"For myself and thousands of other veterans across this country, Memorial Day is every day."
– Air Force Captain Joshua Carroll
Hemingway with Col. Charles 'Buck' Lanham in Germany, 1944,
during the fighting in Hürtgenwald, after which he became ill with pneumonia.
“Death is the mother of beauty. Only the perishable can be beautiful, which is why we are unmoved by artificial flowers.”
― Wallace Stevens
No American writer is more associated with writing about war in the early 20th century than Ernest Hemingway. He experienced it firsthand, wrote dispatches from innumerable frontlines, and used war as a backdrop for many of his most memorable works.
“Throw away the light, the definitions, and say what you see in the dark.”
―
Wallace Stevens
Researchers come to the Hemingway archives at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library primarily to examine Ernest Hemingway's original manuscripts and his correspondence with family, friends, and fellow writers. One object on display is far more consequential: a piece of shrapnel from the battlefield where Hemingway was wounded during World War I.
Had the enemy mortar attack been more successful that fateful night,
the world may never have known one of the greatest writers of the 20th
century. Conversely, had Hemingway not been injured in that attack, he
not may have fallen in love with his Red Cross nurse, a romance that
served as the genesis of A Farewell to Arms, one of the century's most read war novels. Hemingway kept the piece of shrapnel, along with a small handful
of other "charms" including a ring set with a bullet fragment, in a
small leather change purse.
Similarly he held his war experience close
to his heart and demonstrated throughout his life a keen interest in war
and its effects on those who live through it.
War leaves no survivor untouched.
Data compiled from diaries and letters will affirm the presence of
psychological disorders in soldiers who fought in the Civil War. From this
body of evidence, it is clear that soldiers of the American Civil War
did indeed suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder and other
psychological disorders. Until the 20th century little was known about the emotional effects of
war on soldiers and it wasn't until soldiers were studied
psychologically that we began to understand what had happened to them.
The greatest glory of a free-born people is to transmit that freedom to their children.
-William Havard
It was due to soldiers of the Vietnam war that the disorder was
discovered, yet their symptoms had been synonymous with war veterans
from hundreds of years before. Veterans of war find it hard to be the same, emotionally, ever again. Some may say
that their inability to form close bonds with loved ones is due to the
experience of near death and the fear that they will leave someone
behind. The emotional effects of war on soldiers very often hinders
their future achievements too as they find it impossible to imagine or
plan. “The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.”
―
G.K. Chesterton
Who are you remembering today?
That’s the question for
Memorial Day,
the day set aside each spring to honor the men
and woman killed in our nation’s wars ... Men and women who wanted to see their loved ones again But wanted them kept safe even more.
You may think the honor of being on the first cover of Ms. Magazine went to Wonder Woman. Like many treasured beliefs, this one is wrong. That honor went to the many-armed Hindu goddess Kali,
holding a frying
pan, a typewriter, a mirror, and other tools of the hyper-multitasking
modern woman.
Wonder Woman graced the SECOND issue's cover.
William Moulton Marston,
the inventor of Wonder Woman, believed women were superior to men and should run the
world—
and would do so in, oh, about a thousand years.
Hey, his heart was in the right place. Ah, or was it?
{William Moulton Marston testing his lie detector in a 1922 photo}
He was an American psychologist, lawyer, inventor, and comic book writer who created the characterWonder Woman.
Marston had a great deal of help from his wife, Elizabeth Holloway
(we have
her to thank for “Suffering Sappho,” “Great Hera,” and other Amazonian
expostulations),
It is said that I am born of stardust and the sea ... And that is true ... as far as it goes ... which is not nearly far enough. For the realm of my birth is not even of your dimension whose air would be death for you to breathe. I allow mortals to call me Meilori Shinseen,
for that is as close as your vocal chords can come to my true name. You quicksilver humans flicker and are gone like inconsequential fire-flies in the night. I have left so many pieces of myself with each passing eon that I feel hollow inside. Heat-caressed deserts soon become ice fields.
Chasms fill and bristle with green forests.
Everything seems so very transitory. Nothing remains for long. I am afraid to touch things now.
They might be but smoke, and my hand will go right on through them, touching ...
what?
The God at whom you mortals now scoff . Or would I touch the nothing that my life has become? I look back at the long vista of my life, hinting of fire and violet --
the winds of its passing mourning the grieving skies above me. My blue-frosted footsteps standing out like frozen music ... A music which thawed when first I met my Samuel in what you foolishly call Ancient Egypt. My sister's treachery took him from me then. But now he is returned to me. And I, who have given cause for icy fear to so many, now feel it myself,
for I sense death reaching out to snatch him from me again. Thus does Life repay those who take her too lightly.
The first sentence (the 2nd most important sentence in your book) gets the reader to buy & read your book.
The last sentence makes them glad
they did.
Take the BEN HUR remake.
Everyone, even the ones who enjoyed the first of the film, were turned off by the ending.
What a great last line will do:
1.) Refers back to a theme that runs throughout the book. Double bonus points if it mirrors the first line. 2.) Breathes a spirit of victory (even in defeat) or hope. 3.) Reveals the purpose of the novel and/or meaning of the title. A good last line will give finality,
yet with a sense of continuing into another story that those who survived the novel will continue living their lives.
GREAT LAST LINES:
"So that, in the end, there was no end." - Patrick White, The Tree of Man (1955)
"But wherever they go, and whatever happens to them on the way, in that enchanted place on top of the Forest, a little boy and his Bear will always be playing." - A.A. Milne, The House at Pooh Corner(1928)
"He waited for someone to tell him who to be next." - Brian Evenson, The Open Curtain(2006)
"But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive:
for the growing good of the wortld is partly dependent on unhistoric acts;
and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been
is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs." - George Elliot, Middlemarch (1871-72) "He was soon borne away by the waves and lost in darkness and distance." - Mary Shelly, Frankenstein (1818) "It was the nightmare of real things, the fallen wonder of the world." - Don DeLillo, The Names(1982) "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." - F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925) "Everything had gone right with me since he died, but how I wished there existed someone to whom I could say that I was sorry." - Graham Greene, The Quiet American (1956)