too many Daves

The full text of a tweet I saw today reads “It’s 1:22 am, and it is 84 F in Moscow. Kill me.”

Two weeks ago, those words would have made me think of a windless night last summer when heat cheated my sleep. Now, suddenly done with a long estrangement from Hemingway, the words make me think of this passage about Madrid from Death In The Afternoon:

The heat and the cold come and go quickly there. I have watched, on a July night when I could not sleep, the beggars burning newspapers in the street and crouching around the fire to keep warm. Two nights later in was too hot to sleep until the coolness that comes just before morning.

Madrileños love the climate and are proud of these changes. Where can you get such variation in any other large city? When they ask you at the café how you slept and you say it was too bloody hot to sleep until just before morning they tell you that is the time to sleep. There is always that coolness just before daylight at the hour a man should go to sleep. No matter how hot the night you always get that.

Until recently, I’d read The Old Man And The Sea, The Dangerous Summer, and some Hemingway short stories. That’s it. It’s strange, too, because I read The Old Man And The Sea back when I wasn’t much of a reader and I remember needing — just flat-out needing — to finish that book in one mesmerized sitting. Did I take that as a sign I should read more Hemingway? I did not. Not then. Not now.

I’m making my way through Hemingway’s work now for an authentically asinine reason. A congressional committee compelled a high-school classmate of mine to testify about his role in a famous financial scandal. Maureen Dowd blasted this classmate by name in her New York Times column. All that newsworthiness jarred loose a memory that, at first, I didn’t trust. I mean, I had to be imagining that this same classmate quoted the fictional insider trader Gordon Gekko on his senior yearbook page, right? Wrong. I found the yearbook in my garage and there it was: “‘Greed, for lack of a better word, is good.’ - Michael Douglas as Gordon Gecco (sic).”

On my way to deciding not to scan the yearbook page and e-mail it to the reporters who covered the congressional hearing, it hit me that I should look back at my own yearbook page and ask myself whether I would want to be judged by my yearbook quotes if notoriety fell from the sky and landed on me. The answer is no. All the same, I was judging myself. Why had I quoted myself saying “No, these are not Andy McManus’s shorts.” Sure, there’d been confusion on the subject. I’d said those words any number of times. All in fun. A good laugh every time. But, in retrospect, they seem undeserving of any sort of immortality.

Then there’s the last quote, which I swear will get us back on course here. I quoted Hemingway: “If you are lucky enough to live in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.” Knowing what I knew, that quote seemed as damning as the “greed is good” quote. What I knew was this: I hadn’t read Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast when my high school’s yearbook went to press in 1990 and I still hadn’t read it on the day this year when I went searching for Gordon Gekko. Sure, I lived in Paris when I was a fourth-grader. It was absolutely formative. But the Hemingway quote was something fished out of Bartlett’s. Even though the quote spoke to my 17-year-old self, it seemed two decades later to rat me out as both pretentious and lazy.

Reading A Moveable Feast seemed like a reasonable first step toward evading the truth. So I did. Technically, someone else read and I listened while jogging. If you want provisional proof that audiobooks are as good as reading, I offer the existence of this overlong blog post, which I’m writing precisely because I remembered a passage from the Hemingway audiobook I started after savoring A Moveable Feast.