It’s 8.30pm on a Saturday night in Los Angeles. In honour of Earth Hour, the lights are off and I am typing the words of Hemingway by candlelight. I loved this passage in A Moveable Feast – for the words as much as the sentiment – and wanted to share it with you:
“To have come on all this new world of writing, with time to read in a city like Paris where there was a way of living well and working, no matter how poor you were, was like having a great treasure given to you. You could take your treasure with you when you traveled too, and in the mountains where we lived in Switzerland and Italy… there were always the books, so that you lived in the new world you had found, the snow and the forests and the glaciers and their winter problems and your high shelter or your pension in the Hotel Taube in the village at night; and you could live in the other wonderful world the Russian writers were giving you. At first there were the Russians; then there were all the others. But for a long time there were the Russians.”
My heavy copy of War and Peace, waiting to be read…
Marina Chetner 