Road to Elsewhere, Excerpt #28: "Would you please, please, please, please, please, please, please stop talking?"

Ernest Hemingway wrote that line of dialogue. If only I had been listening.

ON THE AFTERNOON OF OCTOBER 17TH, Paris was brisk and encouraging. To me, fall has always been the start of something, rather than the end. That afternoon, I thirstily wandered over to Shakespeare and Company; I had been without a book to read for nearly fourteen hours! I came away with David Copperfield, and read the first 120 pages on a park bench. 

As…