“Hell,” I said, “I love you enough now. What do you want to do? Ruin me?”
“Yes. I want to ruin you.”
“Good,” I said, “that’s what I want too.”
***************
“I’m going to die,” she said; then waited and said, “I hate it.”
- Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms.
Does it surprise you that I tracked down Hemingway all the way in Scotland?
Because it shouldn’t.
- Went into town and got my pay-as-you-go mobile phone. It took about 10 minutes to get everything set up. I called Perv, whose mother thanked me for buying Devil of the Highlands, whereupon I nearly died of embarrassment. I can’t wait to meet her and Big Al in August post-Ireland.
- Crossed Inverness Bridge over the River Ness, and didn’t expect it to move up and down quite so much. I stood on the bridge for a while and admired all of the old stone buildings.
- Having walked around a bit, I walked into a cafe and ordered a gingerbread latte, sat down, and tried not to listen in on people’s conversations around me, which is hard since every time I hear the accent (will this never get old? I don’t think it will) I strain really hard to hear more of it. Eventually I turned my iPod on and listened to The National sing “Secret Meeting” and “Mr. November” and every other perfect song on that fucking album while reading Dave Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (which, btw, I found the version with the upside-down added on appendix, “Mistakes We Knew We Were Making” that I have been looking for for like, 5 years. Where did I find it? In a tiny little used bookshop in Logie Steading in a tiny little village called Forres. I promptly shelled out 4 GBP to buy it because Jesus, what luck!) and drinking my delicious coffee and felt… glorious.
- Found an “Oriental Food Shop” that had, of all things, sae-ooh-ggang! I haven’t had any of it since the giant bag A. bought me for my 23rd birthday, along with Wong Kar Wai’s Happy Together, but I pressed my nose up against the window and couldn’t stop smiling. Koreans: we get everywhere.
- Why is everyone I meet so fucking nice?!
- Took a look inside Inverness Library, which was tiny, and found a copy of Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms. When I was falling head over heels in love with Hemingway at the tender age of 16, I never thought that one day I would be sitting in the Highlands in Scotland and witnessing the love affair between Frederic Henry and Catherine Barkley bloom. I immediately looked around for my favorite quote from the book and found it on page 222 (you should know what it is), took a picture of it, and then sat nestled in my corner of the library, of the world, for a little while, a wee while, and re-read words of devastation that linger on in my heart to this day, 10 years after I first encountered them.
