Big storm tonight in northern VA. Need the rain. Have been purging this dry house of paper and nonsense lately, and re-reading Hemingway before falling asleep.
From The Sun Also Rises:
"Women made such swell friends. Awfully swell. In the first place, you have to be in love with a woman to have a basis of friendship. I had been having Brett for a friend. I had not been thinking about her side of it. I had been getting something for nothing. That only delayed the presentation of the bill. The bill always came. That was one of the swell things you could count on."
I think women should read Hemingway. He tells us about men who fight bulls and other males, the ones who want women who are happy, not pure; women who are content in their puzzle, if that is who they are. He describes the men we know, detest, treasure, seek, lose, meet again at a different time, another place. And he lets us know about himself, how he feels about things behind the shield of masculinity, remorse, rememberance.
Fiction writers from way back were the first psychologists, using the rough pastels of words to scrape some lesson across the page, to tell the story of another human, to give us a glimpse of who we are. It delivers more meaning than being spoon-fed while laying upon some couch.
An acquaintance of mine told me something the other day: she went through thirty (30) years of therapy -- countless hours and dollars -- to only realize that if she had just been honest with herself from the get-go, she would have been all right.
PHOTO: Ernest Hemingway, from FingerLakesPhoto, filtered in Photoshop with -- you guessed it -- the Rough Pastel filter.
Good call, Mary -- I'm going to go back and take a look, since I do tend to think of myself as a puzzle...but whether I'm content in it or not is another matter...
Posted by: Genie | August 27, 2007 at 12:06 AM
Ah, Hemingway and his love for a swell woman and a clean, well-lighted place. If we could all just be honest with ourselves from the beginning, and love ourselves for who we are, then we'd all show up in the world just as we need to be. Sounds like A Prayer for Owen Meany written by Hemingway.
Posted by: QuinnCreative | September 02, 2007 at 05:22 PM