Kim – Rudyard Kipling

“The matter of creeds is like horseflesh. The wise man knows horses are good – that there is a profit to be made from all; and for myself – but that I am a good Sunni and hate the men of Tirah – I could believe the same of all the Faiths. Now manifestly a Kithiawar mare taken from the sands of her birthplace and removed to the west of Bengal founders — nor is even a Balkh stallion … of any account in the great Northern deserts beside the snow-camels I have seen. Therefore I say in my heart the Faiths are like the horses. Each has merit in its own country.”

Larry W. Phillips (ed.), Ernest Hemingway on Writing

Advice to writers

“My attitude toward punctuation is that it ought to be as conventional as possible. The game of golf would lose a good deal if croquet mallets and billiard cues were allowed on the putting green. You ought to be able to show that you can do it a good deal better than anyone else with the regular tools before you have a license to bring in your own improvements.”

“Actually if a writer needs a dictionary he should not write. He should have read the dictionary at least three times from beginning to end and then have loaned it someone who needs it.”

Working habits

“P.P.S. Don’t you drink? I notice you speak slightingly of the bottle. I have drunk since I was fifteen and few things have given me more pleasure. When you work hard all day with your head and know you must work again the next day what else can change your ideas and make them run on a different plane like whisky?”

What to read

“MICE: What books should a writer have to read?

Y.C.: He should have read everything so he knows what he has to beat.

MICE: He can’t have read everything.

Y.C.: I don’t say what he can. I say what he should. Of course he can’t.

MICE: Well what books are necessary?

Y.C.: He should have read War and Peace and Anna Karenina by Tolstoi, Midshipman Easy, Frank Mildmay and Peter Simple by Captain Marryat, Madame Bovary and L’Education Sentimentale by Flaubert, Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann, Joyce’s Dubliners, Portrait of the Artist and Ulysses, Tom Jones and Joseph Andrews by Fielding, Le Rouge et Le Noir and La Chartreuse de Parme by Stendhal, The Brothers Karamazov and any two other Dostoevskis, Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, The Open Boat and The Blue Hotel by Stephen Crane, Hail and Farewell by George Moore, Yeats’s Autobiographies, all the good De Maupassant, all the good Kipling, all of Turgenev, Far Away and Long Ago by W. H. Hudson, Henry James’s short stories, especially Madame de Mauves, and The Turn of the Screw, The Portrait of a Lady, The American—

MICE: I can’t write them down that fast. How many more are there?

Y.C.: I’ll give you the rest another day. There are about three times that many.

MICE: Should a writer have read all of those?

Y.C.: All of those and plenty more. Otherwise he doesn’t know what he has to beat.

MICE: What do you mean “has to beat”?

Y.C.: Listen. There is no use writing anything that has been written before unless you can beat it. What a writer in our time has to do is write what hasn’t been written before or beat dead men at what they have done. The only way he can tell how he is going is to compete with dead men….

MICE: But reading all the good writers might discourage you.

Y.C.: Then you ought to be discouraged.”

Other writers

“I don’t worship Joyce. I like him very much as a friend and think no one can write better, technically; I learned much from him …”

“It is agreed by most of the people I know that Conrad is a bad writer, just as it is agreed that T.S. Eliot is a good writer. If I knew that by grinding Mr. Eliot into a fine dry powder and sprinkling that powder over Mr. Conrad’s grave Mr. Conrad would shortly appear, looking very annoyed at the forced return, and commence writing, I would leave for London early tomorrow morning with a sausage grinder.”

The writer’s life

“You must be prepared to work always without applause. When you are excited about something is when the first draft is done. But no one can see it until you have gone over it again and again until you have communicated the emotion, the sights and the sounds to the reader, and by the time you have completed this the words, sometimes, will not make sense to you as you read them, so many times have you re-read them.

By the time the book comes out you will have started something else and it is all behind you and you do not want to hear about it. But you do, you read it in covers and you see all the places that now you can do nothing about. All the critics who could not make their reputations by discovering you are hoping to make them by predicting hopefully your approaching impotence, failure and general drying up of natural juices…

Finally, in some other place, some other time, when you can’t work and feel like hell you will pick up the book and look in it and start to read and go on and in a little while say to your wife, “Why this stuff is bloody marvelous.” And she will say, “Darling, I always told you it was.” Or maybe she doesn’t hear you and says, “What did you say?” and you do not repeat the remark. But if the book is good, is about something that you know, and is truly written and reading it over you see that this is so you can let the boys yip and the noise will have that pleasant sound coyotes make on a very cold night when they are out in the snow and you are in your own cabin that you have built or paid for with your work.”

