Ernest Hemingway

• Ernest Hemingway was a man's man; he was one of those adventurous types who dabbled in journalism with his novels and short stories. He made a big difference in the style of writing. You find a rather pared down style in Hemingway. You would never confuse a passage of Hemingway to a passage of Charles Dickens. The subject flows on and on. Hemingway gets right to the point in his writing. It is a very journalist way of writing. He was anti-Nazi. Especially during the Spanish Civil War there was a rebirth of Idealism in the West. They saw the rise of fascism there. They sort of carried over these beliefs into WWII. Nevertheless, there was a great deal of disillusionment with the whole process of war in Hemingway, who saw it first hand. He didn't really like it. You find For Whom the Bells Tolls for example, the guy is in the middle of the war gets a little wound and falls in love with his nurse. Then he knocks her up and she dies giving birth. That is the end of the story. Heartwarming isn't it. A lot of Hemingway's stories are that like that. And this one similar.

The Snows of Kilimanjaro

• What is wrong with this guy in the story? Gangrene. How do you get it? From a scratch. Where was this scratch? On his leg. He failed to do something when he got the scratch, what was it? No iodine. You know I'm rough and tough, who cares about a little scratch? The thing is that your out in the sticks and there is no medical doctor nearby to take care of you if you don't take care of yourself.
• Now why had he gone out in the wilderness? Something of his youth, what else? He was trying to regain something of his youth what had he lost? He lost his independence, his fire for living, and his drive. He wants to get back out into nature so he can get in touch with the inner self. That's different from the Puritan regard of the wilderness. How did they regard it? As evil, howling wilderness; you had to carve civilization out from the wilderness and try to set up this little cove of civilization. But of course, now civilization has just spread all over everything. People gripe about the 2% of America that is protected wilderness when 3% of America is covered with concrete and the rest of it is going fast. Farms are shutting down, cities are sprawling out, and you have to actually hunt for wilderness if you want it. By the end of the last century, this process, kind of Thoreau, people are starting to see the wilderness as vanishing place. It's somewhere you go to get in touch with yourself. He's up here in on Kilimanjaro hunting himself, trying to restore the spark of life. There is a symptom,the French word, envee ( boredom with everything in genrerl.) He has envee. When he scratches his leg, instead of jumping on that and getting with it cured, the envee in a sense is what killed him. Going back out there and getting in touch with himself and his life, he carries this inner deadness with him and it is that which kills him. The internal boredom has a way of working itself out, because it made him careless. He didn't care so he didn't take precaution. The goal for going out here was to try to get to care. But the gangrene started a long time before the scratch he had gangrene of the soul before he ever got out here. Very symbolical story isn't it.

That's how you know when it starts.
 

His leg has been really hurting and all of a sudden it quits.
 

I'm awfully sorry about the odor though.

That must bother you.
 

Have you ever smelled rotting flesh? Not necessarily human, but road kill. It's not a very pleasant odor. Here is this dead leg that is starting to rot before the rest of him is dead.
 

Don't! Please don't!
 

• Who is saying this? Some rich widow. They are having an affair. What are the characteristics of the women he has affairs with? Everyone is richer than the last one. What sort of job does he have in a sense? What is his field of endeavor? Writing. He is a writer. He was sort of an analog to Hemingway. What could have happened to him before it actually happened to him didn't it? How did Hemingway die? He committed suicide, he killed himself with a shotgun. Pretty good trick, eh? So he's with her, she beautiful and rich, and she's with him and why is she with him? she loves him, or something with him she has an infatuation with him. He is an adventurer, her husband probably not the kind of guy who is going to take off and fly to Africa with her. So she picks this fellow to go with. So in theory he is a writer, in fact what is he? A gold digger, a gigolo, he talks about, he thinks about how he has traded on his talent.

 

chosen to make his living with something else instead of a pen or a pencil.

It was strange to wasn't it, that when he fell in love with another woman,

that woman should always have more money than the last one? But when

he no longer was in love, when he was only lying, as to this woman, now,

Who had the most money of all, who had all the money there was, who had

had a husband and children, who had taken lovers and been dissatisfied

with them, and who loved him dearly as a writer, and a man, as a companion

and a proud possession; it was strange that when he didn't love her at all

and was lying, that he should be able to give her more for her money than

when he had really loved.

• Maybe her husband is really dead. She has taken up with him and you get the impression that he is younger than her, like her pet and she owns him and he resents that. Nevertheless, he is a better lover towards her as forgiving her emotional support than he was to those women he was really in love with. Why could that be? What is the difference for him? What made him more efficient as a lover when he was lying than when he was telling the truth? When you are telling somebody the truth, it not only involves their feelings, but also your feeling, too. Does he have to clutter up this relationship up with his feelings? That is precisely what he must not do because he doesn't love her? He can say what she wants to hear not what's on his mind? When you really love somebody you tend to tell them what you really think, but he's lying, so he tells her the lies she wants to hear other than the other lies, if you're gonna lie you might as well do it right, so he does it quite well, except in some parts in this, when is it when he lashes out at her and why? Why does it stop?

 

everything and I went wherever you wanted to go and I've done what you

wanted to do. But I wish we'd never come here.
 

The central question--why did this happen to me? What do they mean by that question? Question the Puritans would have understood. What are you asking? Why is God doing this to me? Not just the Puritans, it goes back to Job; woe is me what is God upset with me over because I have done nothing wrong. And this brief companion says oh yes you have and he says oh no you haven't and they said it for 45 chapters. Fairly long to carry on such conversation, the problem from this perspective is a spiritual and moral, why do the bad things happen to us? What sorta answer does he give? Why does this happen?
 

I suppose what I did was to forget to put iodine on it when I first

scratched it.
 
 
 

She is searching for an answer he can't give. What kind of answer does he give? iodine, constricting blood vessels, why does the leaf fall in the forest? What is the puritan answer? God made, willed and wanted it to. This is some message from God. Who said it was gravity pulling it down? The enlightenment era, very scientific rational answer. Why does he forget to put iodine on it? a much deeper question. that is answered through the story, the writer can't really be aware of and can't admit it to himself but he eventually does.
 

Love is a dunghill. And I'm the cock that get's on it to crow. If you

..... haveto go away, is it absolutely to kill off everything you leave behind.
 
 
 
 
 

• He decides he better not lash out at her. Why does he decide that? What haapens if he makes her good and mad enough? She'll leave him. So he needs her, she is the one near to him and he lashes out at her instead of blaming who he should blame anyway, himself. This is all meaningless exercise anyway what were they trying to do when he got scratched. Take a picture and what happens do they get the picture? no, this is one of those meaningless modernist stories of the early part of the story, modernism was searching for values and could never really find them. Remember science is about finding out about the facts it is not so hot at finding values, how do you go out and study scientifically honesty, morality, or spiritual these things are not amenable to the microscope. In the early part of the century we see grim results of that war. There was a whole generation of these people searching for meaning and not really finding it, in modern society, what he finds is death,

 

We find out he has wore out sort of everything, that is this whole idea of I've been everywhere, done everything, life has no more to offer me, there was a song back in the 70s "Is that all there is" that is his attitude.
 

I am getting as bored with dying as everything else, he thought.
 

He is starting to go in and out having hallucinations, he believes the plane is coming for him. Finally the plane arrives but is it the right plane, is he being hauled off to a hospital where is he going? He is dead, the plane to the afterlife, he knows but doesn't tell us he is going to the great beyond though and then in the very last thing she cries
 

Harry, Harry! Then her voice rising Harry! Please, Oh Harry!

There was no answer and she could not here him breathing.
 

The guy is dead and his last dream was flying away on the plane.