with an epigraph from Donne

I remember reading Hemingway's For Whom The Bell Tolls in tenth grade and thinking I was a big pimp just like Papa. I really understood The Old Man And The Sea, and the density of the former made me feel even more intelligent, while its subject of warfare made me feel even more pimpin' (girls don't like Hemingway, just like they don't like Bukowski, because of this excess of testosterone that makes men feel like pimps). As I've been re-reading books I haven't read since high school, I've realized that I really didn't understand them, barely even superficially, and now re-reading For Whom The Bell Tolls has awakened me again to that fact.
Hemingway is no longer my favorite writer; he's been usurped in recent years by Salinger, Bukowski, Kerouac, and others. However, this new reading has again heightened my appreciation for him and his prose. Thematically, he's got that modernist do-what-you-gotta-do drive that I love so much. Most of Hemingway's protagonist Republican guerrillas aren't communists; most of the fascist enemies aren't really fascists. Both sides are soldiers, so they exercise their duty in making war. There's a war going on, so they have to fight and kill; the war is for the sake of war, not for any greater good of political ideology or even nationalistic pride. It's a beautiful thing, and it makes you question the need for war. Why not just live out the socialist dream and farm the land? Because that's a dream--all we can do is live in the moment, whether it's pastoral or violent.
Especially, I dig the man's language. His terse prose and consistent epithets he uses for characters ground the writing in the anti-ideological, anti-mystical real world he inhabits, the world of men and war and bullfights. The generative rhetoric of his sentence structure builds mounds of gorgeous prosody on top of that concrete base. What a fucking genius.
Man, I think I'm going to just run down the list of Bloom's Canon, reading everything. Fuck it, I'll take Bloom's place and tell everyone what they should read. "Read Hemingway, because it's good, because I say so." Or, "Listen to the Locust, because it's good, because I say so." Being a literature snob is as fun and definitely snobbier than being a music snob.