MANILA, Philippines — I've only read one book by Ernest Hemingway, and I am slightly ashamed of this. It was also the last book I finished reading in 2011—I was very busy finishing my thesis, and then being a bum, and then being an employee, that I didn’t get to read as many books as I would’ve liked.

I know this person who reads 52 books a year, which means a book a week, and I think this is admirable, but also impossible.

I read Hemingway ’s memoi r “ A Moveable Feast.” It’s about about living as a writer in Paris in the 1920s.

It’s a magical book and I like this thing that he said: “If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.”

It’s a beautiful metaphor and I think the book is beautiful and very sad, full of the wonder and doubt of growing up. Hemingway says that those magical places or seasons in your life — especially those years, at twenty-odd, as he was in Paris, when you are making decisions about what to believe and whom to become and what to love — will never be lost, no matter how much they change or you change, because you had them in that place in time and tasted them and lived them. They are more than just memories — they are much more alive, much more painful, much more affecting, and they are yours.

It took me a couple of months to finish reading the book because I had to sigh at the end of each chapter.

I am 21 today and I think I read the book at the right time. I read somewhere that the only books that truly affect your life are those that you read at the right time. I find that I am young enough to be full of wonder and old enough to be full of doubt too. There’s a tension here, the tension of growing up, of settling into a routine of responsibilities and credit card bills and sound decisions and a lot of beer, and deciding which of my parents’ expectations to fulfill and which ones to disappoint.

When I started working seven months ago, I didn’t feel like an adult at all. I felt like a little kid among people who knew what they were doing and what they were talking about. I was constantly afraid of being found out even though I dressed like them and maybe even sounded like them sometimes.

Being a young person in a grownup world makes me feel awfully young. But sometimes, this also makes me feel terribly old, like I should’ve done something big and important by now, like visit Europe, or read Ulysses, or get married.

Being around a lot of adults has given me time to consider who and what I want to be like. Do I become grumpy and mean to waiters and security guards? Do I buy designer bags to impress people I don’t like? Do I date a man because he’s not bad-looking and has a stable non-criminal income?

I don’t think the adults I know really decided to be who they are. I think most adults just sort of end up there, in part from opportunities and necessities that get thrown their way, in part from the seemingly irrelevant decisions they made when they were young, like where to get an apartment, or which company to do their OJT in, or whom to flirt with when they were bored, which are not supposed to change the trajectory of a life but which ultimately do.

Reading the right books and being around a lot of adults when one is young gives one the distinct advantage of being taught.

One of my old professors once told me that he thought it was a bad idea for me to go back to UP as a teacher myself because I was much too young and my knowledge had not yet been informed by experience.

On another occasion, a different professor spoke to me and told me that it might be a good idea for me to go back to UP and teach, because I am young, and I am only this energetic and this stubborn now, and we need energy and stubbornness to make sure that the right books get written, and that people continue to be taught. I thought both of them were right.