JOURNAL NO. 17

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s piece, “Babylon Revisited” offers me a range of thoughts. Initially, I viewed Charlie as a man who came back to a place he had once known. He’s asking his old bartender about the people he used to know and hang out with, seeing how their lives are going and if they’ve gotten any better than they once were. It just doesn’t really seem as though Charlie really cares about what his old friends have been up to. 

What I find especially interesting about this story and Charlie’s time in Paris throughout the story is that it’s a story of his return. His return after everything had changed — the loss of his wife, his daughter, his path to sobriety, Charlie coming back to Paris as a brand new man is something I don’t think I’ve read about yet. 

With Hemingway, he doesn’t seem to really discuss how he had changed over time and how his idea or view on Paris changed with him. I don’t really think I’ve written about that either…which, now thinking about it, is actually pretty strange. 

Obviously I don’t have a wife that has just died and I didn’t just spend a couple years trying to get over my alcohol addiction. However, thinking about the person I was days before my arrival in Paris and comparing that person to who I am now, I just know I’ve grown into a whole new person. 

I know this blog post isn’t supposed to be this personal, but reading “Babylon Revisited” kind of sparked something personal for me. I now am thinking about what Paris will be like the next time I come here. As much as I want to come back to Paris as soon as possible, I just don’t think that’s realistic. I have to work, finish up school, save money, get some type of real job, and pretty much just grow up before I can live here again. And I don’t want to…I don’t want to grow up and come to Paris and not have it be the same as it is now. I want to come back to Paris, live in 31 Rue Duret, with the same people, with the same schedule, living the same life. I want to go to Le Zig Zag and walk home on the Champs-Elysses at 4 am. I want to wake up at 2 pm on Tuesdays and force myself to do school work. There’s just something so perfectly balanced about my life here. I go out, I go to school, I do school work and I sit around watching netflix, and its all completely even. 

This all brings me to thinking about Charlie and how he feels about the Paris he used to know. I can’t help but think that some of his anxieties are coming from his yearning for the past. His desire to go back to the way things were before he, and maybe his wife, messed everything up. I know a lot of his anxiety is coming from his ability to prove himself, to prove he’s changed and to prove he’s capable of taking care of his daughter. I just find it easiest to relate to the desire for the past.

JOURNAL NO. 16

FICTION PIECE II

I was swimming through the ocean trying to get somewhere. I don’t know exactly where I was trying to go. The waves were huge. So big that every time one came, I would be thrown hundreds of feet ahead. I never drowned though, I never even came close. Water never filled my lungs and I never choked. It was the most confidently I had ever swam. When I was under the water, I could see fish and coral reefs and turtles, sea creatures of all kinds. 

At one point, I came to the surface. Took a deep breath and looked over to my right. There he was. Floating on his back in the water. I realized I was trying to get to him. Every time I would swim in his direction, the current would become so strong and it seemed as though I wasn’t moving at all. 

I went back under the water, under the waves. I swam as hard and as fast as I could. I came up for air and he was gone. Most of the water was gone, in fact, and the shore was directly ahead of me. I swam further and reached the sand. I was breathing heavily, panting. I laid down in the sand. The sun was hitting my body and it felt amazing. I could hear the waves crashing onto the sand and the wind was making the most beautiful humming sound. I heard birds. 

My eyes were closed but I knew nobody was there. I laid, silently, for an amount of time I can’t define. 

Suddenly there was shade over me…I could no longer feel the sun. I opened my eyes and saw the silhouette of someone standing above me, but I was too blinded by the sun and couldn’t tell who it was. 

And then I woke up. Just me. In my bed. The sun coming through my window, hitting me right in the face. 

What an interesting phenomena, dreams. Our brains working on an unconscious level, showing images, making us feel things, smell things, hear things, all in our heads. And it happens when we aren’t even awake. We’re fast asleep and our eyes can see things that aren’t there, our ears hear things our noses smell things and our hands feel things. 

I’ve been trying to write down my dreams every morning when I wake up. And if there are a lot of parts of my dream that I can’t remember, they usually come back to me throughout the day and I write them down then. I’m trying to see what my unconscious brain is thinking/doing/telling me. As I was recalling this particular dream, I was unable to decipher who the man was that I was trying to swim towards in the water. Throughout the entire day, I never was able to remember who it was or what his face looked like. 

