22/90, the reader

 

I have started reading Ernest Hemingway's collected essays of the Paris years. I give myself 20 minutes a day to take it in, walk the streets with him and figure out what it all means. 

How do we live as an expatriate? Which part of us will never leave? Which will create the lens through which we take in a culture, even after we're no longer a "tourist"? When are we not tourists?

Among the scenes of passionate writing and declarations of love found in the minutia of each day, Hemingway gives us his wisdom, which I admit I was not expecting to find. In closing his preface, I felt like he was giving me a bit of advice I'd always needed.

If the reader prefers, this book may be regarded as fiction. But there is always the chance that such a book of fiction may throw some light on what has been written as fact.

They will read it as they will. Some will read in a way that is easy for them--that is comfortable and does not push their understanding or acceptance. It is not my job to write to them. It is my job to share these things that have shaped me. To write them down and show them to you and say, "This was not just you. I figured out that it was not just me, either. See? See how we are the same and that you are not alone."

Yesterday a friend asked me, "What do you write about?" My immediate reaction was, "What do I write about?" How can I say that one thing is not important when a year from now it could be the center of a starbust of events. The choice to eat the reuben and not the salad for lunch, or to eat the pickle first, could be pivotal.

Then I realized that this response is not true. I do not writ, on my blog, what I am really "writing about," what this learning of nonfiction is really all about. The key points, it turns out, never leave my journal--to protect my reader, to protect the parties involved, to protect myself for the time being. But I feel the need to write these things. I know that the feminist/housewife project I'm working on cannot be complete without reviewing these journals. 

Now, things are getting complicated. Things are heavy and undoable and, I'll say it, impossible. At the present, at such close proximity (timewise). With such high sensitivities on all sides. I am writing, but I am not writing about "what I am writing about." I am writing pretty, writing comfort, writing confused moments, writing feeling better. I am not writing the story yet.