For Whom the Bell Tolls – Ernest Hemingway

Hemingway may have been a man’s man, but I think he also wrote some of the most tender passages I’ve ever read:

“They were walking through the heather of the mountain meadow and Robert Jordan felt the brushing of the heather against his legs, felt the weight of his pistol in its holster against his thigh, felt the sun on his head, felt the breeze from the snow of the mountain peaks cool on his back and, in his hand, he felt the girl’s hand firm and strong, the fingers locked in his. From it, from the palm of her hand against the palm of his, from their fingers locked together, and from her wrist across his wrist something came from her hand, her fingers and her wrist to his that was as fresh as the first light air that moving toward you over the sea barely wrinkles the glassy surface of a calm, as light as a feather moved across one’s lip, or a leaf falling when there is no breeze; so light that it could be felt with the touch of their fingers alone, but that was so strengthened, so intensified, and made so urgent, so aching and so strong by the hard pressure of their fingers and the close pressed palm and wrist, that it was as though a current moved up his arm and filled his whole body with an aching hollowness of wanting. With the sun shining on her hair, tawny as wheat, and on her gold-brown smooth-lovely face and on the curve of her throat he bent her head back and held her to him and kissed her. He felt her trembling as he kissed her and he held the length of her body tight to him and felt her breasts against his chest through the two khaki shirts, he felt them small and firm and he reached and undid the buttons on her shirt and bent and kissed her and she stood shivering, holding her head back, his arm behind her. Then she dropped her chin to his head and then he felt her hands holding his head and rocking it against her. He straightened and with his two arms around her held her so tightly that she was lifted off the ground, tight against him, and he felt her trembling and then her lips were on his throat, and then he put her down and said, “Maria, oh, my Maria.”

Then he said, “Where should we go?”

She did not say anything but slipped her hand inside of his shirt and he felt her undoing the shirt buttons and she said, “You, too. I want to kiss, too.”

“No, little rabbit.”

“Yes. Yes. Everything as you.”

“Nay. That is an impossibility.”

“Well, then. Oh, then. Oh, then. Oh.”

Then there was the smell of heather crushed and the roughness of the bent stalks under her head and the sun bright on her closed eyes and all his life he would remember the curve of her throat with her head pushed back into the heather roots and her lips that moved smally and by themselves and the fluttering of the lashes on the eyes tight closed against the sun and against everything, and for her everything was red, orange, gold-red from the sun on the closed eyes, and it all was that color, all of it, the filling, the possessing, the having, all of that color, all in a blindness of that color. For him it was a dark passage which led to nowhere, then to nowhere, then again to nowhere, once again to nowhere, always and forever to nowhere, heavy on the elbows in the earth to nowhere, dark, never any end to nowhere, hung on all time always to unknowing nowhere, this time and again for always to nowhere, now not to be borne once again always and to nowhere, now beyond all bearing up, up, up and into nowhere, suddenly, scaldingly, holdingly all nowhere gone and time absolutely still and they were both there, time having stopped and he felt the earth move out and away from under them.

Then he was lying on his side, his head deep in the heather, smelling it and the smell of the roots and the earth and the sun came through it and it was scratchy on his bare shoulders and along his flanks and the girl was lying opposite him with her eyes still shut and then she opened them and smiled at him and he said very tiredly and from a great but friendly distance, “Hello, rabbit.” And she smiled and from no distance said, “Hello, my Inglés.””

For Whom the Bell Tolls – Ernest Hemingway

“There is nothing else than now. There is neither yesterday, certainly, nor is there any tomorrow. How old must you be before you know that? There is only now, and if now is only two days, then two days is your life and everything in it will be in proportion. This is how you live a life in two days. And if you stop complaining and asking for what you never will get, you will have a good life. A good life is not measured by any biblical span.”

---

“”Let us sleep,” he said, and he felt the long light body, warm against him, comforting against him, abolishing loneliness against him, magically, by a simple touching of flanks, of shoulders and of feet, making an alliance against death with him, and he said, “Sleep well, little long rabbit.””

---

“And another thing. Don’t ever kid yourself about loving someone. It is just that most people are not lucky enough ever to have it. You never had it before and now you have it. What you have with Maria, whether it lasts just through today and a part of tomorrow, or whether it lasts for a long life is the most important thing that can happen to a human being. There will always be people who say it does not exist because they cannot have it. But I tell you it is true and that you have it and that you are lucky even if you die tomorrow.”

Walden – Henry David Thoreau (Vegetarianism edition)

“No humane being, past the thoughtless age of boyhood, will wantonly murder any creature, which holds its life by the same tenure that he does. The hare in its extremity cries like a child. I warn you, mothers, that my sympathies do not always make the usual philanthropic distinctions.”