By recalling my dreams, interpreting them and comparing them, I think I’ll have an infinitely better hold on what the hell this thing called life is all about. A various amount of cognitive neuroscientists believe that only 5% of our conscious mind is used on a daily basis, and everything else occurs in the subconscious. I want to understand my subconscious. Thats the main controller of my dreams, so I figured if I can figure those out, I’ll have a better chance at understanding the whole thing. The whole subconscious, I mean. 

And, I mean, if the subconscious really does control 95% of our mind — of our actions — I think thats the best way for me to figure out life. Maybe not figure out life, but understand it, you know? Understand why I do things and why other people do things. Understand how dreams connect to reality and vice versa. 

I’m no scientist. I’m just a normal, curious person that wants to know more. More about herself and more about those surrounding her. 

I tried to remember the man’s face from my dream all day long. Nothing came up. I eventually stopped thinking about it. I went down to the beach, and I laid in the sand. It wasn’t the same beach that I had dreamt about, but it was a beach. My body was sprawled across the sand, the sun hitting me, all over. I heard the waves hitting the shore, I heard the wind, the birds and the other people on the beach. I heard an ice cream truck every once in a while. I must have been laying there for at least 2 hours. Dozing in and out of sleep. 

Suddenly, I felt the presence of someone standing over me. The sun was blocked and I was covered in shade. I opened my eyes. It was exactly like my dream had been that night. I rubbed and squinted my eyes, and realized who it was. 

The man standing over me was my ex-boyfriend. I had broken up with him months earlier because he was a piece of shit. A liar and a cheater. I thought, what the hell is this little fucker doing here? How does he even know where the hell Long Beach Island is? How did he find me on this particular beach, out of all the beaches on the island? 

“Hey” he said, “fancy seeing you here, huh?” I sat up, sitting criss-crossed apple sauce in the sand. He sat down next to me. I was silent for a while. “Well you gonna say anything or just stare at me like that?” He said, with a smirk on his face. 

I asked him what he was doing there and how he saw me. He told me he asked my best friends where I was. They told him, reluctantly. He then messaged the girl I was staying with who, the dumb girl that she is, believed that he wanted to surprise me…that he missed me. She told him what beach I go to and what time I get off work. So he got in his car and came on down to the island. Drove to 14th Street beach and saw me. 

What the hell does all of this mean? It drives my mind in circles. I have a dream that I’m trying so hard to get to a man in the ocean but the current won’t allow me, and then before I know it he’s gone. Then he all of a sudden shows up again, standing over me on the beach. Then the next day a man from my past shows up, standing over me on the beach? What the fuck?! 

So I took it as though my subconscious was giving me a warning of him coming to see me. That somehow my unconscious brain knew what was to come and wanted to let me know. I also thought that it meant I should give him a second chance. How else would a silly, naive 20 year old chick take that? So I did. 

And, boy was I wrong. Things were good for a while. Then we fell back into the same patterns. He lied and he cheated, I got even, we fought we made up and fought again. 

I finally realized that my dream wasn’t telling me to give him a second chance. The fact that he was unobtainable in my dream, I couldn’t get to him. I was trying and trying but I wasn’t moving. My subconscious was indeed warning me that he was coming to see me, but also telling me that I can never get him the way I want him. He will never be faithful or honest. He’s unobtainable, in my dream and in real life. 

All this just trips me out now. I think I lost what I was really looking for by writing down my dreams. They are all so coincidental. Most of my dreams have nothing to do with the reality of my life. They don’t make sense and they don’t connect. It was a silly idea to try and make sense of it all. 

The subconscious is subconscious for a reason. I don’t think anyone will ever really understand it. And I certainly don’t think dreams will help out, in any way. 

JOURNAL NO. 15

Hemingway’s relationship to Ezra Pound intrigues me deeply. You see, I can tell that Hemingway has a certain amount for Pound — for his writing, his efforts and his personality in general. 

