ToW #24 - IRB by Ernest Hemingway: "A Moveable Feast"

    Reading A Moveable Feast has gone off without a hitch; the smoothness and consistency with which I can read Hemingway's prose is a testament to the skill put into writing it. I find that I never have to reread a paragraph, a sentence, or even a word when reading Hemingway -- he recounts only what he observes and describes it all in effective layman's terms. As the natural ebb and flow of the writing brought me into the second half of A Moveable Feast, I noticed that the chapter subjects moved away from Hemingway's time spent alone -- writing, eating, and thinking -- to his time spent with others -- in cafes, meeting contemporaries, and drinking with friends. This outward progression changes the tone of A Moveable Feast from the secluded turmoils and happinesses of Hemingway's mind to the populated turmoils and happinesses that Hemingway shares with his fellow Parisians.
    The wealth of social interactions that Hemingway suddenly has does not seem to change his overly pragmatic outlook (seen in the first half, for example, when he uses his poverty-caused hunger to help him focus on his writing) -- his time spent with others only proves his complete lack of romantic thinking. At one point, after accidentally insulting a suicidal drug addict, poet Ralph Cheever Dunning, and getting hit by a pegged milk bottle, Hemingway's only remark was "For a poet he threw a very accurate milk bottle." There was no outwardly expressed worry for the man's well-being or appreciation of the oddity of the situation. He seems so scarred from his time in World War I (after all, he did have to clean up corpses and then was nearly killed by a mortar blast) that he could not think about anything other than stark reality. This frame of mind, in truth, may connect to Hemingway's eventual suicide forty years later. Seven years before his suicide, he was nearly killed again by two successive plane crashes -- burn wounds and damaging concussions. Unequipped with the wishful thinking that most of us have to relax our worries, his slightly controlled alcoholism developed into heavy dependence. Equipped with liver disease, high blood pressure, failing eyesight, and chronic confusion and pain, he lived out the rest of his life bedridden. It seems that, when faced with the reality of everyday pain and low-quality living, it was Ernest Hemingway's lack of romantic thinking that took his life.

This ToW's writing goal: To make up for the romantics that Hemingway lost.