no man is an iland, intire of it selfe;

Five years ago I applied to Swarthmore and wrote about my ambitions as a writer. I wrote about Hemingway, and how he was the author I had the most difficulty with at that time because he challenged my notions of what constituted "good writing." I wrote about how my ramblings as a kindergardener were boring and repetitive and had no imagination because they just told things as they happened, and this was how I perceived Hemingway, too. But then I thought more about A Farewell to Arms and The Old Man and the Sea and then I realized that what I hated was not Hemingway's lack of ornate writing. This was superfluous. What I hated was my own lack of adventure, of doing anything worth noting.

So of course I love Joyce and what he did with Ulysses for the beauty of the everyday, the "wonderful organization" that seeps in all around us without even knowing it. And of course I held off from reading any more Hemingway throughout college. And of course it would be recently that I had this urge to go back to him, because I started having those same thoughts I had five years ago all over again.

Most of the books I chose to bring with me for the first half of this year are by American authors and are distinctly so. They are all books that I'd been wanting to read for years now, and hadn't found the time to do so until now. I read For Whom the Bell Tolls last week, beginning with cynicism toward the Hemingway-approach-to-wooing-women and ending with tears and a stronger desire than ever to go back to writing, "a passion" and "hobby" that I've barely kept up with in a non-academic sense in all of these past five years. It's difficult to explain, and probably better not to, but there is something so cleansing about the simplicity of For Whom the Bell Tolls. The imagery is clear, the language direct, and the memory of the Montana landscape wholly worth longing and fighting for.

Perhaps the singular word that For Whom the Bell Tolls, The End of the Affair, which I finished yesterday, and Frankenstein, which I am about to finish today, could be boiled down to, is motive. These characters seem to have such strong motives, and I read them thinking about my own. Robert and Maria, Maurice and Sarah, Dr. Frankenstein and his monster--all steer their own lives in the pursuit of passion, creation, and the lives of others. And then there is me, and I cannot help but think of the opening monologue from Richard III:

Deformed, unfinish'd, sent before my time
Into this breathing world, scarce half made up,

The Shakespeare may be a bit overdramatic, but it's hard not to feel out of sorts right now. And when I stop and remember that Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein when she was just eighteen...such motive and ambition some people have--whatever happened to me?