So, I read this book – which I’ll chat about it, specifically, in the next post – That Summer in Paris, about a young writer’s summer in, er, Paris in 1929, in which he palled around with the likes of Hemingway and Fitzgerald (and Joyce, as I mentioned here).
I picked it up at an estate sale a couple of months ago. The deceased had been a professor of literature and film and was of Palestinian roots. As I opened it the book – edition published in 1962 – the other day to begin reading, two things promptly tumbled from the pages:
They’re all words from the book, yes, even soutane and genuflect because a priest is encountered and churches are toured. And Callaghan was Catholic.
Anyway,
Of course, I don’t know who the very handsome fellow in the photograph is. The book’s owner, a Middle Eastern immigrant who ended up teaching college students in Alabama? A friend? Relative? I’ve no idea. But that ain’t Alabama, that’s for sure.
Nor do I know why he noted these particular words. Were they new to him? Words he needed to look up? Words he thought were interesting for one reason or another? Did he just like the sound of them?
You could easily compose a found poem from these words. Perhaps that’s what he was about, why he noted them.
Or even a short story.
That ineffable, articled old walrus was sipping an aperitif in the café. I noted his pallor, but he brushed me off in a peremptory manner and nodded at the priest across the way in his soutane. “He seems a bit of a scunner,” muttered the walrus. “Profligate, even.” I watched the cleric push open the doors of the church on the corner and enter. I imagined – wondered – if he’d genuflect as he went up the aisle of the church. I turned back to the walrus. “Well,” I said, as cheerfully as I could, “How’s the campaign for alderman going?”
I went and sat outside in the cool of the evening and wondered what I was supposed to say about these found things. And here I am, back again.
It seems to me to be something about the concrete.
Here I am, a 60-year old woman, writing a few things, tending to the people in her life in 2021, contemplating words noted down from a dead Palestinian scholar from a book written by a Canadian around the time I was born about the Writing Life in Paris circa 1929, around the time my mother was born. In Canada.
Almost a hundred years.
I don’t know what the connection means. I can’t explain, can’t think of a cozy, succinct circle to draw. All I know is that I like it.
I like the actual piece of paper and the photograph printed on paper surprising me, fluttering to the ground from the book made of paper that I bought in a garage in a real house from real people – the daughters, maybe, or granddaughters of the man in the picture – a mile or so from my real house – that somehow connects me to those people, and then to Palestine, to Paris, to Toronto, to all kinds of people, real people, trying to make sense of life, and caring enough about it all to leave their questions, if not their answers, behind for me to find.
ineffable…profligate….
…genuflect (?)
