luminaries of the literary world that tread on Ernest Hemingway’s path or field of vision. Needless to say, it was also an excursion to the city’s most sane and decadent lifestyle. “A Moveable Feast” is a literary banquet as it bursts with characters like James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Scott F. Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound (to name a few )of which to a literary buff was a smorgasbord of, well, literary goodies. Written in the style of a memoir, this covers the life of Ernest as a budding writer in, where else, but the cultural capital of the Western World, Paris. It features the various attractions of people and places found on this little side of Paris where he tried to establish a vocation of being a journalist then a free-lance fiction writer. I did not bother to look into how much of “A Moveable Feast” was fabricated and reduced to fiction, it was enough to read about one of the world’s most beautiful cities which happened to suffer an ebb of flow of self-exiled creative geniuses. Love it or hate it, this is a remembrance of “The Lost Generations” (as Gertrude Stein calls it) an essential brainchild of one of the most celebrated figures of American Literature.

On John Green's "The Fault In Our Stars"

I have just finished reading John Green's "The Fault In Our Stars" which arrived three days ago (much to my glee since I've waited a whole month for it and other books to arrive from Book Depository) and I've been racking my brains out, ever since, to come up with at least a reaction about what a great book it is/was. Try as I might, I can't come up with words that would level up to how awesome it truly is, a word of praise or strings of cliches would deem bottom-rung as compared to the ones done by millions of John Green aficionados out there. But first, a confession. I am guilty of being a literary snob when it comes to this genre (Young Adult just seems a bit ill-suited for someone whose age is slipping off the days of the monthly calendar). I am aware of this flaw and therefore my opinion is unsound and not worthy to be quoted. I do know of some people whose literary tastes cannot be underestimated or undermined and whose preferences are not limited to the dead fictionists from days of yore (they've goaded me in the direction of YA in ways I am unwilling to admit). I have shun the possibility of reading the Potter series and I never had the temptation to pore over Suzanne Collins's Hunger Games. It is therefore a sort of radical leap when I placed a John Green book amongst other names of authors which I chose to read in order to wile away time. On it's first few pages, I was hooked. It wasn't juvenalia. In fact it was an easier read compared to Ernest Hemingway's "A Moveable Feast", a book I've been reading before I procured JG's. And I have realized YA has gone far. Far since Francine Pascal or V.C. Andrews (See? I haven't read much).  


I was aware of the tragedy that's ahead. Hazel Grace Lancaster, the voice that covers the story, is a girl that survived a stage IV cancer case and she recounts her post-cancer life amidst a cast of characters in the state of unwellness, too. The book centers on her life and her struggles for normalcy despite it's known finitude. It turns out to be a blend of heartbreaking and funny examinations of what it's like to be at the brink of womanhood and being sick with the Big C. There is a love affair going on that is worth enduring every sugar-coated and cheesy lines (well gut punching, actually). Augustus Waters, a smart-mouthed amputee (over osteosarcoma) falls in love with Hazel and goes through life's bumpy road in the state of unwellness with her. There is also a mention of Peter Van Houten, an inveterate wastrel and a reclusive author of the book An Imperial Affliction whom Hazel Grace took up the courage to meet in Amsterdam just to ask about the book's possible denoument. What took place in Amsterdam prodded me on my 4th hour of reading that I nearly gone cross eyed. This book ventures into a lot of things all at once, and life lessons are just bursting upon page after page. It just really ties up a knot right on your heart and stomach (especially if you're someone who knows someone who's actually in almost same condition as Hazel; my aunt died of breast cancer, another aunt died of critical Crohn's disease, my mom once had a cancer scare which left enough trauma in me than anything in the world could fend off) but there were the funnies that served to loosen up these knots, however, a comic view over the dark and hurting realities that took shape in the book that somehow made me realize what an awesome writer this John Green guy is since he doesn't flinch over the Big C and wrote about it in a humor that does not purport to offend or bore you. 

This is what's so nice about reading (a new author, too), like eating a box of chocolate or treading on an unchartered territory, you'll never know what hits you and most of all, you'll never know just how it will change you, about your views on certain things in life. Yeah, dying sucks, the book will say repeatedly but, really, it tells you to live your best life everyday too. 

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"There are infinite numbers between 0 and 1. There's .1 and .12 and .112 and an infinite collection of others. Of course, there is a bigger infinite set of numbers between 0 and 2, or between 0 and a million. Some infinities are bigger than other infinities. A writer we used to like taught us that. There are days, many of them, when I resent the size of my unbounded set. I want more numbers than I'm likely to get, and God, I want more numbers for Augustus Waters than he got. But, Gus, my love, I cannot tell you how thankful I am for our little infinity. I wouldn't trade it for the world. You gave me a forever within the numbered days, and I'm grateful.” 