I get the sense that Pound is similar to Sylvia Beach in some way. They are both extremely kind, and do their best to help others — whether or not they are their peers. I also think that Hemingway loves people like this. He holds them in his heart. But I mean, who wouldn’t? 

There’s something incredibly enchanting about a person who has a big heart and only wants to do good for others. I know that that’s one of my favorite character traits in my friends. 

Not to say that Hemingway isn’t a nice guy, or that he’s a dick, but I get the sense that he isn’t as affable as his friends Pound and Beach. And I can see why that would make him appreciate the two even more. As humans, we tend to appreciate and love the aspects of other people that we don’t obtain. I wouldn’t suggest you quote me on that, but I can imagine the words to be somewhat true. 

Calling Pound a saint, Hemingway is clearly expressing his true opinion of him. By definition, a saint is a very holy or virtuous person. However, I think when someone calls another person a saint they simply mean that the specified person is a good person — someone who has no bad intentions. 

I can see that being very true, when I read about Pound’s “Bel Espirit”. A fellow writer to Hemingway and Pound was T.S. Eliot. In the chapter we read for this blog post in the “Additional Sketches” section of A Moveable Feast, I learned that Eliot was working as a banker in order to make sufficient funds to live. This work at the bank didn’t leave him much time to work on his writing. In order to help Eliot out, Pound got a group of writer friends together and started to save money up for Eliot so that he wouldn’t have to work at the bank anymore. 

This act of solely wanting to help out a fellow writer and a friend, shows a lot about character. Even Hemingway admits that at times he didn’t necessarily want to put his money into this fund, but I have an idea that he was willing to just because Pound was the one who started it. 

When Hemingway spoke about Ernest Walsh, a poet who Pound was friends with, it was just another instance in which it became clear to me how much Hemingway truly cared about Pound. You see, Walsh was a conman, and was insistent on conning writers into being a part of his new magazine by promising them an award. He promised both Hemingway and Joyce the same award, and they kept this a secret from Pound. From what I gather, their reasoning behind this secret was to protect Pound from thinking his friend Walsh wasn’t actually as great and kind as he thought. 

I don’t know if I’m making up too much in my head regarding Hemingway’s relationship with Pound, but this just seems to make the most sense to me. 

As I mentioned earlier, I think it’s common for people to love personality traits that we don’t actually have. It’s clear to me that Hemingway wasn’t as blatantly kind and giving as Pound was. Doesn’t make him any lesser or more than Pound, just different.

As A Moveable Feast comes to an end, I have a bittersweet feeling. This wasn’t the first time I read Hemingway’s memoir, however, it was the first time I read it so deeply and closely. I feel as though I was able to really get up in Hemingway’s head, into his thoughts. I feel like reading it now, 4 years later, 4 years older and 4 years wiser, I can actually compare and contrast my own thoughts/feelings with those of Hemingway. 

I think that if I was around during the time of the Lost Generation in Paris, and I knew all of these writers and artists alike, I would be a Pound or Beach like person. I would be the one to want to help out as many people as possible. I also think I would have a certain disliking for Gertrude Stein — for different reasons, though. I got the sense that Stein and Hemingway’s friendship diminished because he couldn’t handle the fact that she was lesbian. The reason I wouldn’t continue a friendship with Stein is because she is too stuck up and gives herself too much credit. But hey, that’s just me. 

Hemingway is truly an interesting guy, and I don’t think I or anyone else can really, fully understand him unless we actually knew him. I guess its just that reading his words, it almost feels like I do… 

Journal NO. 14

FICTION PIECE

I never thought that I’d want to leave my home. When the time for applying to college came around, I knew in my heart that New York City was where I wanted to be. Why go to a school with 10,000 faces I would never recognize and only have my campus as an exploration ground when I could have millions of unrecognizable faces in the best city in the world? 

My family was both happy and sad about this. You see, my parents wanted me to get out into the world and experience something new. My grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins were all thrilled at the thought because me staying in the city meant they wouldn’t have to miss me. 

To please everyone, I applied to schools all over. Some in florida, some on the west coast, some in Boston, some in Pennsylvania, one in Paris cause why the hell not, and more. 

