Midnight In Paris

A lovely movie. It inspired lovely reviews, like AO Scott’s in the New York Times.

One part deserves a special comment here. The protagonist (Gil) is writing a novel about “a guy who runs a nostalgia shop.” Your Bloguero has written that he “lives in a museum.” Your Bloguero knows this terrain well.

The question is where these dreams of Paris with Scott and Zelda, or your Bloguero's dreams of Buenos Aires with Borges and Macedonio take the dreamer. Your Bloguero doesn't go back. He can’t. No magic car picks him up. No. It’s that those people have somehow arrived here. And they’ve only temporarily left. Maybe they were just sitting at the next table having a Malbec. Maybe they just left the bar and were walking down Serrano. They're around here somehow. Somewhere. All your Bloguero knows is that having them in the immediate proximity, not necessarily in one's company, makes the city and the world richer. They're around until they are forgotten. Or ignored.

Your Bloguero does not go to Paris to visit Cortazar. No. Too late for that. He recognizes that he’s not physically there at the moment. But he's there nonetheless. The City and your Bloguero are richer for remembering him.

Marcel Proust put it this way:

People do not die for us immediately, but remain bathed in a sort of aura of life which bears no relation to true immortality but through which they continue to occupy our thoughts in the same way as when they were alive. It is as though they were traveling abroad."