[b]Ernest Hemingway
He had never quarreled much with this woman, while with the women that he loved he had quarreled so much they had finally, always, with the corrosion of the quarreling, killed what they had together. He had loved too much, demanded too much, and he wore it all out.[/b]
Is it really possible to wear it all out, he wondered?
In other words, having never been in love himself.
Then I thought of her walking up the street and stepping into the car, as I had last seen her, and of course in a little while I felt like hell again. It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night is another thing.
He means the “wee small hours” of course.
You don’t have to destroy me. Do you? I’m only a woman who loves you and wants to do what you want to do. I’ve been destroyed two or three times already. You wouldn’t want to destroy me again, would you?
Works that way for men too. Only different somehow.
This too to remember. If a man writes clearly enough any one can see if he fakes. If he mystifies to avoid a straight statement, which is very different from breaking so-called rules of syntax or grammar to make an efffect which can be obtained in no other way, the writer takes a longer time to be known as a fake and other writers who are afflicted by the same necessity will praise him in their own defense. True mysticism should not be confused with incompetence in writing which seeks to mystify where there is no mystery but is really only the necessity to fake to cover lack of knowledge or the inability to state clearly. Mysticism implies a mystery and there are many mysteries; but incompetence is not one of them; nor is overwritten journalism made literature by the injection of a false epic qulaity. Remember this too: all bad writers are in love with the epic.
Of course to understand this you actually have to be a writer. A good one, for example.
Organizations for writers palliate the writer’s loneliness, but I doubt if they improve his writing… For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.
And then there are organizations for philosophers. Enough said?
He did not care for the lying at first. He hated it. Then later he had come to like it. It was part of being an insider but it was a very corrupting business.
A universal truth as it were.