The only school that I held high in my heart and mind, though, was Colombia University. I wanted to be a lawyer. I wanted to be a lawyer who attended and IV League school in New York City. I wanted my own law firm where I was the boss. I wanted to fight for justice, and so be it, I did everything in my power to get myself there. 

Without discussing it with my parents, I applied Early Decision. This meant that if I got accepted, I had no choice but to go there. I pretty much signed the contract without knowing if the people I was signing with actual wanted me. 

It had been about a month and a half since I applied. Acceptance or rejection letters should be arriving at me and my fellow students doors any day now. As I waited for my letter, I would spend my days uptown on the campus and sit on a bench and just watch as all the amazing brains and people walked passed me. 

Then it happened. The letter came. And, it was a no. “Dear Charlotte, it is with regret to inform you that we are unable to offer you admission to the freshman class at Columbia University.” 

It was as though 800 different emotions went flying through my brain. I wanted to know why. I wanted to know what was wrong with me. I was sad. I was angry. I was disappointed. I was surprised yet I expected it. I didn’t know if I should cry or if I should scream. If I should crawl into a ball and hide in my room or go out into the street and wreck any and everything I saw. 

I grabbed the letter, folded it up and placed it back in the envelope. I walked out my door without saying a word to my mom. I needed air, I needed to walk. I didn’t know where I was going or for how long I’d be gone. I just knew that I needed to get out of that apartment and put what seemed like the 6 million scattered pieces of my brain back together. 

I walked up Furman Street till I got to Columbia Street. Figures, huh, that I’d try to run away from the name that was jabbing a knife into my stomach and end up looking right at it again. Instead of walking down that street, I turned left and made my way up Atlantic Ave. I turned right onto Henry Street and walked and walked. 

It was a gray, rainy February afternoon, so it was pretty convenient that there was scaffolding up all the way down Henry till President Street. It was almost perfect, the sky matched my mood. Gray, rainy, wet, and unhappy. I liked that the scaffolding protected me from getting soaked, but not as much as I liked it when I had to cross the street and the rain would hit my body hard and fast, due to the lack of scaffolding on the crosswalks. The rain cooled my heated and red face, while the scaffolding served as some type of protection from reality. It was like I knew the rain was there, but it wasn’t actually affecting me because I had something to hide under. 

I reached President Street and the scaffolding was gone. I had nothing to hide under anymore. The reality was that it was fucking pouring outside and I didn’t get accepted into my dream school and I had no idea where I was going to go or what I was going to do. 

It all seems so funny to me now, after graduating from college and heading off to graduate school, how purely depressed and lost I felt in this exact moment when I stood in the rain and just cried. And how the moment to follow changed everything about me and my future. 

I was crying on the corner of President and Henry. I went to the side of Henry where there was no scaffolding at all, plopped down on a stoop, lit a cigarette and cried. I had my hand covering the entire cigarette so that it wouldn't get soaked from the rain and go out. It was my last one. Had to make it count. 

I felt a vibration in my coat pocket. Pulled my phone out and saw that I had an incoming call, from Susan, my mom. I took a deep breath, sighed, opened my eyes real wide, and picked up. 

“Charlie,” she said, “You’ll never believe what I’m holding in my hands!” I rolled my eyes, “What is it? The fucking golden ticket? You’re going to Willy Wonka’s magical chocolate factory?” 

“Shit, someone must be PMSing. No you hormonal little shit. It’s a letter from the American University of Paris. You got accepted! They want YOU in PARIS and they offered you a scholarship. A big one at that. Where are you anyways? I wanna talk to you about this. Get home please, Char. This is so amazing I need to squeeze you till ya pop!” And she hung up. 

I was frozen for what felt like an hour but was probably a minute. Paris? Me in Paris? Me not in New York? I didn’t know what to think, or what to do. Then something so cliche happened. Something that you would only see in movies. Minutes after my mom hung up, it stopped raining. The sky was still gray but the rain had stopped. I literally heard a bird chirp. I was waiting to see the sun pop out from behind a cloud, but that would be to unreal. 

I stood up, suddenly knowing exactly how I felt. I had hope. I knew that I would be alright. Paris…I thought. Not a college campus with 10,000 unrecognizable faces, but the second best city in the world with a million brand new faces. 

