According to A. E. Hotchner, Hemingway's friend and biographer, the two of them had been invited to lunch at the Paris Ritz by the Hotel's Chairman, Charley Ritz. While they ate, Ritz wondered if Hemingway knew he had a trunk stored in the hotel's basement, noting that it had been there since 1930. Hemingway was both surprised and pleased by the news. His friend, Louis Vuitton, had specially made that trunk for Hemingway in the 1920's, but the writer had lost track of it.
After lunch, Ritz had the trunk brought up to his office. Hemingway sifted through clothes, menus, receipts, memos, hunting and fishing paraphernalia, skiing equipment, racing forms, and correspondence. Then, at the bottom, he found the treasure: two stacks of notebooks, the kind school children used in the 1920's.
The notebooks were filled with his commentary on the places, the people, and the events of his life during his time in Paris. He had lived in near poverty in 1920's Paris, but he had known the people whose ideas and artistic expressions changed the world of "the lost generation." Among those described in his commentaries were F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and Aleister Crowley, to name only a few.
If you want to get a sense of this heady period, watch the film, Midnight in Paris.
Hemingway eventually had his notebooks transcribed and then organized them into a book entitled, A Moveable Feast. The book was his memoir of those years and those people as he knew them. The title of the book comes from a comment Hemingway made to a friend n 1950: "If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a movable feast."
After carefully preserving his thoughts, writing almost daily his observations of his life and those who shared it, Hemingway lost them all. He searched for those notebooks for years, decades.
This week's Lectionary scriptures are about a different kind of moveable feast. Using such phrases as "delight yourselves in rich food (Isaiah 55:2)," and "My soul is satisfied as with a rich feast (Psalm 63:5)," this week's scriptures capture the reality of eating the spiritual food God has prepared for us. We are enjoined to not lose our way; to not partake of the "same spiritual food" and the "same spiritual drink" as the Israelites in the wilderness (I Corinthians 10:3-4) while yet forgetting their true source. And finally, we are warned of the perils of not producing our portion of that moveable feast in the parable of the fruitless fig tree (Luke 13:6-9).
Hemingway lost his moveable feast for a time. And then one day, as with most lost things, he found them right where he had left them. Our moveable feast is right where it's been all our lives. We need only return to it.
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READINGS FOR THE COMING WEEK
http://lectionary.library.vanderbilt.edu/
Third Sunday in Lent (February 28, 2016)
First reading
Isaiah 55:1-9
Psalm
Psalm 63:1-8
Second reading
1 Corinthians 10:1-13
Gospel
Luke 13:1-9
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Join us for a feast Friday mornings at Lectionary Breakfast. As usual, we meet at the Waco "Egg and I" restaurant at 8:00 for an hour like no other. We feast on food, we feast on God's word, and we feast on fellowship. And when we leave, part of those feasts moves with us, out into the day, the week, and the lives of those we meet.
Enjoy the week!
Steve
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