No hemming and hawing

Ernest Hemingway was born on this day in 1899.

"Always ready to lend a helping hand to the one above him."  --  F. Scott Fitzgerald on Hemingway.

   Cutterback tipped back his huge head and swallowed the rest of his Scotch. He idolized Hemingway. The writer sits down each day to face eternity, or the lack of it, he intoned. Bullshit, Sully told him. The writer sits down to face a blank page. Maybe that was what was wrong with Hemingway.

   “What?” Cutterback said.
   “He had to make a rite out of it?”
   “A write? What the fuck are you talking about?”
   “A rite. A ceremony.”
   “He was a great fucking writer,” Cutterback growled.
   “Sure he was. Did he even say that?”
   “What?”
   “What you just said. About eternity.”
   “Yes, he did.”
   “He’s full of shit, then.”
                                          --  Chapter 17, The Misforgotten.

Are you serious?

Petrarch, the Italian poet, died on this day in 1374. 

"We are made to be immortal, and yet we die. It's horrible, it can't be taken seriously."  --  Eugene Ionesco.

How often had he warmed himself by the fire of fellow feeling, reveled in the commingling of like minds, kindred hearts! At a particular pitch of drunkenness, all men were brothers, and the self slipped away, receded temporarily. The only immortality Sully believed in was just this, the persistence of good will, the community of souls that would outlast heaven and earth, that would live on as a rebuke to the implacable enmity of the cosmos.  --  Chapter 15, The Misforgotten.

A Bellow from the past

Today is the birthday of Saul Bellow, the American writer and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. He died in 2005 at the age of 89.

In Humboldt's Gift, written in 1973, Bellow's protagonist, Charlie Citrine, believes that he may be "imperfectly reborn" -- that his forgetting of the perfect soul-life may be "imperfect, defective, incomplete."

"...from an early age," Citrine recalls, "I was taken aback to see eyes move in faces, nose breathe, skins sweat, hairs grow, and the like, finding it comical. This was sometimes offensive to people born with full oblivion of their immortality."

This is something that Sully broods about in The Misforgotten -- do some of us fail to entirely forget our previous lives?.

Surely we’ve all lived before, else why are we so unhappy? We long for what was, for what we were. All of our discontent was simply grieving for what we’d lost. -- Chapter 43, The Misforgotten.