Ernest In Earnest

Re-reading A Farewell to Arms for the first time after many years, I was in for a shock. For even though I remembered how it went—how everything falls apart and keeps falling apart until it is about as busted as it can get—I found the book even more compelling now, at age 64, than when I first read it in my early 30s. I didn't have the life experience or the maturity back then to let the book take me down into the Abyss, so I fended it off. 

Don Ernesto will later teach us that it is in the depths where great luminous Beauties may be found: Beauties that rise to test our strength and resolve and show us what we're made of.

 

Catherine Barkley was one such Beauty, though we will not learn that until we see what happens to Santiago when he takes his little skiff out past the safe waters.

“After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain” eventually gives way to “The old man was dreaming about the lions.”