i swore off hemingway after reading the sun also rises and not connecting with it at all and deciding that he just wasn’t for me, which was such a damn shame because i love american authors and j. d. salinger, one of my favourites of all time, cites him as one of his main inspirations. the hard-boiled style is something i thought i’d be so moved by and yet i felt nothing. 

then i read j. d. salinger’s ‘franny and zooey’ which includes the line “i see me dead in the rain” (genuinely a perfect line. i cannot imagine it any more concise or any more beautiful) and he claimed it was from a farewell to arms, and i immediately put the book down and walked to my local bookstore and got it. i was so moved by that one sentence i knew that i just needed to see it in context, even if the rest of the book was lousy.

it wasn’t. it was actually so lovely it’s making me want to reread the sun also rises because surely i was just stupid or something when i read that one?! at first i thought that maybe a farewell to arms was just better, and perhaps my fascination with war was making it more appealing to me, but then in my philosophy class my friend took it and started reading it and absolutely hated it LOL (though admittedly she did start from page 150 which must’ve made for a confusing reading experience) so i guess you just have to be in a certain state of mind for hemingway to click. and click he did! god, this was gorgeous. i want to read everything he’s ever written now.

i mean… come on:

‘“All right. I’m afraid of the rain because sometimes I see me dead in it.’

‘No.’

‘And sometimes I see you dead in it.’

[…]

She was crying. I comforted her and she stopped crying. But outside it kept on raining.”

the entirety of chapter 41 is some of the most heartbreaking shit ever written. you can tell hemingway rewrote it 29 times. i haven’t teared up over a book since s. e. hinton’s the outsiders. that final line gave me chills. just phenomenal