(posts) an excerpt about a glimmer of hope

There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty forever beyond its reach.

J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King

 

something about Ernest Hemingway's "The Sun Also Rises"

Most critics recognize The Sun Also Rises as Hemingway's best work. Published in 1926, the story follows an American expatriate traveling from Paris through Spain in the company of other American and British expatriates. Literary commentary inevitably refers to how the novel captures the Lost Generation's sense of disillusionment. Sure enough, Book I of this slim novel passes time in Paris, and there we see how unbearable disillusioned people can be, conspicuously bored and uncomedically witty. But after Book I, The Sun Also Rises reveals itself to be a potent, beautifully rich novel. Even the waste and cruelties of Book I become meaningful when recast in the violence at the fiesta.

There are so many wonderful lines. Examples:

Robert Cohn was a member, through his father, of one of the richest Jewish families in New York, and through his mother of one of the oldest.

And,

"How did you go bankrupt?" Bill asked.
"Two ways," Mike said. "Gradually and then suddenly."

And that phrasing is called back later:

The bull gathered himself, then his head went forward and he went over slowly, then all over, suddenly, four feet in the air.

But maybe my favorite part is the chapter in which Jake is drunk in his hotel room, thinking through his views on life. This chapter includes the following:

Women made such swell friends. Awfully swell. In the first place, you had to be in love with a woman to have a basis of friendship. I had been having Brett for a friend. I had not been thinking about her side of it. I had been getting something for nothing. That only delayed the presentation of the bill. The bill always came. That was one of the swell things you could count on.

I thought I had paid for everything. Not like the woman pays and pays and pays. No idea of retribution or punishment. Just exchange of values. You gave up something and got something else. Or you worked for something. You paid some way for everything that was any good. I paid my way into enough things that I liked, so that I had a good time. Either you paid by learning about them, or by experience, or by taking chances, or by money. Enjoying living was learning to get your money's worth and knowing when you had it. You could get your money's worth. The world was a good place to buy in. It seemed like a fine philosophy. In five years, I thought, it will seem just as silly as all the other fine philosophies I've had.

Perhaps that wasn't true, though. Perhaps as you went along you did learn something. I did not care what it was all about. All I wanted to know was how to live in it. Maybe if you found out how to live in it you learned from that what it was all about.

Hope is Right

My grandmother wrote at least one book. Nothing of hers was published. Oddly, my grandfather wrote a single poem--a parody based on a famous poem--and immediately was published in some collection, somewhere.

Anyway, my grandmother. She once wrote and sent this letter to a publisher:

Enclosed is a short synopsis and the first three chapters of my manuscript, "West Winds of Hope". It is part of me. I felt every word of it.

I was born in western part of Texas. I haven't participated in any wild escapades. You can say, I'm just an ordinary home-maker who loves to write. I'm finishing a murder mystery now.

"West Winds of Hope" would make a great mini-series. It is quite a dramatic story. I hope you will consider it. It is two hundred ninety three typed pages. My manuscript has been edited. It is also registered with copyright.

I belong to several clubs and everyone is ready to purchase my book.

Her book, with its not-at-all cliché title, West Winds of Hope, was based on her own experience. She fails to make this clear in the letter. Regardless, she offers herself, her devotion, and not the book, to the publisher. I read this and hear the desperate plea of an 11 year-old girl begging father for a pony. To her credit, she was concise, and tried to appeal to the man's pocketbook, offering her friends as potential customers, hopefully representatives of the larger population of everyday women yearning to feel drama blow in from the West.

The letter, as much as the book, is autobiographical: "I haven't participated in any wild escapades." No wild escapades. Is she speaking with a pang of regret? Is she apologizing? Confessing? And, then: "You can say, I'm just an ordinary home-maker who loves to write." She turns suddenly, painting herself the underdog in this tale of aspiring author surrendering her fate to the silent whims of this powerful publisher. An underdog. A crazy kid with a dream.

I miss her dearly.