It Tolls for Thee
Do you hear that, the bell ringing? Well, that's right, its ringing for you...
OK, people, I don't really know how much I can give to this one--time is short and I am busy as the next person. But I started last night, am two chapters in, and I'm totally hooked. The goal is to finish what is regarded as Hemingway's greatest novel For Whom the Bell Tolls over the next four weeks or so. That shouldn't be too difficult, though I suspect my posting about it will be kept to a minimum.
What do you guys say, want to join me?
(Why this all of the sudden? Well, I read somewhere that this is the favorite book of both McCain and Obama. I picked it up the other day and thought, Jackson's Lips have kind of been missing--they must be brewing something up for the spring or summer, so why not attack this in the interim, while my interest is piqued.)
Anyone?
Slippery Joaquin's Photos
just want to note that i tore
just want to note that i tore through this book, loved it, finished a couple of weeks ago.
i loved Benkler's book, too, but it was blissful to read through a novel after that.
spectacular book, and among other things it got me excited to learn more about the Spanish Civil War that i thought i knew so well after high school history class...
it's sweet to be reading a
it's sweet to be reading a novel again. ~25 pages in, moving fast, i'm hooked.
jag, i picked up a copy of
jag, i picked up a copy of this book over the holidays. can't say when i'll get to it, but hopefully before it's totally out of mind for you.
Nice!
It will be a while before that book is out of mind. At your leisure, amigo...
Keep an eye open for posts regarding "The Awakening," by the by.
just a guy is Joey D
And so I am done with the quotations
It's a beautiful book, really. I generally think the assaults on Hemingway are misguided. In pieces, he doesn't stand up to well. His best sentences, here in his best book, don't stand up well against Shakespeare or Homer or whatever. But taken as whole--it's magnificent and brooks comparison to any who have ever written, I think. And there seems to be a resistance to forming anything remotely flowery in Hemingway--something perhaps akin to Wordsworth and Coleridge's purpose with their lyrical ballads--as though to say: simplicity is the best way to the profound. Of course, writer's should write how they are--and the great ones do, it seems to me. I'll take the flowers and the soil--take them both if they are true. They're good for me.
Glad I read it and worked with it a bit, and I would be glad to work with it some more. But now I push it aside, and turn to what's next...
just a guy is Joey D
thanks for sharing all this,
thanks for sharing all this, JAG. i may try to pick it up some time soon, while it's not too far out of your mind. for now, i'm still slogging through The Wealth of Networks.
Going to finish tonight, I think
I am about 80 pages from the end now, and the tension is killing me. For those of you who know the book, it is the morning of the bridge attack and Pablo is returned with five men...
Intense, yes, but also profound and expansive. The full range of emotions are present and sharpened by the fateful actions of the characters, and none of it seems remotely unrealistic or illigitimate. I enjoy the digressions, often the narrator's entrance into one of the character's thinking. I especially enjoy the switch of perspectives from principals to secondary characters and even to enemies.
The Emerson quotation used in Saving Private Ryan comes to mind:
"War educates the senses, calls into action the will, perfects the physical constitution, brings men into such swift and close collision in critical moments that man measures man."
Men are measuring men here, but there is also much more. In this book, Hemingway's ideal man is present and so is his ideal woman. I know there could be great discussion on this. Hemingway is often faulted for misogyny--but that's overstating it, I think...
But there is much more than manliness in this here book...
I plan to finish and to get quotations from the book on this thread in the next week or so. And then, it's off to The Awakening. Anyone interested in that one. It's a Christmas assignment...
just a guy is Joey D
Finished
A great read. I thoroughly enjoyed it. It's been a while since I have picked up Hemingway. Remember A Farewell to Arms, The Sun Also Rises, and A Moveable Feast, and a couple of short stories that I have taught--and I enjoyed them all, but I am willing to say already, For Whom the Bell Tolls is my favorite.
