Skip to main content

Farewell...


I have not, unfortunately, read widely in literature, let alone the classics. It is something I wish I did more. I read Goethe's Faust a year ago and thought that was very good, but my literary scope has been pretty much limited to the Harry Potter series over the past couple years, though I am only on Book 5. I did try to get through Love in the Time of Cholera, but I only got half way. I went on the word of a friend and picked up one of Hemingway's.

I don't know if Farewell to Arms is even considered a "classic." My American Literature class in college may have touched on him a bit, but most likely not. The book is probably too provocative for the school. If it did, I was probably not paying attention because my American Lit. professor was especially boring. Any way, I have never felt so involved in the world of fictional characters. I love Harry Potter and I feel like I get pretty involved, but I have yet to experience the powerful emotion I felt after reading the last sentence of Farewell to Arms, "After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain." My immediate thought after reading the words "THE END" was, "I hate you, Hemingway. I hate you." I immediately texted my friend who recommended the book and wrote, "I hate Hemingway. I hate him. To hades with his rotten soul."

How could you not hate a man who writes this depressingly blunt portrait of reality: "Poor little kid. I wished the hell I'd been choked like that. No I didn't. Still there would not be all this dying to go through. Now Catherine would die. That was what you did. You died. You did not know what it was about. You never had time to learn. They threw you in and told you the rules and the first time they caught you off base they killed you. Or they killed you gratuitously like Aymo. Or gave you the syphilis like Rinaldi. But they killed you in the end. You could count on that. Stay around and they would kill you." It kind of reminded me of Donnie Darco said, something like, "in the end everyone dies alone."

Hemingway died alone. He killed himself, I think. I don't want to die alone, but I am alone. If I died today, I would die alone.

*Artwork from HERE

Popular posts from this blog

go with your gut

I was sitting in a coffee shop on Sunday, and a young lady sat next to me on the sofa. The place was packed and that was the only other seat open. She asked if she could sit and I smiled and nodded. I continued my business, trying to give the impression that it was no big deal that this cute girl just sat next to me. It wasn't a big deal, after all it happens every day. Right... Though it appeared to be the case, that was not the case. For about an hour or so I could not focus on what I was doing. I was constantly thinking about what I will say in order to strike up a conversation, find out her "status", and make a decision whether to ask her out or not. So I sat nervously thinking about what to say. It wasn't that hard, because she was feverishly grading what appeared to be homework, as if she was a teacher. So at a natural transition in my business I asked, "Are you a teacher?" That was that. She was kind and responded as if not to be bothered by my questi
Read more

what is it?

God, Is it proper to approach you first with a heavy heart? Or rather should I come confessing your goodness and love and holiness even if I don't feel like it? When I come with such a desperate heaviness it is hard to confess with my lips what I know to be true of you in my heart. I have read about your every-day-new-mercy, but I have also read your servant David and have seen how you accepted his groanings when he lay on the floor in despair over the heaviness in his soul. From where my heaviness arises I cannot with full confidence say, though I know my sin and its subsequent guilt are ever-present before my eyes. Though I rest in your forgiveness I tremble when I think of my hearts willful disobedience to what is righteous, to what pertains to wholeness. I know my heart and its vileness and evil, I know what hides in the shadows from the eyes of my friends. But here is my despair: that I yearn yet I do not know what for. There is a strange and dark cloud alive over me with a mi
Read more

A trip to The Shack

Andi, the lady who owns the Dunn Brothers coffee shop I daily frequent during the work week, asked me one day a while back if I had ever read The Shack . I hadn’t. She raved over it. My friend Austin consistently slammed, among other things, its cavalier Trinitarian theology, even to the point of alleging heresy. Fact is, I’d heard all the buzz, and had no intentions of reading it. Andi told me it was rock solid and would change my life. Austin told me it is like chaff to the wind. I trust Austin ’s theological astuteness (he’s a fellow Th.M. guy) more than I trust Andi’s. Austin and I think in similar Christian historical and theological paradigms.  Any way, Andi brought it up again a few weeks ago. So as not to raise any issue, I told Andi I would “think about it,” knowing full well I probably wouldn’t. I had visions of John Eldridge’s ridiculous Wild at Heart running through my head. They’re books meant to make you feel good, but in the end they’re bottomless canteens. Th
Read more