****

“My thoughts are stars I cannot fathom into constellations.” 

**** 

“I'm in love with you," he said quietly.

"Augustus," I said.

"I am," he said. He was staring at me, and I could see the corners of his eyes crinkling. "I'm in love with you, and I'm not in the business of denying myself the simple pleasure of saying true things. I'm in love with you, and I know that love is just a shout into the void, and that oblivion is inevitable, and that we're all doomed and that there will come a day when all our labor has been returned to dust, and I know the sun will swallow the only earth we'll ever have, and I am in love with you.” 

****

“Grief does not change you, Hazel. It reveals you.” 

**** 


**** 

“Oh, I wouldn't mind, Hazel Grace. It would be a privilege to have my heart broken by you.” 


****
When you go into the ER, one of the first things they ask you to do is rate your pain on a scale of one to ten, and from there they decide which drugs to use and how quickly to use them. I'd been asked this question hundreds of times over the years, and I remember once early on when I couldn't get my breath and it felt like my chest was on fire, flames licking the inside of my ribs fighting for a way to burn out of my body, my parents took me to the ER. nurse asked me about the pain, and I couldn't even speak, so I held up nine fingers.

Later, after they'd given me something, the nurse came in and she was kind of stroking my head while she took my blood pressure and said, "You know how I know you're a fighter? You called a ten a nine."

But that wasn't quite right. I called it a nine because I was saving my ten. And here it was, the great and terrible ten, slamming me again and again as I lay still and alone in my bed staring at the ceiling, the waves tossing me against the rocks then pulling me back out to sea so they could launch me again into the jagged face of the cliff, leaving me floating faceup on the water, undrowned.” 

****


“Oh, I wouldn't mind, Hazel Grace. It would be a privilege to have my heart broken by you.” 


****
“It seemed like forever ago, like we've had this brief but still infinite forever. Some infinities are bigger than other infinities.” 


**** 
“The world is not a wish-granting factory.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars


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P.S. 

Once again, I was at the leisure of having my heart broken and mended .... by a book. :-P 

Lament

We who are left, how shall we look again

Happily on the sun, or feel the rain, 

Without remembering how they who went 

Ungrudgingly, and spent

Their all for us, loved, too, the sun and rain?

A bird among the rain-wet lilac sings--

But we, how shall we turn to little things

And listen to the birds and winds and streams

Made holy by their dreams, 

Nor feel the heart-break in the heart of things? 

Wilfred Gibson

The Woman I Know

I know a woman and I know she is beautiful. She dons up make up on special occasions but I’ve come to admire her in her house dresses, which were normally in the shades of orange, yellow or red, always floral, cut low, with a single strap on each side revealing her neck. Her arms hung limp on her side. Her hands show no signs of a life-long craft on cooking, baking or anything that took place in the kitchen and of anything that consisted of a measure of butter, flour, eggs, spices, flames and a heart that can withstand what a body can’t, sometimes. She also owns a pair of feet that took on a rhythm upon the slightest hint of a tune, be it a swing, a boogie, reggae, fox trot, tango or whatever dances one is doomed to face in the art of Ballroom Dancing. She’s exposed to the daily tyrannies of life but believes that one can be oblivious to all these with an Aretha Franklin song at full blast on the stereo to drown out the chaos that resembled itself like an unwelcomed guest in the living room.  I have come to admire and seek the simplicity of life through the familiar comforts of the past with every track by The Carpenters, Frank Sinatra, Johnny Mathis, The Platters, Gypsy Kings and all other crooners that sang of love and loss yet set her in better spirits. She owns a voice I know I will recognize even in a far off corner, underwater or outer space that’s because it is the very timbre I would fall asleep to when she is engaged on the phone till the late hours of the night and I with my head slumped on her back, listening to the hum of her entrails, and the rise and fall of her voice, would be lost in a dream. 

As a woman grows old, she uncovers herself bit by bit. She sheds off a skin and reveals a part of herself, hidden like an age-old secret be it to charm you or to put you off. This may come unprophecied, but still, you have to admit to yourself that you have no right not to love her. 

I know a woman but she doesn’t know me, yet I want her to know that I am SHE. I am more of her than I am myself. She has lived long enough for me, for us, now it is time that we live strong enough for her. I accept whatever weaknesses she bore for I too am guilty of my imperfections. 

I know a woman and she’ll probably be the only woman I will come to love first and forever. 

 I hope these words will find it's way to you, my Ma. 

Happy Mother's Day Agnes Lanzaderas, nee dela Serna.