The Urban Sherpa - a blog by Christopher DeWan

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The Importance of Being Ernest rating=3

July 2, 2005
File under: Miscellany Bucket

Here's a story, probably apocryphal, but still good: Ernest Hemingway was thirty years old, and about to release A Farewell to Arms, when his father committed suicide with a shotgun. His mother, her grief overpowered by her anger, bequeathed the gun to her son Ernest. For whom the bell tollsHe used the gun regularly, though whether with or without irony, I suppose we'll never know. In fact, he claimed that it was his favorite gun, and proved it when he chose it for his own suicide many years later, on this day in 1961.*

It's been years since I read Hemingway, but I read him at a very impressionable age, and still think of him as one of my favorite writers. If you asked me to tell you what happens in The Sun Also Rises, I could not—partly the fault of my bad memory, but more because nothing much happens in The Sun Also Rises. And that is the point, isn't it?

Sometimes I imagine myself as another Jake Barnes, in another "Lost Generation." I like to think that someone looking at my life from the outside would say of it that nothing much happens—because most of life's plot points and dramas are too subtle to flag with explosive verbs or garrulous adjectives. Instead, we drink a little, love a little, struggle internally with dilemmas we often won't speak out loud, and watch the bullfights, looking for heroic if arbitrary inspiration.

"Isn't it pretty to think so?"

* Some Internet research shows this story probably isn't true: Hemingway's father shot himself with a Civil War pistol.

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