Hemingway and Coffee and God and Cured Restlessness

The coffee is a sort of gray-brown and is warm in right hand, and A Farewell To Arms is folded open to page 178 in my left hand, at the time when Frederic has been sent back to the front, back to Gorizia and back to the fighting, back to the blood and the ambulance he drives; he just left Milan, and Catherine, and it was very sad. A few months ago I thought it would be intellectual to read A Farewell To Arms, and so I picked it up and began to read it—very casually—and I finished it just last weekend. I liked it so much that I wanted to read another Hemingway novel, which I did (To Have and Have Not­—finished it in three days), but then I kept thinking about Catherine and how much my reading of Hemingway did not meet my expectations. To be honest, I thought that reading A Farewell To Arms would make me—like I mentioned above—very intellectual or something, and before that I had never been in love with Hemingway, but after To Have and Have Not I felt empty, so I picked up A Farewell to Arms again, starting it again yesterday, and now I am more than half-way through it. And now I am in love with Hemingway. I wrote a sentence about it yesterday, because it is a true sentence about how I feel about A Farewell To Arms, and it plays with the frustration/infatuation I have with the word “read”—how it can be both past and present tense:

 

I read it, and I read it again, and I was always reading it, and always am reading it, and always will read it, on a plane or at home or in between classes or with a cup of coffee or smoking a cigarette, and when I read it I felt and feel very disillusioned—very sure about things and very unsure about things at the same time—and all the time when I was reading it, and am reading it, even though I felt and feel disillusioned, the real things in life became and become very real and the small things in life became and become very small, and that is the way things ought to be in life and that is the way things were and are when I am reading A Farewell to Arms.

 

It is true that A Farewell To Arms is becoming my favorite book, more so than The Great Gatsby ever was, and it is also true that, when reading A Farewell To Arms, I feel more in-tune with life. It is a very good thing. It is a very good book. If you have not read it, you should read it.

 

School is almost over and I am feeling restless, and I know I am about to meet the band this weekend and hopefully that will work out, but I am still feeling very restless and wanting to fly to Africa or something. I also know that I have been pretty busy—which I think is a lie that Americans tell themselves so they feel good about the things they haven’t done—so I guess I haven’t been busy but I have been not reading God’s word for a few days. And it’s only been like three days since I’ve poured myself into his word, and I have still been writing in my prayer journal every day, but I can totally feel the difference. I am very restless, and it is not my favorite feeling; I just end up drinking enormous amounts of coffee and occasionally playing basketball to burn off some energy, which actually is very helpful. You should read A Farewell To Arms, and don’t miss the horrors in the book by passing by his beautifully understated language. You should read it, all right. Please read it. I sent a short story to the New Yorker today via email. I am writing a collection of short stories based in Galveston, Texas, where I spent a lot of time as a kid. They are good short stories, I think. Hopefully they will be published some day. If you want to read one now just let me know. I am generous in my letting people read stuff. I only have two done right now, and they are rough drafts but they are at least done and I think they have good endings, and I have another one that I am planning out and it will be interesting and I think it will be very good, too, like the other ones, and if they are all published as a short story collection it will be called “The Gulf Tales” I think, which sounds simple but is good because they are just simple tales with larger implications if you read into the characters like you should.

 

If you love Jesus, you might check out Revelation 21:1-7, because it is very beautiful and very comforting and it eases my restlessness like NyQuil eases un-sleepiness.