I rememeber reading The Scarlet Letter and wondering to myself why the exact way the sunlight hit the trees in midautumn had anything to do with ANYTHING. Yes ok the tree is pretty and it’s cold out side but isn’t there a girl trying to exacpe her husband because she slept with a clergyman?! I mean, can we PLEASE get onto the damn story already?!
Yeah not so much.
Several months later, we read a book by an author who had answered my unspoken prayers, Ernest Hemingway. Finally a man that could create a setting and well developed characters without having a single word that seemed unnecessary! His writing wasn’t flowery, and still he made me sob like a baby.
I was a woman posessed. After I read A Moveable Feast I had to know everything there was to know about him. I found that Heminwayway lived much like he wrote; simply, masculinly, and very very drunk.
But let me assure you dear readers, this blog won’t be just about Hemingway. It’ll be about different members of the lost generation), and the woman who coined the term, Gertude Stein. Dali, Fitgerald, Hemingway, Picasso, and Kayne West! Ok maybe not Kayne… But I assure you their lives were just as filled with booze, partying, and women. 😉
(har har I’m so funny)
The members of the lost generation were trying to escape themselves after some really not cool things in World War I, and although our lives may not have such drastic injustices, we face our own crisises.
They truly lived by the philosophy that if you left where you were from, you left yourself. What made them all flock to paris, I do not know, but I can’t help but admire their drive and determination to escape and begin anew. Where they courageously picked up anythign for a life of European adventure, I could only cowardly follow them in my mind through their stories and memoirs. One day I aspire to live life fully and gloriously as they did, but I am wary of where their paths follow.
Hemingway recounts his times in Paris as , “This is how Paris was in the early days when we were very poor and very happy” Somehow it’s heartbreakingly sad to read this because once he leaves Paris, he slowly begins to fall apart.
The lost generation has changed my view on life and have made me find hope through their hopelessness. They force you to enjoy the small things in life, because if you’re not having fun then what’s the point in living?
On that note please enjoy this picture of Scott Fitzgerald in drag. (Yes, the guy who wrote The Great Gatsby)
I apologize for the crudeness of this post but hey, as Hemingway says; ” The first draft of anything is shit.”