The Sun Also Rises (book rant)

I just finished reading The Sun Also Rises and I feel lousy. The sadness never seemed so real as it did this time, and I wonder how a story that I've read a half dozen times can grow more mystifying with each subsequent exposure. Perhaps it's some sort of reverse immunity. Perhaps every time through hurts a little more.

Or is it merely a side effect of aging?

I think of Jake's impotence and Brett's impossibility, of Cohn's foolishness and Michael drunkenness; I imagine Romero's beauty. Bit by bit this boy of nineteen will chipped away by time's passing. That is the curse of those whose talent emerges early – their immortality is lived in the shadow of their youth.

Arthur Rimbaud abandoned writing at age 21

Someday Romero will grow old, look in the mirror, and wonder what happened to the matador who performed so elegantly in Pampalona. He will wonder if it was all a dream, or if it was merely the soft mist of recollection shrouding over the twilight of adolescence.

He will wonder if Brett was ever really there at all.

We all have our Basque Country; we all have our San Sebastian in the summer. There is a Romero in each of us, and a Cohn as well. The question is not whether or not our glory will fade, but rather how we will accept it. This is a profoundly Hemingway-esque sentiment, and seems all the more ironic considering Papa put a shotgun in his mouth one July morning fifty years ago.

I wonder if he was a religious man, or if the War beat it out of him like this woman said:

"You are all a lost generation..."

I once visited his house in Key West, which was allegedly bought because it was located nearby a lighthouse. The light helped to guide him home in his drunkenness, and if memory serves he abandoned it when he abandoned the wife (number two or three?) that bought it for him.

I wonder if Hemingway saw himself as Jake or Romero? I wonder if his meditation on the bullfight ("In bull-fighting they speak of the terrain of the bull and the terrain of the bull-fighter. As long as a bull-fighter stays in his own terrain he is comparatively safe...") was an attempt to compensate for his own impotence.

Each blue pill contains 1,ooo Romeros.

Maybe both men are opposite ends of the same afición, a long thin rod connecting the beautiful naivete of youth to the dissolute wisdom of experience. Brett is the fulcrum between them; she is the spoke at the center of the novel, with Cohn and Bill and Michael and Jake and Romero spinning 'round her.

She says:

"I'm thirty-four, you know.
I'm not going to be one of these bitches that ruins children."

I will be thirty-four one week from tomorrow. I suppose, if I were a woman, I would soon be old enough to ruin children.

But this is beside the point.

The point is that the words have not changed in the novel, and so I must assume that I have. Books are funny that way. I like to keep little notes and highlights and tabs in mine so I can go back and see the things I once found meaningful or profound. It's like a time capsule of my own immaturity. Here, for example, is one gem of a topic sentence from April of 1997:

"The Sun Also Rises seems a benign moniker, but Hemingway takes the normal connotations associated with the sun - life, rebirth, and hope - and twists them one hundred eighty degrees. His method in doing so consists of integrating the characterizations of Brett and Jake and their doomed interdependence into a unified theme."

A 'benign moniker'? Was that really ever okay?

(Yes, especially when discussing
'doomed interdependence'
in 2500 words or less.)

But these embarrassing turns of phrase are also wonderfully endearing, connecting us to the children we were and reminding us that someday the 'adults' we've become may look just as helpless, searching and lost. There is a Jake and Romero and Brett in each of us;

"We are large, we contain multitudes"

final quote (paraphrase, really) from Uncle Walt Whitman