For Whom the Bell Tolls

I LOVE good novels. I'm having a hard time deciding if For Whom the Bell Tolls is one of them. I finished it the other night and felt so excited, but it seemed like I had to wade through a lot of sewage to get there.

I appreciated so much Hemmingway's historical knowledge and integration of language. It was so funny to read the English dialog that was playfully colored by Spanish grammar and cognates. I learned so new words I never wanted to learn in Spanish, but that was my own fault, I guess.

The book was completely dialog with a simple plot. Hemmingway has a masterful way of expressing the inner mind and its workings, and it's incoherency at times, yet powerful sway.

The development of the title itselt was genius. I felt like I didn't understand it in it's entirety until the very last page, and then it kind of all clicked.

Truly, mankind is a continent, as John Donne wrote it, and not an island in and of himself. What happens to one happens to us all. Is that not an eternal law? And it's amazing how what we send out to others usually returns the same back to us. A smile begets a smile in many instances, kindness for kindness... when received without misperception or distortion, but in its purest intended form.

We truly all are interconnected. This is illustrated best in loving relationships that we share. As we see our loved ones suffer, do we not suffer? Why, then, do we not suffer when others we do not know suffer? Is it not because we do not love them like we should?

No man is an Iland, intire of it selfe; every man is

a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine; if a

Clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse,

as well as if a Promontorie were, as well as if a Mannor

of they friends or of thine owne were; any mans

death diminishes me, because I am in-

volved in Mankinde; And therefore

never send to know for

whom the bells tolls; It

tolls for thee.

John Donne

Such a profound truth

Was it worth the gray? Was the beautiful, hidden, golden yellow amidst the lifeless, and drab things worth the journey through it all?