I’m gonna skip the part with all the conversations, decisions, obstacles, fights and tears that came to follow me in the months after I found out about Paris. I’m gonna jump right to the part when I decided I was going. When I suddenly had no desire in my blood to be a lawyer anymore. When I was walking down Henry Street on an excruciatingly hot August morning and it was my last day in Brooklyn. I plopped down on that same stoop on Henry and President. Looked around, smiled, and started crying again. But this time it was a happy cry, a melancholy one, a bittersweet one. A cry because everything had fallen into place and a cry because I was excited and nervous and a cry because I was gonna miss this stoop and everything else about my home. 

I walked back home, with out any scaffolding. Completely aware of and present in reality. Kissed my dog, jumped on my bed, and left for the airport. I was going to Paris and I was going to write. Nothing felt more perfect than this. 

Now I’m gonna jump to when I had settled into my apartment. Settled into school. Made friends. Had a little bit of a clue as to how to navigate my new home. It had been 2 months at this point. I was loving every second and every minute that I spent in this city of love and life. Since it was still fall during my first few months in Paris and the weather was nice, I made a point to walk all over. Go to every park. See everything that was outdoors while it wasn’t too cold or too rainy. 

My apartment was walking distance to my school. I was lucky enough to only have class 3 days a week. When I wasn’t at school or doing school work, I was outside. I spent a lot of time in the Tuileries and Luxembourg Gardens. I had made my way to the canals by Reublique and to a bunch of different parks. I would walk through Le Marais and Bastille. Sunday morning were spent at the market in the Bastille and then picnicking at Le Tour Eiffel. Some days I would walk through Montmarte and up to the Sacre Coeur and stare at the city below me. Paris was everything and nothing I had expected at the same time. Completely different than New York, but equally as lovable. 

Once November approached, the warmth seemed to disappear and the cold appeared. It wasn’t dead winter yet and being outside wasn’t quite painful. It was the time of year for a hot coffee or a hot chocolate. It was time to take the metro and walk a shorter distance and find somewhere cozy to sit inside. This is when I discovered the passages of Paris. They were walkways that were covered and filled with little boutiques and shops. Like all of Paris, they were filled with history. Many of them have been around for over a hundred years. 

My favorite passages to walk through were the Passages des Panoramas and Galerie Vivienne. It wasn’t until recently that I realized why I liked these passages so much. I just arrived back in Paris and I’m starting Grad school. It’s kind of like starting college all over again. There are still so many surprises in store. I made my way back to the passages and walked through them a bit. Window shopping and people looking. I suddenly had a flashback to the day I found out I got accepted to the American University of Paris. I remembered walking under the scaffolding and escaping from reality. 

Walking through the passages on a cold, rainy day is kind of the same thing, escaping from reality I mean. You get to walk and pass by adorable little shops and see so many different people, with the feeling of walking down any of Paris’s historic streets. But, the cold and the rain aren’t hitting you. You seem to forget that its such a shitty day outside when you spend your time walking through such gorgeous walkways. 

As I walked through Galerie Vivienne, I seemed to forget that I was starting yet another new part of my life. I forgot that I was now 24 and had to get serious about everything in my life. I was that same 17 year old girl I was when I was walking down Henry Street. I was blinded and naive. But this time, it was invigorating. It was exciting and warm. I wasn’t crying at all. 

JOURNAL NO.13

I couldn’t really tell you why, but reading this Henry Miller passage reminds me of my first week in Paris. I remember that the first few days and nights I spent in my apartment, seemed to be a dream. 

I have never moved before. Well, I moved from a house in Brooklyn to an apartment in Brooklyn, but that doesn’t count. I’ve never packed up and left my home to make a new place home. 

Until I came to Paris. 

The first week in my apartment felt dreamlike. It was strange to me that this place was my home. It didn’t really register that I would be living here for months. That I would be calling this apartment home. 

Now, though, it’s hard to imagine life before this was my home. Its hard to remember what it felt like not having 31 Rue Duret as a part of me. The creeks of the floor, the sound of the heater, the way our fridge doesn’t close all the way unless you really slam it. 