In addition to the question of misogyny, the 2 other crticisms of Hemingway I recall are 1) his easy readability--his short, uncomplicated and fluid prose that is often regarded a lack of sophistication or profundity, and 2) that whole iceberg thing (which probably is meant to counter the 1st criticism)--you know, that his books are like icebergs in that you can initially only know the 10% of the overall concept that sits above the surface. You know what I am talking about, don't you?
Well, this particular book, For Whom the Bell Tolls, seems to be a reverse iceburg to me--there is little profundity that is not immediately accessible (--or is it because I am a different reader than I once was?). Part of me believes, as flattering as it is to think I am a much advanced reader and mind, that Hemingway is simply answering his critics here--he's exposing his great depths in this book. Hemingway is naked here, I guess I'm saying. And, yes, there is plenty to irk or raise the eyebrow of feminists, but there is also a degree of honesty and a depth of compassion that overclaims the work--and the man for posterity. Disagree?
Let me get out some quotations and we'll see what comes of it...
just a guy is Joey D
Quotations (first ten chapters)
"But Anselmo's a man. They are wonderful when they are good, he thought. There is no people like them when they are good and when they are bad there is no people that is worse."
"The old man was right. The horses made [Pablo] rich and as soon as he was rich he wanted to enjoy life."
"All the best ones, when you thought it over, were gay. It was much better to be gay and it was a sign of something too. It was like having immortality while you were still alive."
"Men. It is a shame to us women that we make them."
"Neither you nor this old man is anything. You are instruments to do your duty."
"That which must pass, will pass."
"You treat a man as coward because he has a tactical sense. Because he can see the results of an idiocy in advance. It is not cowardly to know what is foolish."
"Niether is it foolish to know what is cowardly."
"I don't joke that way.... Comarada to me is what all should be called with seriousness in this war. In the joking commences a rottenness."
"But in weakness a man can be a great danger."
"...nothing is done to oneself that one does not accept...."
"It is beneath a man's dignity to listen and give importance to rumors."
"There probably still is God after all, although we have abolished Him."
"Every one needs to talk to some one.... Before we had religion and other nonsense. Now for every one there should be some one to whom one can speak frankly, for all the valor that one could have one becomes very alone."
just a guy is Joey D
i'm in chapter 11 now and
i'm in chapter 11 now and absolutely loving this book.
to your list above i'd add this one at the end of chapter 4:
also, i never knew the title came from a meditation by John Donne.
Quotations (chapters 11-17)
"That you should speak.... For what are we born if not to aid one another? And to listen and say nothing is a cold enough aid."
"There is always something like something that there should not be."
""Few people will ever talk to thee truly and no woman. I am jealous and say it and it is there. And I say it."
"[I am] so simple I am very complicated."
"How do you know they are impossible until you have tried them?"
"Bigotry is an odd thing. To be bigoted you have to be absolutely sure that you are right and nothing makes that surety and righteousness like continence. Continence is the foe of heresy."
"When you were drunk or when you committed either fornication or adultery you recognized your own personal fallibility of that so mutable substitute for the apostles' creed, the party line. Down with Bohemianism, the sin of Mayakovsky."
"And if there is not any such thing as a long time, nor the rest of your lives, nor from now on, but there is only now, why then now is the thing to praise and I am very happy with it. Now, ahora, maintenant, heute. Now, it has a funny sound to be a whole world and your life."
"You were gone when you first saw her. When she first opened her mouth and spoke to you it was there already and you know it. Since you have it and you never thought you would have it, there is no sense throwing dirt at it, when you know what it is and you know it came the first time you looked at her as she came out bent over carrying that iron cooking platter."
"I would like to have it for my whole life. You will, the other part of him said. You will. You have it now and that is all your whole life is; now. There is nothing else than now. There is neither yesterday, certainly, nor is there any tomorrow. How old must you be before you know that? There is only now, and if now is only two days, then two days is your life and everything in it will be in proportion. This is how you live a life in two days. And if you stop complaining and asking for what you never will get, you will have a good life. A good life is not measured by any biblical span."
"This was a big storm and he might as well enjoy it. It was ruining everything, but you might as well enjoy it."
