Better Living Through Literature
Words + Projects + Stuff I Like
1. Here is a Hemingway quote, if you needed to know what Papa thought about things:
Try to learn to breathe deeply, really to taste food when you eat, and when you sleep, really to sleep. Try as much as possible to be wholly alive with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell. And when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough.
2. And here are pictures of attractive men paired with pictures of cats:
Okay, he’s not really a hippie by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s a nice thought regardless:
“As a writer, you should not judge, you should understand.”
I was up Millcreek in the snow yesterday, climbing through the forest, and thought of the last chapter of A Moveable Feast where Papa talks about spending the winter in Austria, skiing and climbing through the forest:
No one could afford a broken leg. There were no ski patrols. Anything you ran down from, you had to climb up. That gave you legs that were fit to run down with.
[…] But climbing was fun and no one minded it in those days. You set a certain pace well under the speed at which you could climb, and it was easy and your heart felt good and you were proud of the weight of your rucksack. Part of the climb up to the Madlener-Haus was steep and very tough. But the second time you made that climb it was easier, and finally you made it easily with double the weight you had carried at first.
I know this makes thing pretty author-heavy this week, but I couldn’t miss mentioning Hemingway’s birthday today!
(That is the manliest turtleneck I have ever seen. Well done, Papa.)
Today’s birthday quote comes from an archived LIFE interview from 1952 when he was awarded the Pulitzer for The Old Man and the Sea:
“The right way to do it–style–is not just an idle concept,” he says. “It is simply the way to get done what is supposed to be done. The fact that the right way also looks beautiful when it’s done is just incidental.”
This exchange from Across the River and Into the Trees has always haunted me. I was rearranging books this week and found some old journals and, yes, poems and had to think of it.
“Es un oficio bastante malo,” he repeated, “loving me.”
“Yes. But it is the only one I have.”
“Don’t you write any more poetry?”
“It was young girl poetry. Like young girl painting. Everyone is talented at a certain age.”
SNAP!
No, it’s not my father’s birthday–it’s Papa Hemingway’s!
Hem and his cat.
There are a lot of old interviews with him floating around the internet–one from The Paris Review has this gem:
HEMINGWAY [asked about the amount of revising he does]: It depends. I rewrote the ending to Farewell to Arms, the last page of it, thirty-nine times before I was satisfied.
INTERVIEWER : Was there some technical problem there? What was it that had stumped you?
HEMINGWAY: Getting the words right.
Amen, brother.
1. I’ve posted this Hemingway quote before, but I’ll post it again because it is SO TRUE:
When you work all day with your head and know you must again work the next day, what else can change your ideas and make them run on a different plane like whiskey?
2. I need to learn about real estate (Thing #2) sooner rather than later. Maybe I’ll start that online course this weekend.
3. I must make something with this fabric. Cat heads that look like flower? Yes!
I posted this at the beginning of April two years ago when it was merely cold and rainy, so now that it is NEARLY MAY and there is SNOW I think I am justified in re-quoting:
Sometimes the heavy cold rains would beat it [spring] back so that it would seem that it would never come and that you were losing a season out of your life…You expected to be sad in the fall. Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the tree and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintry light. But you knew there would always be the spring, as you knew the river would flow again after it was frozen. When the cold rains kept on and killed the spring, it was as though a young person had died for no reason.
Monday night I took a wine class (through the U’s Continuing Education) with a friend from work. Our class was “Value Wines of Italy” and as we moved onto a Tuscan red (not, apparently, an “official” Chianti), the teacher asked, “Who knows what the straw-wrapped bottles of Chianti are called?”
And I had to remember all the times the Colonel in Across the River and Into the Trees asked the hotel staff in Venice for “a fiasco” of some wine or another, and that was indeed the answer.
The teacher went on to explain how most Americans’ first experience with Chianti was so bad that the term was adopted to mean “a complete failure”–which isn’t exactly what the dictionary tells me*, but sounded very charming and plausible when she said it.
*My dictionary says the term came about from the phrase “far fiasco,” literally “to make a bottle,” and was used in Italy to mean “complete failure” since the mid-19th century. Tomato, tomahto…both of which are very nice with Chianti.
In the past two years my hair has gone from being this curly:
to what could only be called “wavy” if you’re feeling generous. My hair has betrayed me, and now I don’t know what to do with it.
In the winter I cut it even shorter, hoping for a Jean Seberg look:
But, in the words of the wife in a Hemingway short story*, “I get so tired of looking like a boy.”
It’s been nearly 10 years since I had long hair; I didn’t do anything special with my hair when it was long (although it was curly then, AHEM, HAIR); and I know I would hate growing it out. But. I find myself staring at pictures of braids and long glossy hair and echoing that Hemingway character:
“I want to pull my hair back tight and smooth and make a big knot at the back that I can feel. . . . And I want to eat at a table with my own silver and I want candles. And I want it to be spring and I want to brush my hair out in front of a mirror and I want a kitty and I want some new clothes.”
In other words, I don’t know what I want.
*The story is “Cat in the Rain,” from In Our Time.