…Reading that first book Donald Junkins assigned, In Our Time, I was surprised to find so many stories with strong, creative women, men awash in their violent, shallow ways of seeing the world, so at times it even seemed to me as if a woman had written the stories…. Then I came to the long, two-part story “Big Two-Hearted River,” that final, seemingly eventless story, and I was blown away. I think some of my response to that collection and to that story in particular had to do with finally being ready to read and understand Hemingway. I had stepped beyond the world of abstract, speculative thought and into the literal stream, into the heart from which all speculative reason emerges, a place that nothing presupposes, where direct contact with the world precedes thought, makes it possible. I had become an angler. So many academics never go here, I realized. Though it’s a cliché to be sure, so many of them stay always in the ether of their high towers. Like Plato’s cave dwellers, they prefer the shadows on the wall cast from cut out shapes of actual things to the real world of forms just beyond those walls.
Nice one.
Absolutely beautiful. I see something new and poignant in Hemingway story every time we talk about it, and I loved reading this piece.
Thanks, Tricia!