Conversations June 13, 2010

Sunday, June 13, 2010

6 AM. All right, boys and girls, here we go again. At least, I’m here if you’re here. Papa, I sort of miss talking to you specifically, but I get that this information is following rules of its own, sort of like a lesson-plan. So, whomever.

One of the difficulties, as you perceive it, is that although the information will be read in easy succession, so that what took you a week to bring forth may be read in one setting, you as you bring it forth cannot remember even the previous day’s information, let alone a week’s worth or the entire picture. But after all, this is only your usual situation in life, living in time-slices, concentrating on each successive stone in the mosaic, unable to sit far enough away to see it in an over-all view. There’s nothing wrong with it; this is how it should be. You do the detail work, we guide the pattern, and at the end you can read the final product (or, in the case of a writer, read and reshape) and perhaps for the first time see what you have been doing as it relates to itself, one piece to another, and as it relates to life.

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Conversations with Hemingway (7)

Tuesday, May 4, 2010

11 AM. So, Papa, more about Spain?

There is always more about Spain. I just wish you could see it for yourself — and I wish you could see it in the 1920s, as I saw it.

Nobody brought it closer than you did.

And I can be there now, if you help focus me, or someone else does — directs my attention there, you know. But the whole tragedy was lying there waiting. They’d missed the war, so they had to have one of their own, or continue dozing in the sun, and that wasn’t possible.

Continue reading Conversations with Hemingway (7)