What a sentence!

I picked up a copy of Hemingway's short stories for a buck yesterday, as I do not recall ever reading more than one or two, in an anthology here and there. The book was published by Scribner's, probably in 1955 or thereabouts, as the back cover was milking Hemingway's 1953 Pulitzer and 1954 Nobel Prizes for The Old Man and the Sea for all they were worth.

I found this gem in the author's preface, written in 1938:

In going where you have to go, and doing what you have to do, and seeing what you have to see, you dull and blunt the instrument you write with. But I would rather have it bent and dull and know I had to put it on the grindstone again and hammer it into shape and put a whetstone to it, and to know that I had something to write about, than to have it bright and shining and nothing to say, or smooth and well-oiled in the closet, but unused.

Love that second sentecne!

Cheers...

A fine paragraph...

This time, it's something I translated... :^)

Besides an unfortunate tendency to write in sentence fragments. And engage in parallel constructions that seem excessive to my ear. The author has this maddening trait of saying stuff that makes a lot of sense to me, interspersed with other stuff that sounds pretty silly. The following is some of the former:

Life is what always happens athwart of rationally constructed plans. The strange effect of the "other room" always takes place in life ("he walked into a room and ended up in another," as was said by a certain heroine in Griboedov's play). Life is least of all a school textbook in which everything is laid out in its assigned place. All of life consists of very random twists and turns.

And it all hangs together, except for that reference to that "other room." (Or am I being too critical?)

As for the rest, I'm happy I was finally able to use "athwart" in a sentence.

Cheers...