Hemingway, Lewis, and God

 

Marrying Agnes

The Broken Places

The Indifference Death Knell

Quiet Assertion

Why is it we want so badly to memorialize ourselves?
Even while we're still alive?
We wish to assert our existence, 
like dogs peeing on fire hydrants.


- Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin  

Simplify

Our life is frittered away by detail.  

Simplify, simplify.  

-Henry David Thoreau

The End

The Time of Your Life

Well, your wait is over.  AZeigler Dailies, Edition: Junk in my old closet, is here.

In the weeks leading up to my recent birthday, my life flashed before my eyes.  Literally.  A quick history lesson: In the late eighties, my parents built a house.  On the second floor of that house, my sister & I shared many happy years in our bedrooms, & we were so busy living fulfilling lives & reveling in all the happiness that we neglected to clean out our cavernous closets.  Ever.

The Week in Pictures

Choice

A Moveable Feast

Never go on trips with anyone you do not love.

-Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

A Moveable Feast is a set of memoirs about the years Hemingway spent in Paris in the company of literary giants like F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, & James Joyce.  The title of the memoirs was taken from a quote attributed to Hemingway's friend & biographer A.E. Hotchner, who is credited with informing Hemingway that, "If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast."

 To borrow Mr. Hotchner's sentiment, my life is a feast, a constant, unending array of one delectable morsel after another, & last week the table was set in Destin, Florida.  For a week, Reagan had not only her father & I to look after her, but four grandparents, two aunts, & one uncle as we all descended on a rented home in SanDestin, a resort community in Destin I've loved a long time.

In This World

I spent my freshman year of college at Harding University in Searcy, Arkansas.  As an English major, I was required to take a course titled "Introduction to Literature."  We read a little bit of everything, & even dabbled in some film criticism.  My professor, a film connoisseur, showed us clips of several movies, some of them 'R' rated.

Harding is a private Christian university.  Students are expected to attend chapel daily & enroll in a Bible class each semester.  It was not completely shocking that a young lady in my Introduction to Literature class raised an objection to the viewing of R rated films.  After politely signaling that she wanted to speak, she informed our professor, & the entire class, that she never watched any film rated R.  What followed was an interesting exchange between this usually soft-spoken young lady & our professor, the latter arguing that the young lady was needlessly keeping herself from an array of wonderful movies.  He cited several films that attempt to realistically depict war in all its brutality.  It's history, after all, he stated.  I was thinking more along the lines of how tragic it was that she'd never seen When Harry Met Sally, but I kept my mouth shut.