When I read the article about sexual geography, a whole new perspective and view on Hemingway and other expatriates came to mind. I never really read Hemingway with the idea of sexuality in mind. Even when I read the chapter about the girl he saw in the cafe, I didn’t really think about sex. 

When he wrote that writing a story was like making love, I never really compared it to him making love to the girl he saw in the cafe. Not until I read this article, that is. 

Something else that this article opened my eyes to was in regards to Gertrude Stein. I have written this previously, but I’ve never been a huge fan of Stein. Granted, I only read parts of Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, but the parts that I did read didn’t really resonate with me on a positive note. 

That being said, when Pizer began to discuss Stein’s book and relationship to Alice Toklas, I definitely came upon a new found appreciation for her work. He was right when he said that many casual readers sometimes find her work to be egotistical. I sure thought it was. But looking at her writing as a way to show her appreciation for Toklas’ ability to give Stein confidence in her “creative powers”, makes it seem a lot less egotistical and a lot more appreciative. 

I mean, I must have been blind reading this book because how could it not come off as appreciative when rather than writing her own autobiography, she writes one in the voice of her lover. At least now I know. 

This is something I love so much about reading. I love gaining a whole new perspective on things. On life. On the world. 

I honestly spend hours just talking to my friends about what they think about this or that rather than discussing my own opinions. Obviously I spend time talking about my own, but I find it so much more interesting to hear what others have to say. 

By hearing what other people think or feel, it helps me to truly shape my own thoughts. And I don’t mean to sound unoriginal, or too caught up with what other people think. That’s not it. 

It’s just that by listening to and understanding other people’s thoughts, feelings, opinions, I am able to decipher between what I agree with and what I disagree with. What I resonate with and what doesn’t resonate with me. What I can sympathize with and what I can’t. 

The world is made up of billions of people for a reason, why push their minds aside? 

The little passage that Pizer included from a piece of Miller’s writing is another great example of this. 

I think that for most of my life I have been waiting for something to happen. I can’t put my finger on exactly what that is. But something tells me it’s love. Love to me is something that will fill a void of emptiness and loneliness. But this is just an idea. I don’t necessarily think it’s true, but it’s still something that sit inside of my stomach and doesn’t really want to go away. 

Anyways, when Miller writes, “…now suddenly, inspired by the absolute hopelessness of everything, I felt relieved, I felt as though a great burden had been lifted from my shoulders…”, I can’t help but to yearn for this feeling. 

This feeling of relief. 

I don’t want that relief to come from realizing that there’s hopelessness in everything. That I don’t agree with. I think there’s hope in everything. There’s even hope in writing this blogpost. 

But the fact that he was able to find relief from something that had been daunting at him for his entire life is inspiring. It gives me hope that I will find relief from whatever is daunting at me. Whatever the hell it is. 

Anyways, enough of my personal banter and back to sexual geography and Henry Miller. 

Miller’s style is difficult for me. I know I understood a majority of what he was saying in “Walking Up and Down in China”, but for some reason it’s hard to completely and utterly grasp it. I can’t resonate with it. Maybe it’s because I don’t know enough about buddhism? I don’t even know if many of these ideas are in fact buddhist, but that’s what comes to mind. 

He seems so sure of what he’s writing and as if it comes to him in an instant. I like that. I like that confidence and that easiness. Its strange, though, because the writing itself isn’t what I would call, easy. 

I have yet to read any Anaïs Nin, although I just bought one of her books from Shakespeare and Co,. It’s hard for me to, again, fully grasp and understand what Pizer is talking about in his article. I mean, yeah I understand it, but I don’t feel like I can really discuss it much because I don’t attain enough knowledge on her as a writer and her history. 

I’m at a loss for how to end this blogpost. I don’t really have much more to say but I feel as though it’s missing something. Maybe because it’s 2 a.m. and it’s only Thursday. Who really knows anyway?

