Trevor of Montmartre

The weather is stunning. I've had the windows open all week, and the sun streams in almost in liquid form, drenching my room with a perpetual state of that lazy, stretching morning sense of endless possibilities. Most of the Swedes have gone on their Easter Break (oddly, their Easter is like our Halloween: they dress up and go door to door to get candy...I swear) so Flogsta is empty and quiet, but for a multitude of birds and a handful of lazy Europeans sunbathing on blankets on the grass.

Three weeks ago, Flogsta looked like this:



But now, the sun goes on forever. The nights are comfortable and mild and good for taking walks by the river. I've been strolling downtown every afternoon to sit by the Fyris or in the shade of the cathedral to watch young lovers and read Nabokov and W. Somerset Maugham.

I've never read Nabokov before. It's a terrible pity he's mostly known as the author of Lolita and therefore is regarded with a bit of creepy distaste. I've read Lolita now, and it certainly is quite creepy (and, in my opinion, suffers from serious structural problems) but my God...the language. The man's language is simply gorgeous, and Pnin and Pale Fire have proven him to be a novelist of the first rank. Highly recommended.
Maugham, of course, is as excellent as ever. I've been reading The Razor's Edge, and it makes me want desperately to move to Paris.

I mean, what better life could there be than to be a character in one of those great novels of the first half of the twentieth century? What could be better than to live in one of those little apartments with a balcony and curly iron furniture, perhaps on a colourful, narrow street full of expatriates and starving artists. To take all your meals at the same crowded, rambling little restaurant where you know all the waiters and cooks and bartenders by name, to drink red wine with different tired crowds on warm summer evenings, to walk in the Luxembourg gardens and read by the Seine? It is imperative that I learn French immediately, that I may read Baudelaire and Balzac and lapse romantically into French when having passionate intellectual conversations with ladies. I want to walk through the rain in Montmartre to the seventh-story flat where I am having a fling with an artist's model in a little room full of slender books and candles. I want to know cafes full of anarchists and exiled Burmese.

But of course I have gotten enough of what I want in my life to realize that it never turns out to be the way you imagined. The apartment would be wretched and there would be expensive legal trouble with the landlord, assuming I could even get a place to stay, which is unlikely. Rent would be crippling. A job would be next to impossible, particularly with my lack of French. And so on.

So instead I satsify myself with my own currently sunny corner of Europe, in which I do relax in a high apartment with the windows open and through which I wander, reading lots of books. It's a very good existence, for the moment.

There is little else to report right now. I'm off for a month: my final class doesn't start till May. Going to do a bit of travelling, but I'll write on that when it happens. Life for now is comfortable, sunny lassitude, and I am perfectly fine with that. This is as cheerful as this blog is ever going to get, so enjoy it while it lasts.

What I'm Reading (a rare foray into fiction!)
Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita, Pnin, and Pale Fire
W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor's Edge
John Milton, Paradise Lost