A secret you might not know is that the morning train from Brooklyn to Manhattan is the best place in the world to read. No rider wants to be the one to spoil the peace, meaning if you’re lucky, the universe has granted you a handsome sum of time.

During my weekly commute I’ve been working through Ernest Hemingway’s memoir “A Moveable Feast” in which he documents his time in Paris, and run-ins with luminaries like Gertrud Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and T.S Elliot. The book was a gift from a friend before I moved to Paris for three months this summer. Hemingway’s memoir reads more like a diary. He recalls Fitzgerald’s apartment near Rue de Vaugirard and the whiskey they all drank at the Cafe du Dome. He recalls Stein’s patronizing tone in their interactions and his burgeoning gambling addiction. Maybe my friend thought it would inspire me, and that I’d be motivated to explore some of the spots the writer documented. If I’d read it, maybe I would have tried to follow in the footsteps of these ghosts of “la belle époque”, the peaceful twilight between world wars one and two when Americans would expatriate to Europe to enjoy it’s lively and artistic ethos. Regrettably, the book sat untouched in my suitcase for months until I returned to New York and needed something to occupy my mind as I rode from Brooklyn to Manhattan…

Maybe everyone experiences this phenomenon as they age, maybe it’s just me… but recently, I’ve been having the sensation that time is moving faster and faster, but the puzzling piece is that sometimes, we don’t know how valuable the time we experience is until it’s gone...

It’s serendipitous to be reading A Moveable Feast because Hemingway captures this feeling of compressed time well. His writing brings home the concept that we only understand the significance of the present once it has become the past...One story in particular captivated my imagination. Towards the middle of the book, Hemingway talks about meeting F Scott Fitzgerald for the first time. The two men both saw Paris as a place to rest and dedicate themselves more fully to their writing. Naturally, the two of them would be spending a lot of time together. However, the two of them didn’t spend much time writing. From their interactions, we learn how torturous a trade writing was. I imagine that they spent 95% of their time thinking about writing, and 5% of their time writing. At one point, both writers need a distraction and Fitzgerald invites Hemingway away for a weekend to help him retrieve a sports car that he left in a nearby city (rich people problems). Hemingway reluctantly accepts. His desire to spend the weekend with a mentor and more skilled writer outweighed the financial burden he would feel as a struggling journalist and the general inertia he was experiencing…

The trip goes like this: Scott, a notorious drunkard, spends most of the time ordering whiskey, then falls so ill that he demands Hemingway take care of him and nurse him back to health. Hemingway is frustrated, as the trip had already been rocky and unpredictable (Fitzgerald was almost a day late to their agreed meeting, and was asking increasingly intrusive questions about Hemingway’s personal life). Hemingway begrudgingly obliges to take care of Fitzgerald and eagerly awaits his return home. If you had run into Hemingway at any point during his journey, he would have told you how annoyed he was, and how excited he was to get home to his wife, and to a part of Paris he was familiar with, rather than drunkenly search for a lost car in an unfamiliar city with an unreliable “friend”. What bothered Hemingway the most, I gather, was how insecure he felt in the presence of Fitzgerald, an accomplished writer whose work regularly showed up in popular magazines. The irony is that Fitzgerald felt envious of Hemingway, who he knew would be an equally great writer one day. Neither man expressed such to the other…

I think Hemingway’s experience gives us a quintessential insight into our own human experience — how we feel now is not how we’ll feel later. Though in the moment, Hemingway couldn’t wait for the trip to be over, it later became one of his most cherished memories. He didn’t realize how lucky he was to be one of the first people to hear the plot of Gatsby before it was published, or how the intrusive questions Fitzgerald asked would later provoke reflection. At one point, Fitzgerald complimented Hemingway on a short story. Hemingway later fumes to his wife, “Praise to the face is an open disgrace”. Oddly, this compliment became one of the greatest he ever received. Later in life, he would proudly recount the story of the trip to his daughter, who would then recount tales of the late Fitzgerald to her curious friends...

How you feel now is not how you’ll always feel. Days, weeks, months, and years pass, and it’s only when we are safely removed from those periods that we’re able to appreciate what they contain...When I was in Paris, no matter how many times I saw the sunset bounce magnificently off the stone walls of buildings in Pigalle and Montmartre, I was plagued by an incessant discomfort — that what I had been imagining in my mind was not matching up to what I was experiencing in real life. Maybe I set my expectations too high because as I unearth and examine these artifacts of memory in my mind, I feel grateful. I would give anything for another carefree ride through the 18th arrondissement on a rented bicycle. A few days ago, I was mindlessly scrolling through my phone and an old image came up — it was of a sunrise I saw after sleeplessly wandering Pigalle at dawn. The rays of light made the road look like it was sprinkled with gold dust. I felt like I was inhabiting an old sepia-tinted photo I would look at years later, steeped in nostalgia...

Many of the people I met in Paris were experiencing a similar dissatisfaction. The great fortune we felt by being in such a beautiful environment triggered in us a deep sense of insignificance. From one friend, I learned that any self-respecting American travelers were not on a trip, but undertaking a “creative residence”, during which it was our responsibility to draw inspiration from everything going on around us. What a heavy burden. I met interesting people doing more interesting things than I, who still felt inadequate. One stranger turned friend was writing scripts. Another was a creative consultant focused on filling buildings with canvases of art. Another had sold an ad agency and needed recharging. We all felt restless. As I came across these people, I felt that I needed to match their creative output, and if I hadn’t then my life was simply not interesting. Looking back, I now realize that the most “interesting” thing I could have done at that point was simply live my life, content to observe all of the mysteries the universe had gently placed around me...I’m almost done with the Hemingway book. As I ride the train, I re-examine the fragmented stories about his encounters with F. Scott Fitzgerald and imagine what Paris must have felt like for them, and if they also felt the pressure to “create”...

I don’t like to think of myself as a person with regrets, but if I could go back in time, I would have started the book sooner and tried to retrace their steps...