JOURNAL NO.12

For many authors who write about walking, Nature seems to be their go to walking route/spot. Two specific writers that discuss the beauty of Nature in retrospect to walking are Wordsworth and Thoreau. Wordsworth explains his ability to get lost in nature and find himself while Thoreau explains how nature is a key to one’s happiness/sanity. I personally am not a big fan of Nature. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I can appreciate the beauty of trees and plants along with open fields and birds chirping through the air. There is definitely something serene about sitting in Nature and taking everything around you in. Literally breathing in the Natural air and having a crisp feeling inside your lungs. In order for me to fully maintain some sort of happiness or sanity, though, I must take a walk down a city street. I need to be alone yet surrounded by people. Seeing a flower blossom is not nearly as rewarding or helpful to me as noticing a piece of graffiti on a familiar street for the first time. 

Walking through Nature, I feel alone. Most of the time, I am physically alone. But that aside, the quietness and peacefulness of Nature has an ability to make me feel alone in every aspect of my life. There’s something about complete and utter quietness that makes me feel uncomfortable. There’s something about perfection and cleanliness that makes me troubled. You see, I’m a city kid. I grew up in Brooklyn and have spent most of my time in either Prospect or Central Parks. These parks are dirty. They are tarnished and filled with people. Their grasses are far from perfect and their fields are filled with people. Walking through one of these parks is pretty much like walking anywhere in the city itself. You’ll find some pigeons flying around, maybe a duck if you’re lucky. There will be garbage cans filled to the top, and garbage all over the grass or little cement walkways. There will be a few homeless people asleep on benches and a few teenagers smoking weed or drinking beer. There will be cigarette butts and picnickers. You will never be alone. 

Thoreau states, “When we walk, we naturally go to the fields and woods; what would become of us if we walked only in a garden or a mall?”. This statement just isn’t true for me. If I need to go on a walk and do some intense thinking, I’ll hit Clinton or Henry Street — naturally. The thought of finding a field or some woods to walk through has never crossed my mind and I doubt it will. As I walk down a city street, I find comfort in the people around me. I find comfort in the sound of the cars driving down the street and comfort in the filth that makes up the sidewalk. Sometimes, if you’re in a really busy and popular area, you’ll get a whiff of garbage or body odor, and I’m not gonna lie, sometimes I like it. Well, maybe I don’t like it, but when I’m away from it for too long I begin to miss it. 

Here in Paris, a street where I have done some walking and some thinking is in Le Marais. We had to take a walk down this street for one of our blog posts, and I didn’t realize which street it was until I got there. I never knew the name of it before I did the walk for class. Anyway, for this walk, we had to keep an eye out for street art and discuss it in our posts. This assignment brought me a lot of inspiration and a lot of knowledge. It was here that I rediscovered the beauty of taking a walk down a busy street. It was here that I became inspired to write once again. And it was here that I did my best thinking since my arrival in Paris. 

Rue Vieille du Temple was no Clinton Street, that’s for sure. It is kind of a mix between Clinton and Mercer Street. Parts of Rue Vieille du Temple are emptier than others, and parts are more aesthetically pleasing than others. I have always said that Le Marais is the Soho of Paris, so Mercer street is a great comparison. Before taking the walk down this street for my assignment, I had never really paid attention to or noticed any street art. While I was looking for it, however, I found numerous pieces on each block. Not all equivalent with beauty but, in my opinion, equivalent in importance. What I realized as I saw more and more graffiti is that there have been so many people that have walked down this street and marked it with their art. And, there have been even more people that have walked down this street and have not noticed the art that it has. I was one of those people…I hadn’t noticed a majority of this artwork until I was actually looking for it. 

These discoveries brought me to think about invisibility. The invisibility of the history of the people who have walked down a street before you. The invisibility of art and the invisibility of things in general. I like how when there’s cement, or some surface that you can write or draw on, you can mark your territory. You can mark it any way that you like so that everyone and anyone knows that you were there. But they don't know exactly who you are. They don't know your name or anything about you. They just know that someone walked the same route that they are walking and drew something to show it. I know that if you’re walking through Nature and you see a tree, you can carve your initials into it or something and mark your territory. But with carving something into a tree, it’s much harder to notice. I mean, if it’s hard for someone to notice graffiti in bright yellow spray paint on a dark blue door, how can someone discover a small carving in the trunk of a tree? 