***

“The practical objection to animal food in my case was its uncleanness; and, besides, when I had caught and cleaned and cooked and eaten my fish, they seemed not to have fed me essentially. It was insignificant and unnecessary, and cost more than it came to. A little bread or a few potatoes would have done as well, with less trouble and filth. Like many of my contemporaries, I had rarely for many years used animal food, or tea, or coffee, &c.; not so much because of any ill effects which I had traced to them, as because they were not agreeable to my imagination. The repugnance to animal food is not the effect of experience, but is an instinct. It appeared more beautiful to live low and fare hard in many respects; and though I never did so, I went far enough to please my imagination. I believe that every man who has ever been earnest to preserve his higher or poetic faculties in the best condition has been particularly inclined to abstain from animal food, and from much food of any kind.”

***

“ Is it not a reproach that man is a carnivorous animal? True, he can and does live, in a great measure, by preying on other animals; but this is a miserable way,—as any one who will go to snaring rabbits, or slaughtering lambs, may learn,—and he will be regarded as a benefactor of his race who shall teach man to confine himself to a more innocent and wholesome diet. Whatever my own practice may be, I have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals, as surely as the savage tribes have left off eating each other when they came in contact with the more civilized.”

“I think the reason why people behave in an ugly manner is that it’s really scary to be alive and to be human, and people are really really afraid … The fear is the basic condition, and there are all kinds of reasons for why we’re so afraid. But the fact of the matter is, is that, is that the job that we’re here to do is to learn how to live in a way that we’re not terrified all the time. And not in a position of using all kinds of different things, and using people to keep that kind of terror at bay. That is my personal opinion.”

David Foster Wallace (1962-2008), quoted in David Lipsky’s Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip With David Foster Wallace (2010)

Pythagoreanism and stuff

I think there are loads of good reasons why we shouldn’t eat meat in the 21st century. Although I’m vegetarian, I don’t normally try to convince others to abstain from meat. But I will gladly share my views with those who are willing to listen.

In my experience (and this says something about human nature), people are most receptive to arguments against eating meat which are somehow based on the idea that it is better for us if we don’t eat meat. Tell someone that there are health benefits to a vegetarian diet and they’ll probably listen to you, even if they don’t ultimately give up on meat eating altogether.

The same goes (to a certain extent) for environmental reasons for adopting a vegetarian diet: the process of converting grain and crops into meat is monumentally wasteful and creates scores of environmental problems like polluted waterways, destruction of topsoil and harm to ecosystems through deforestation. This stuff will eventually come back to bite us. If it doesn’t affect us directly now, it will affect our families in future generations. And since people generally care about their families, this sort of argument against eating meat tends to carry some weight when we hear it.

But there’s a second kind of argument against eating meat. Arguments of this second kind don’t depend on what meat eating does or may not do to us, or on how eating a vegetarian diet may benefit us. They instead look at what our practice of meat eating does to animals themselves, and then ask whether and why our actions in this regard are justified.

I have always found arguments of this latter sort the most convincing. Out of all the many reasons for not eating meat, here’s one that seems to me to be unanswerable: we shouldn’t be cruel, we shouldn’t cause pain, we shouldn’t kill or maim, if we can avoid it, or unless there are extremely important interests at stake.

I don’t think that’s very controversial. Yet for some reason, we don’t apply it to our diets. We definitely don’t need meat to survive or be healthy. That knocks out the argument from necessity which, while valid in former times, is absurd in the context of modern western societies.

But that leaves us with just one reason for continuing modern meat production practices: we’re used to it, and we like the taste. Does this count as an extremely important interest justifying mass cruelty to sentient animals? I doubt it. 

I like this quote from Pythagoras (as retold by Ovid) not because I agree with everything in it (I don’t – I admire its strong language but I’m also aware that militant vegetarians give vegetarians a bad name), but because it melds and conflates the two kinds of arguments I mention above in a way that – illuminatingly – collapses the distinction between the two.

Because it’s not just that eating meat is cruel to animals, it’s also that in desensitising ourselves to the cruelty involved, we are harming ourselves too. By eating meat we court cruelty and cultivate blithe indifference to the suffering of others.

So we don’t actually need to care about animals in order to change our attitude towards them. We can change our orientation towards animals for our own sakes, because by so doing we develop a kind of self control and compassion that will make us better people. It’s ultimately in our own interests to care about the interests of those we currently kill and eat for pleasure. Pythagoras saw this in 500 BC; it’s interesting that we don’t really see it now.

Human beings, stop desecrating your bodies with impious foodstuffs. There are crops; there are apples weighing down the branches; and ripening grapes on the vines; there are flavoursome herbs; and those that can be rendered mild and gentle over the flames; and you do not lack flowing milk; or honey fragrant from the flowering thyme. The earth, prodigal of its wealth, supplies you with gentle sustenance, and offers you food without killing or shedding blood.

