Hemingway
Thursday, February 17th, 2022
February 17, 2022
‘Our minds our like crows. They pick up everything that glitters, no matter how uncomfortable our nests get with all the metal in them.’
-Thomas Merton, 1961, Seeds of Destruction
Apropos for contemporaneous news cycles and destruction of social media. -dayle
For the thousands who die everyday from the pandemic still, whose deaths are only felt in numbers, not souls…1,000,000 total as of today. -dayle
‘Any disaster you can survive is an improvement in your character, your stature, and your life.’
-Joseph Campbell
‘What is to give light must endure burning.’
-Victor Frankl
A prayer from Marianne:
‘I place my relationship with him in your hands. May my presence once again be a blessing in his life, and my his be blessing in mine. May my thoughts toward him be those of innocence and love, and may his toward me be the same. Amen.’
❀
The Broken Places
September 10, 2018
The Hemingway Seminar concluded on Saturday, Sept. 8th, at the Community Library in Ketchum, with a focus on Hemingway’s third book, A Farewell to Arms. At the ending presentation, University of Maryland english professor David Wyatt discussed the various 47 endings Hemingway considered, including an ending Hemingway’s friend, F. Scott Fitzgerald, pleaded with him to use.
If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.
Hemingway would ultimately choose a different ending, and include 68 more pages after this one, which is found on page 216 in A Farewell to Arms, The Hemingway Library Edition, Includes the Author’s 1948 Introduction, Early Drafts, and All of the Alternative Endings (2012).
The Hemingway Society
The Bi-Annual conference moves to Wyoming in 2020 after Paris in 2018.
“We will begin in Sheridan, Wyoming, where A Farewell to Arms was finished and end in Cooke City, MT, from where final drafts of Death in the Afternoon and To Have and Have Not were mailed, with stops at the Little Bighorn Battlefield, Yellowstone National Park and Hemingway pertinent towns – Cody, WY and Red Lodge, Montana. The Hemingway Society invites you to join us in 2020 to celebrate the 80th anniversary of For Whom the Bell Tolls, experience some of the America’s most pristine wilderness, and explore the final frontier of Hemingway scholarship.”
Hemingway & Fitzgerald
July 2, 2015
Ernest Hemingway left his body on this day in 1961. Maria Papova, (Brain Pickings) posted this letter that Hemingway wrote to F. Scott Fitzgerald back in July, 1925…
“Dear Scott —
We are going in to Pamplona tomorrow. Been trout fishing here. How are you? And how is Zelda?”
I am feeling better than I’ve ever felt — haven’t drunk any thing but wine since I left Paris. God it has been wonderful country. But you hate country. All right omit description of country. I wonder what your idea of heaven would be — A beautiful vacuum filled with wealthy monogamists. All powerful and members of the best families all drinking themselves to death. And hell would probably an ugly vacuum full of poor polygamists unable to obtain booze or with chronic stomach disorders that they called secret sorrows.
To me a heaven would be a big bull ring with me holding two barrera seats and a trout stream outside that no one else was allowed to fish in and two lovely houses in the town; one where I would have my wife and children and be monogamous and love them truly and well and the other where I would have my nine beautiful mistresses on 9 different floors and one house would be fitted up with special copies of the Dial printed on soft tissue and kept in the toilets on every floor and in the other house we would use the American Mercury and the New Republic. Then there would be a fine church like in Pamplona where I could go and be confessed on the way from one house to the other and I would get on my horse and ride out with my son to my bull ranch named Hacienda Hadley and toss coins to all my illegitimate children that lined the road. I would write out at the Hacienda and send my son in to lock the chastity belts onto my mistresses because someone had just galloped up with the news that a notorious monogamist named Fitzgerald had been seen riding toward the town at the head of a company of strolling drinkers.
Well anyway were going into town tomorrow early in the morning. Write me at the / Hotel Quintana
Pamplona
Spain
Or don’t you like to write letters*. I do because it’s such a swell way to keep from working and yet feel you’ve done something.
So long and love to Zelda from us both —
Yours,
Ernest