"It is only orders that come between us. Those men are not fascists. I call them so, but they are not. They are poor men as we are. They should never be fighting against us and I do not like to think of the killing."
"...But he had not prayed once since the movement. He missed the prayers but he thought it would be unfair and hypocritical to say them and he did not wish to ask any favors or for any different treatment than all the men wre receiving.... But one thing I have that no man nor any God can take from me and that is that I have worked well for the Republic...."
"Of all men the drunkard is the foulest. The thief when he is not stealing is like another. The executioner does not practise in the home. The murderer when he is at home can wash his hands. But the drunkard stinks and vomits in his own bed and dissolves his organs in alcohol."
"But an intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend his time with fools."
just a guy is Joey D
Quotations (chapters 18-25)
"You felt, inspite of all bureaucracy and inefficiency and party strife, something that was like the feeling you exepcted to have and did not have when you made your first communion. It was a feeling of consecration to a duty toward all the oppressed of the world which would be as difficult and embarrassing to speak about as religious experience and yet it was authentic as the feeling you had when you heard Bach, or stood in Chartres Cathedral or the Cathedral at Leon and saw the light coming through the great windows; or when you saw Mantegna and Greco and Brueghel in the Prado. It gave you a part in something that you could believe in wholly and completely and in which you felt an absolute brotherhood with the others who were engaged in it. It was something that you had never known before but that you had experienced now and you gave such importance to it and the reasons for it that your own death seemed of complete unimportance; only a thing to be avoided because it would interfere with the performance of your duty. But the best thing was that there was something you could do about this feeling and this necessity too. You could fight.
"So you fought, he thought. And in the fighting soon there was no purity of feeling for those who survived the fighting and were good at it. Not after the first six months."
"It had seemed just and right and necessary that the men who ran were shot. There was nothing wrong about it. Their running was a selfishness."
"You learned the dry-mouthed, fear-purged, purging ecstasy of battle and you fought that summer and that fall for all the poor in the world, against all tyranny, for all the things that you believed and for the new world you had been educated into. You learned that fall, he thought, how to endure and how to ignore suffering in the long time of cold and wetness, of mud and of digging and fortifying. And the feeling of the summer and the fall was buried deep under tiredness, sleepiness, and nervousness and discomfort. But it was still there and all that you went through only served to validate it."
"You corrupt very easily, he thought. But was it corruption or was it merely that you lost the naivete that you started with? Would it not be the same in anything? Who else kept that first chastity of mind about their work that young doctors, young priests, and young soldiers usually started with?"
"'This government has had much money. Much gold. They will give nothing to their friends. You are a friend. All right. You will do it for nothing and you should not be rewarded. But to people representing an important firm or a country which is not friendly but must be influenced--to such people they give much.'"
"'You are not supposed to like things. Only to understand.'"
"'But an army that is made up of good and bad elements cannot win a war. All must be brought to a certain level of political development; all must know why they are fighting, and its importance. All must believe in the fight they are to make and all must accept discipline.'"
"'It seems to me you do not understand politics, Ingles, nor guerilla warfare. In politics and this other the first thing is to continue to exist.'"
"'I suffer for others.'
"'As all good men should.'"
just a guy is Joey D
Quotations (26-34)
"You never kill any one that you want to kill in a war, he said to himself. Well, hardly ever, he amended..."
"But you mustn't believe in killing, he told himself. You must do it as a necessity but you must not believe in it. If you believe in it the whole thing is wrong."
"Because if you are not absolutely straight in your head you have no right to do the things you do for all of them are crimes and no man has a right to take another man's life unless it is to prevent something worse happening to other people."
"You have no right to forget anything. You have no right to shut your eyes to any of it nor any right to forget any of it nor to soften it nor to change it."
"What you have with Maria, whether it lasts just through today and a part of tomorrow, or whether it lasts for a long life is the most important thing that can happen to a human being. There will always be people who say it does not exist because they cannot have it. But I tell you it is true and that you have it and that you are lucky even if you die tomorrow."
