Midnight In Paris

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"All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you: the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was."
— Ernest Hemingway

Recently I went to see the movie, Midnight In Paris. It was a brilliant film with a great story, but I don't want to spoil it for you. Ernest Hemingway is in the movie, not the real Ernest Hemingway duh, but Hemingway nonetheless. The entire movie was him quoting himself and the one thing that stuck out to me was that quote. It is so true.

Books tear me apart. They really do. When I read the Twilight series I went through a crazy mixed up emotions phase for about a month. As soon as I started New Moon I felt depressed and encompassed by this great amount of heartbreak and sorrow. That is when you know a writer is good. When you are inwardly effected by writing, you can truly say you have lived.

For me, I find that intense feeling most when I read Jane Eyre. I trudge along in her desolate childhood, and feel lonely with her as she grows into a teenager. An overcoming want for righteousness washes over me as I read about her devotion to God after an inevitable heart-break. Tears seriously stream down my face every time I read the last chapters of that book when she is reunited with her love, someone who's soul is interconnected with her own. Oh! If I could live in those feelings forever.

Sometimes, I do. Just like Hemingway said, "afterwards it all belongs to you." When your heart is tested, or you are thrown down to the ground by the world. What you have read, what you have come to know, from reading, comes back to you.

One moment you are yourself, in your own world, your own happiness or tragedy. Then as the two collide, you come to float on the edge of fantasty and reality. Epic, so epic.