Wish Hemingway had written more
Got a rare three day holiday, I was able to complete "Farewell to Arms". Excellent work indeed. For some reason Hemingway has now a place in me. I was thrilled first when I read "Fisherman and the Sea", though I don't think "The Sun also rises" as a great one, I couldn't put my reader down then, I finished that one few months before.
From his works I could see how sober Hemingway's mind was, no wonder he won the admiration of Fidel Castro who has one of the most excellent sober minds. Fisherman and the sea explains a tail of a skilled person who knows his job, does his job well, gets the thing done, and greedy sharks spoil his work. Its just like the human race. People with skills do the right work, and people without them and or people with greed spoil it to get a bite of their success, thus leaving the skilled to live with what is left out. I work in I.T industry and have seen lot of it. Some times I wonder if all dignity has been wiped off the face of humanity to be like the sharks.
The Sun also rises, explains the concept of true friendship, or does it? Or does it say what a man will endure to get a friendship of a girl? I don't know. The story was okay and I liked it. I wonder weather there would be any true friendship between man and a woman? I don't really know. I definitely don't understand the brains of woman, when I probe I feel they are idiots, but man always sees a woman like a dog sees a bitch. Probably there are super controlled brains out there who see it otherwise and become true friends. Looks like evolution is far more powerful, we can only mask our true identity with our good behavior, but does that make who we really are?
I liked farewell to arms very well. It talks about life. How people like to live, what a man wishes to have, what a woman wishes to have and what we hate and try to run away from. Though being a fiction, it looked so real. It also explains about death, how life's can be wasted, how one can suffer loss even though one may not deserve it. It also has little bit of fairy tale in it.
Reading these three stories, it occurs to me that Hemingway has quiet sober mind, that can cut through the glare and see reality. Can cut through pain and pleasure and see what is human, he seems to be having an understanding of it. He also seems to have an good understanding of how cold things can be, what negative things the society has. Probably he was unable to think of a solution to our problems and he could see them perpetuate till the end of humanity, possibly because of that he took his own life. Tigers are more sober than cows, but which one do you think will get extinct first?
There is no solution to humanities problems, the dark black hole of greed in us will always keep growing. When evil reaches a point it must be destroyed, perhaps even by using evil means. I wish Hemingway had read the Bagavatgeetha and learned the art of detachment from universal material things. I wish he had learned about Buddhism and knew that ones happiness and sadness lies within self than the external world. I wish he had lived more and written more. More than that I wish humanity will change, but after have seen too many irrational idiots I can guarantee that won't happen.