[b]Ernest Hemingway
The coward dies a thousand deaths, the brave but one?
Of course. Who said it?
I don’t know.
He was probably a coward, she said. He knew a great deal about cowards but nothing about the brave. The brave dies perhaps two thousand deaths if he’s intelligent. He simply doesn’t mention them.[/b]
Of course no one really knows what shit like this means.
Perhaps wars weren’t won anymore. Maybe they went on forever. Maybe it was another Hundred Years’ War.
Cue the military industrial complex.
I don’t know. There isn’t always an explanation for everything.
Let alone the right one.
He told me how he had first met her during the war and then lost her and won her back, and about their marriage and then about something tragic that had happened to them at St-Raphael about a year ago. This first version that he told me of Zelda and a French naval aviator falling in love was truly a sad story and I believe it was a true story. Later he told me other versions of it as though trying them for use in a novel, but none was as sad as this first one and I always believed the first one, although any of them might have been true. They were better told each time; but they never hurt you the same way the first one did.
That’s what I’m doing here myself: giving you versions.
For we have thought the longer thoughts
And gone the shorter way.
And we have danced to devils’ tunes
Shivering home to pray;
To serve one master in the night,
Another in the day.
Sooner or later though one tends to prevail.
Now he was proving it again. Each time was a new time and he never thought about the past when he was doing it.
While sneaking a peek [now and then] at the future.