      Flesh satisfies the wild beast’s hunger, though not all of them, since horses, sheep and cattle live on grasses, but those that are wild and savage: Armenian tigers, raging lions, and wolves and bears, enjoy food wet with blood. Oh, how wrong it is for flesh to be made from flesh; for a greedy body to fatten, by swallowing another body; for one creature to live by the death of another creature! So amongst such riches, that earth, the greatest of mothers, yields, you are not happy unless you tear, with cruel teeth, at pitiful wounds, recalling Cyclops’s practice, and you cannot satisfy your voracious appetite, and your restless hunger, unless you destroy other life!

      But that former age, that we call golden, was happy with the fruit from the trees, and the herbs the earth produced, and did not defile its lips with blood. Then birds winged their way through the air in safety, and hares wandered, unafraid, among the fields, and its own gullibility did not hook the fish: all was free from trickery, and fearless of any guile, and filled with peace. But once someone, whoever he was, the author of something unfitting, envied the lion’s prey, and stuffed his greedy belly with fleshy food, he paved the way for crime. It may be that, from the first, weapons were warm and bloodstained from the killing of wild beasts, but that would have been enough: I admit that creatures that seek our destruction may be killed without it being a sin, but while they may be killed, they still should not be eaten.

      From that, the wickedness spread further, and it is thought that the pig was first considered to merit slaughter because it rooted up the seeds with its broad snout, and destroyed all hope of harvest. The goat was led to death, at the avenging altar, for browsing the vines of Bacchus. These two suffered for their crimes! What did you sheep do, tranquil flocks, born to serve man, who bring us sweet milk in full udders, who give us your wool to make soft clothing, who give us more by your life than you grant us by dying? What have the oxen done, without guile or deceit, harmless, simple, born to endure labour?

      He is truly thankless, and not worthy of the gift of corn, who could, in a moment, remove the weight of the curved plough, and kill his labourer, striking that work-worn neck with his axe, that has helped turn the hard earth as many times as the earth yielded harvest. It is not enough to have committed such wickedness: they involve the gods in crime, and believe that the gods above delight in the slaughter of suffering oxen! A victim of outstanding beauty, and without blemish (since to be pleasing is harmful), distinguished by sacrificial ribbons and gold, is positioned in front of the altar, and listens, unknowingly, to the prayers, and sees the corn it has laboured to produce, scattered between its horns, and, struck down, stains with blood those knives that it has already caught sight of, perhaps, reflected in the clear water.

      Immediately they inspect the lungs, ripped from the still-living chest, and from them find out the will of the gods. On this (so great is man’s hunger for forbidden food) you feed, O human race! Do not, I beg you, and concentrate your minds on my admonitions! When you place the flesh of slaughtered cattle in your mouths, know and feel, that you are devouring your fellow-creature.’

 

Ovid, Metamorphoses Bk XV:60-142 Pythagoras’s Teachings:Vegetarianism

Tender is the Night – F. Scott Fitzgerald

One writes of scars healed, a loose parallel to the pathology of the skin, but there is no such thing in the life of an individual. There are open wounds, shrunk sometimes to the size of a pin-prick but wounds still. The marks of suffering are more comparable to the loss of a finger, or of the sight of an eye. We may not miss them, either, for one minute in a year, but if we should there is nothing to be done about it…

Soft sounds flitted through the tiny gap under her bedroom door. So she was there after all. She was probably listening to some of that slow, lilting shoegaze that washes over you like a rolling wave of tremulous noise, the musical equivalent of a soft warm dressing gown being pulled over cold skin.

He could see why people liked shoegaze, but he didn’t like it. Maybe it’s a patience thing: that kind of music happens as if in slow motion; the melodies get drawn out over time like an elastic band stretched to almost breaking point. There was beauty in the idea of it, but when experienced in real time he always found it frustrating somehow, unnecessarily protracted. He liked to listen to something that matched the tenor of his emotions; and his emotions were volatile and ephemeral. Plot them on a graph and you’d get spikes and jagged edges and little segments which would start to look as if they were forming into the regularity of a sine wave rollercoaster, but which would deviate from this pattern just when you thought you’d worked things out.

Music crept out from under her door. He wondered what was she doing in there, anyway. Maybe lying around on her bed, eyes closed, musicscape wafting around the room like rarefied air. Maybe at her desk, her shoulders back slightly, her spine curved in the rigid posture of someone who has been told too often to sit up straight and has taken the advice to heart. Reading a book or studying. Hypnotically gazing. Mouth slightly open. Curious stare.