"'Hay que tomar la muerte como si fuera aspirina,' which means, 'You will have to take death as an asprin.'"
"If he had known how many men in history have had to use a hill to die on it would not have cheered him any for, in the moment he was passing through, men are not impressed by what has happened to other men in similar circumstances any more than a widow of one day is helped by the knowledge that other loved husbands have died. Whether one has fear of it or not, one's death is difficult to accept...
"If one must die, he thought, and clearly one must, I can die. But I hate it."
"I guess really good soldiers are really good at very little else, he thought."
"'But all was good before,' she said pleadingly.
"'That is the promise that all will be good again.'"
"'...I must take care of my body and guard the line of my figure as though I were a bullfighter... this was of great importance.'
"'It is,' Robert Jordan said. 'But thou hast not to worry about that for many years.'"
"Maybe I have had all my life in three days, he thought. If that's true I wish we would have spent the last night differently. But last nights are never any good. Last nothings are any good. Yes, last words were good sometimes..."
"And besides, he told himself, as one who suddenly remembers that there will be pleasure too in an engagement only the onerous aspects of which he has been considering, and besides I will enjoy the killing of some fascists. It has been too long since we have destroyed any. Tomorrow can be a day of much valid action. Tomorrow can be a day of concrete acts. Tomorrow can be a day which is worth something. That tomorrow should come and that I should be there."
"If our father had not been a Republican both Eladio and I would be soldiers now with the fascists and if one were a soldier with them then there would be no problem. One would obey orders and one would live or die and in the end it would be however it would be. It was easier to live under a regime than to fight it."
just a guy is Joey D
Quotations (Chapters 35-43)
"He could not bear to be unjust. He hated injustice as he hated cruelty and he lay in his rage that blinded his mind until gradually the anger died down and the red, black, blinding, killing anger was all gone and his mind now as quiet, empty-calm and sharp, cold-seeing as a man is after he has had sexual intercourse with a woman that he does not love.
"...What an animal a man is in a rage.
"...God, I'm glad I got over being angry. It was like not being able to breathe in a storm."
"It is not liberty not to bury the mess one makes, he thought. No animal has more liberty than the cat; but it buries the mess it makes. The cat is the best anarchist. Until they learn that from the cat I cannot respect them."
"How little we know of what there is to know.... I'd like to be an old man and to really know. I wonder if you keep on learning or if there is only a certain amount each man can understand. I thought I knew about so many things that I know nothing of. I wish there was more time.
"...If I die on this day it is a waste because I know a few things now. I wonder if you only learn them now because you are oversensitized because of the shortness of the time? There is no such thing as a shortness of time, though. You should have sense enough to know that too. I have been all my life in these hills since I have been here. Anselmo is my oldest friend.... Agustin, with his vile mouth, is my brother, and I never had a brother. Maria is my true love and my wife. I never had a true love. I never had a wife. She is also my sister, and I never had a sister, and my daughter, and I never will have a daughter. I hate to leave a thing that is so good. He finished tying his rope-soled shoes."
"It was a night plan and it's morning now. Night plans aren't any good in the morning. The way you think at night is no good in the morning."
"Don't get into a rage. That's just a way out too. There are always ways out. You've got to bite on the nail now. There isn't any need to deny everything there's been just because you are going to lose it. Don't be like some damned snake with a broken back biting at itself; and your back isn't broken either, you hound. Wait until you're hurt before you start to cry. Wait until the fight before you get angry. There's lots of time for it in a fight. It will be some use to you in a fight."
"'Yes, Ingles,' she said. 'Thou art very worried, for good cause. But all will be well, Ingles. It is for this that we are born.'"
"He knew that he was nothing, and he knew death was nothing. He knew that truly, as truly as he knew anything. In the last few days he had learned that he himself, with another person, could be everything. But inside himself he knew that this was the exception. That we have had, he thought. In that I have been most fortunate. That was given to me, perhaps, because I never asked for it. that cannot be taken away nor lost."
