an ernest world

as some of you know (and some don't), i enjoy reading ernest hemingway. there is something about his prose that captures my imagination and attention.

yes, yes, i am aware of his haltng, short dialogue wich occurs infrequently throughuot his prose or his machismo attitude which pervades through his writing.

however, when i read many of his books, especially the ones his wrote during the 1920s, there's a sense of time encapsulation that transports me back to the era -- the roaring '20s.

true, for many, if not most of that time, he spent his writing years in eurpoe as part of the group that beame known as the expratriots, a group that included gertrude stein, ezra pound and t.s. eliot., among others. yet, reading "in our time" or "the sun also rises" takes me there to that time, whether in northern michigan ("up in michigan") or to pamplona ("the sun also rises").

this morning i walked over to the bookshelf where my hemingway collection is located and rifled through the books, some not opened in years, some dog-earred, others with scribbled notes on the pages from college. there was a sense of nostalgia, probably from times i'd read the books, of course, not from actually being in the places where he set the novels and stories.

a time when typing was done through a typewriter not through a computer. where revisions were made on pages then retyped. a simple life.

then i think that it was probably a good time to live during that time. true the great depression was right around the corner. still, the 1920s seemed like a great time to live the literary life, living abroad, pounding down booze in a bar in paris or somewhere in spain, watching the running of the bulls, attending a bullfight, talking books with other writers, living a life where you wrote novels or short stories, made income that way, and lived the rest of your life doing things you enjoy. experiencing life, experimenting.

and so with this begins part of my journey. not to relive any of that. the roaring '20s, that time is passed. but to do other things that are in my realm of accomplishment.