A Moveable Feast, Part III

(Note: reminder that this is a piece I wrote about six years ago and have recycled here. I would write this differently today, but that is not how life works. The greatest joy of a professor is the eureka-moment that we see in our students. Often it takes much longer for ourselves. Prego.)

But, on the other hand, Hemingway has previously warned us in the preface, that “[I]f the reader prefers, this book may be regarded as fiction. But there is always the chance that such a book of fiction may throw some light on what has been written as fact.” So, “if the reader prefers,” he may read this as fiction or fact, leaving the question in suspense of whether you are reading a work of fiction or fact. Simple enough, but what is the weight of your choice as the reader? Again, I asked my  students, just who was Hemingway’s audience?

To return to the beginning, I mentioned that Hemingway begins his book with the sentence, “Then there was the bad weather.” The Yoga sutras begins in a similar way and has troubled translators and interpreters for centuries. The sutras begin with the word, atha. This word may be translated as “now,” “then,” or “so then” and the like. “Now is the time for the practice of yoga,” or “Then, one begins the practice of yoga,” and other various translations begin this work. But what is before if we take the word to mean “then” in a concessive manner? What must happen before you begin yoga? A common acceptance is that the yoga sutras were composed by the same Patañjali who also wrote the grammar sutras and ayurvedic sutras. It has been supposed that the “then” aspect of atha is that first you must learn the grammar of Sanskrit and the science of living well through ayurvedic practice, and then you are ready to begin yoga.

In addition to this example by Hemingway and the yoga sutras, Thucydides is also known to play tricks with beginnings and use unconventional structures in his writings that frustrate students and translators of Greek. Derrida, a student of classical studies and philology took the concept of deconstruction in language to its logical conclusion by looking at every word and exploding its meaning into meaningless by exponential combinations of potential meanings in relation to all other words. He has been criticized for killing the possibility of reading, because of the inevitable entropy of communication as one reads a text or performs any act of communication. So, what do we do? Do we stop communicating?

I think not. Let us look again at Hemingway’s opening sentence, “Then there was the bad weather.” The students who were in my class are future interpreters, translators, and language experts. These students take three foreign languages from their first year in college and some are fluent in three from the start. As a “philologist” myself, this group really impressed me. However, they had not expected one of the first questions that I had for the class. “What does Hemingway mean by then?” Silence. Mummuring. Silence. More mummuring. Silence.

A hand goes up.

“Prof. Fulton, we don’t understand the question, could you repeat it please?” I repeated, “What does Hemingway mean by then?” Silence. Shuffling of pages. Coughs.

“Ok,” I asked, “how would you translate this word? Adesso (now), dopo (after), ora (now), ormai (from this point)? And what is the difference?” Signs of interest began to creep over their faces, brows began to frown. Now, they were starting to get it. How do you begin a work? How do you dive into another persons work and try and capture its meaning, dare I say essence? I asked again, “What does Hemingway mean by then?”

Now hands began to go up.

“Maybe he didn’t include what came before.”

“Maybe he is starting in media res and will tell us later.”

“Maybe he didn’t expect the bad weather.”

“Maybe weather has something to do with the story.”

“Why does he begin the story with bad weather?”

“It throws the reader off because everyone thinks of Paris in the springtime.”

“It is stream of consciousness.”

And so a discussion of a book begins. The responses move from “maybes” to more assertive responses and we are deep into the discussion of why Hemingway would choose to discuss bad weather in a book about Paris. Gay Paris, the image that many have of Paris in the twenties is suddenly inverted into dark, gray, cold and miserable Paris. Reality. So dark and cold and miserable that Hemingway and Hadley actually leave Paris, (though later to return) after the first chapter, quite surprising for a book that is supposed to be about Paris.

But, I returned to the question again. This time, they really listened. “What does Hemingway mean by then?”  What happens to people when they meet on the street, or when a conversation turns to mundane things. We talk about the weather. But what does the weather really mean to us? Why would Hemingway talk about the fact that then there was the bad weather. A time in his life that was to be remembered as the best, yet we begin with dirt, cold, and smells of stale beer and decadence in Paris.

Bologna has been cold, dark, and wet for the past four months. At the beginning of March, we had a record snowfall of over a foot in twenty-four hours. The red clay tiled roofs were covered with thick, wet, white and grey snow. Patches of red would slowly emerge above kitchens and heaters and the streets were slushed with black, messy sludge within a day. The sky in the Emilia-Romagna padana (valley of the Po River) is notorious for winter haze and fog. Ferrara, home of black magic in Italy, is often shrouded in a misty garment of cold, dark fog. The sky wraps itself in a mantel of darkness in northern Europe and keeps this mantel wrapped tightly for months.

I remember talking with people in Austin about my future in Italy and many were jealous that I would be sipping wine on rooftop terraces soaking in the Italian sun. Our rooftop terrace has been wet for a great deal of the time, and the sun has been vacationing in the environs of Ethiopia as was Poseidon at the beginning of the Odyssey. Yes, we have enjoyed some wonderful Italian wine, but more often then not, only after ducking into the apartment after escaping the chilled weather outside.

Living in another country presents many obstacles, challenges, and setbacks that can never be fully anticipated. On a daily basis, you are reminded that you are not from here, whether it be the language, or the simple fact that you order something in the wrong sequence at dinner. You have to deal with new customs, new schedules, new rules, and new ways of looking at life.

Standing in line for four hours at a time at the Questura to try and get your Permesso di Soggiorno (the Italian green card) only to be told to come back next week (for the fifth time) with no explanation tempers your nerves and your patience. Having people really think that you are actually quite ignorant because you speak well enough to get by, but not well enough to fit in yet, provides your ego with humility. Teaching a class of seventy students who laugh out loud (not out of rudeness, but mirth) when you mispronounce a word in Italian and then proceed to correct you in perfect unison reminds you that you  are not in Texas anymore.

There are countless events that happen in our lives that we often miss, don’t care to notice, or simply “don’t have the time to deal with,” and yet these small, or large if it be the case, occurrences weave the fabric that make us who we are.

Spring has found Bologna more or less, although as I write, winter is making one last stand. However, on the train to Forlì this week I saw the Po valley transformed into a beautiful tapestry of almond, cherry, peach, apple, and pear trees full in bloom. Spring does find even Bologna and it found Paris for Hemingway eventually. Soon, we will be able to sit out on our terrace again, looking out over an array of red-tiled rooftops dotted with green penthouse gardens, sitting in the Italian sun, and enjoying a glass of Italian wine.

Before that, however, there was then for us as well the bad weather.