"We are caught between the ignorant and the cynical. But we will educate the one and eliminate the other."
"Today is only one day in all the days that will ever be. But what will happen in all the other days that ever come can depend on what you do today. It's been that way all this year. It's been that way so many times. All of this war is that way."
"In him, too, was despair from the sorrow that soldiers turn to hatred in order that they may continue to be soldiers. Now it was over he was lonely, detached and unelated and he hated every one he saw."
"He had the feeling of something that had started normally and had then brought great, outsized, giant repercussions. It was as though you had thrown a stone and the stone made a ripple and the ripple returned roaring and toppling as a tidal wave. Or as though you shouted and the echo came back in rolls and peals of thunder, and the thunder was deadly. Or as though you struck one man and he fell and as far as you could see other men rose up all armed and armored."
This is Robert Jordan, the protagonist, telling Maria, his "true love," goodbye--in Spanish: "...Thou art so good. Now do not think more. Now art thou doing what thou should. Now thou art obeying. Not me but us both. The me in thee. Now you go for us both. Truly. we both go in thee now. This I have promised thee. Thou art very good to go and very kind."
"Each one does what he can. You can do nothing for yourself but perhaps you can do something for another."
"He looked down the hill slope and he thought, I hate to leave it, is all. I hate to leave it very much and I hope I have done some good in it. I have tried to with what talent I had. Have, you mean. All right, have.
"I have fought for what I believed in for a year now. If we win here we will win everywhere. The world is a fine place and worth the fighting for and I hate very much to leave it. And you had a lot of luck, he told himself, to have had such a good life... You do not want to complain when you have been so lucky. I wish there was some way to pass on what I've learned, though. Christ, I was learning fast there at the end... There's no one thing that's true. It's all true. The way the planes are beautiful whether they are ours or theirs. The hell they are, he thought."
"Who do you suppose has it easier? Ones with religion or just taking it straight? It comforts them very much but we know there is no thing to fear. It is only missing it that's bad. Dying is only bad when it takes a long time and hurts so much that it humiliates you. That is where you have all the luck, see? You don't have any of that?"
"And if you wait and hold them up even a little while or just get the officer that may make all the difference. One thing well done can make--"
just a guy is Joey D
Only 200 in yet
Am 200 pages in and enjoying it immensely. It's sad to see that I started this thread two and half weeks ago and am only a little less than half way through the book. Pilar is a great character. Robert and Maria have a convincing romance going. Suspense is building at every turn. Snow is falling and the attack is coming soon...
Anyone want to come along? I'll probably still be reading it--will certainly still be thinking and posting about it in Junuary... 2010. Anyone?
just a guy is Joey D
well hot damn, jaggy, i'd
well hot damn, jaggy, i'd love to join you. if only i weren't such a worthless sack of flesh at the moment!
gimme a little more heads-up next time, my friend (to steal a phrase from John McCain). whenever i get back to actually reading a page now and then, i'm still trying to work through the Benkler book. but i just might try to catch up with you when i do some traveling next month...
and ha, ha -- i think i heard the same mention of the book on NPR this morning.
Yea, me too
Hiebs,
I don't know if it's realistic for me either. I am only 6 or 7 chapters in, and I don't have but three more busy weeks to go. Why only three? Because I start teaching a new book then in my AP Lit., and almost all my focus will have to go to it. But pick up the Bell if you can, and I'll talk to you (or to whomever else) about whenever you're ready.
By the way, it's good, smooth and yet profound, as Hemingway tends to be...
just a guy is Joey D
only 130 in
Just finished chapter ten and am enjoying it immensely--enjoying it and enjoying reading, again. Hemingway is great, without question. Time is running short, though. I only have two more weeks with plenty of grading to do. But I am going for it nevertheless. In other words, not too late for anyone to join...
just a guy is Joey D
good luck... i can't do it
good luck... i can't do it at the moment -- still trying to wade through The Wealth of Networks, which i'll post about some time soon... but i am starting to yearn for some fiction again (love to bounce back and forth that way).