There’s a huge difference between people who need nature for sanity and those who don’t. A few of my friends find the need to get out of the city for a while because it seems to become too much for them. I have never felt this way. Except for when I decided to come to Paris, that is. But that wasn’t because I needed a break from a city in general…just a break from my own particular one. I needed to experience something new and unfamiliar for a while. And I guess I could have decided to experience something new and unfamiliar like Nature if I really wanted to, but that would have driven me crazy. Unlike Thoreau who needed to take a walk through Nature to get away from society and find his sanity, I need to be surrounded by society and remember who I am. Remember my contribution to the group and my own value. 

I’m an invisible person and an invisible walker to the thousands of people who have walked before me and will walk after me. In Paris and in New York. But I, the invisible walker, and everyone else, the invisible walkers, have something in common. If you can’t guess what it is…it’s invisibility. We don’t know anything about each other and we don’t know if we would be friends or not. But thats what I like.

Walking through a city, you know people have walked the same exact route that you’re taking. Walking through Nature, you have no clue if anyone as even seen the same things that you’re seeing. The presence of others is uncertain. If you can’t be certain about their presence, you can’t feel their invisibility. 

JOURNAL NO.11

The unreliable narrator. An unreliable narrator is one that is biased and concerned with him/herself. One that doesn't include or consider any perspective other than their own. An unreliable narrator cannot be trusted. They are ignorant, they are liars and they are selfish.
John, the narrator of the passage we had to read for this blogpost, is most obviously unreliable. The story he is telling is that of an unfaithful and manipulative wife. If I were to narrate a story about my unfaithful and manipulative husband, I can guarantee that I would be unreliable, or biased, too.
Since we're only reading about John's perspective on this subject, I can empathize with him considerably. Although his tone comes off as quite arrogant and bitter, I can understand his anger and frustration.
Who wouldn't be angry at a spouse who was controlling and constantly cheating? Who wouldn't be bitter after knowing their loved one cheated on them multiple times and didn't seem to care at all?
Since we only get a look into how John, the narrator, feels/thinks about all of this, we automatically sympathize with him.
I find something kind of comforting in truly understanding one person's thoughts and feelings, however, this passage causes me to want something more. I want to hear about Florence's thoughts. I want to her about Jimmy and Edward, and if they agreed with John about her cold heart.
The unreliable narrator causes a story to be one-sided and extremely simple. I don't have any problems with John as a narrator or a character, I just don't like the role of the unreliable narrator here.
I don't think that John comes off as mentally unstable in any way. It seems as though he is just an angry man that has dealt with a lot of bullshit. I mean, granted, when he says he would have given Florence and Edward money and allowed them to be together, he didn't seem to sane. But generally speaking, he seemed like a guy who was caught up with a girl and did his best to marry her. He then realized that she isn't someone who he should be married to. She isn't someone who should be married at all.
I don't know if I'm a good person to have discuss the difference between American and British mannerisms because my father is British. My aunt and uncle are British. At least 20 of my cousins are, too. I know them all extremely well and their mannerisms don't seem much different to me.
However, to get stereotypical, I really can picture John's voice in a British accent. His sarcastic and bitter tone almost fits the sound of that accent.
It is interesting, though, how he talks about Florence's aunts and her family's desires for her. He seems to find them strange and he doesn't understand. This is a good example of a difference in British and American culture, not so much mannerisms.
I don't really feel like anything in this passage relates to Paris as a city. The Ford Maddox Ford passage I had to read did, though.
Ford's personification of Paris makes me feel warm. I feel his love for the city and I think I can relate to that love deeply.
I wish I knew where the square is that he talks about in the very beginning of the passage. Personifying the city brings the city alive, as redundant as that sounds. She [Paris] is the city filled with cafes and cigarettes and artists and politicians and writers alike speak at different volumes. She is the city who has endured many invasions.
In my opinion, Ford Maddox Ford's "A Paris Letter" doesn't seem to have an unreliable narrator. It seems to have a very reliable one, actually. The narrator doesn't seem to be only concerned with himself. It's quite the opposite, in fact. The narrator seems to include all different information and descriptions that are open to interpretation. They don't emphasize one feeling or thought. It's all over the place.