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xaaraFor once, the weather was nice on free admissions day to Mount Vernon. Actually, the weather was two things:
1. Beautiful, and
2. Friggin' cold.
We stood around outside for almost half an hour watching the fife and drum corps marching around and then watching the Commander-in-Chief's guard line up by platoon, division, and battalion to fire blanks across George Washington's bowling grounds. Then we practically sprinted through the rest of Mount Vernon, attempting in vain to restore circulation to our extremities. By the end of the few hour we spent there, I was so cold I couldn't move my fingers well enough to retrieve money from my wallet in order to buy coffee. Talk about cruel irony - I was so cold I couldn't get warm.
But it was beautiful. The sun shone everywhere, and sparkled off the Potomac so brightly that I couldn't look directly across the river - I had to look to one side around the slash of glittering light that divided the waters. I love rural Virginia in the winter, because it's so undeveloped and uninhabited that looking across the river you can almost imagine there aren't ten thousand other people behind you walking through Mount Vernon; you can almost think you're alone. And then the wind picks up and manages to find its way underneath the down jacket you're wearing and suddenly beauty is no longer important. The only thing you want to do then is run for forever and get the blood flowing again or maybe go inside and drink a gallon of hot black coffee. Which, of course, is what I did. There's nothing like a hot drink on a cold day.
I tried to read my Hemingway on the car ride back, but the sun was shining on that spot at the back of your neck that makes you sleepy if it's warm and I couldn't concentrate on Robert and Maria and Pablo long enough to figure out whether or not they kill each other or destroy the bridge or anything. I'm relatively sure Robert dies in the end, because it's Hemingway. Which is too bad, because he's the only character I can even start to think about liking so far. Maria's too clingy; Pilar's too brazen; I can't trust Pablo. But I'm only about three-fifths through the book. Maybe something interesting will happen. (Is it ironic that the best scenes in the book are portrayals of sex? They seem to me the most lyrical, the most poetic, and the least "minimalistic," but their subject matter is not generally one I care to dwell on.)
And if not, I suppose I can always skim the rest and tell my teacher just what I've written here: Hemingway is, for the most part, dull. And when he's not dull, he's writing about sex or violence or betrayal - interesting themes, to be sure, but when crowded too closely together they lose their potency.
1. Beautiful, and
2. Friggin' cold.
We stood around outside for almost half an hour watching the fife and drum corps marching around and then watching the Commander-in-Chief's guard line up by platoon, division, and battalion to fire blanks across George Washington's bowling grounds. Then we practically sprinted through the rest of Mount Vernon, attempting in vain to restore circulation to our extremities. By the end of the few hour we spent there, I was so cold I couldn't move my fingers well enough to retrieve money from my wallet in order to buy coffee. Talk about cruel irony - I was so cold I couldn't get warm.
But it was beautiful. The sun shone everywhere, and sparkled off the Potomac so brightly that I couldn't look directly across the river - I had to look to one side around the slash of glittering light that divided the waters. I love rural Virginia in the winter, because it's so undeveloped and uninhabited that looking across the river you can almost imagine there aren't ten thousand other people behind you walking through Mount Vernon; you can almost think you're alone. And then the wind picks up and manages to find its way underneath the down jacket you're wearing and suddenly beauty is no longer important. The only thing you want to do then is run for forever and get the blood flowing again or maybe go inside and drink a gallon of hot black coffee. Which, of course, is what I did. There's nothing like a hot drink on a cold day.
I tried to read my Hemingway on the car ride back, but the sun was shining on that spot at the back of your neck that makes you sleepy if it's warm and I couldn't concentrate on Robert and Maria and Pablo long enough to figure out whether or not they kill each other or destroy the bridge or anything. I'm relatively sure Robert dies in the end, because it's Hemingway. Which is too bad, because he's the only character I can even start to think about liking so far. Maria's too clingy; Pilar's too brazen; I can't trust Pablo. But I'm only about three-fifths through the book. Maybe something interesting will happen. (Is it ironic that the best scenes in the book are portrayals of sex? They seem to me the most lyrical, the most poetic, and the least "minimalistic," but their subject matter is not generally one I care to dwell on.)
And if not, I suppose I can always skim the rest and tell my teacher just what I've written here: Hemingway is, for the most part, dull. And when he's not dull, he's writing about sex or violence or betrayal - interesting themes, to be sure, but when crowded too closely together they lose their potency.
