Reading For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway has taken longer than expected. It’s been a slog, to say the least. As I’ve mentioned dozens of times, if I love a book, I’ll read chapters each night. If it hasn’t exactly picked up yet, I’ll read a page or two and fall asleep doing so. Apparently, evidenced by my falling asleep so quickly after opening this one, I’d say it’s yet to pick up. I’m hoping it will. I’m more than halfway through so something’s bound to happen. I mean, it’s just got to happen, right?
I’d like to take a moment to mention a few thoughts that’ve occurred to me while reading. Sometimes while doing so, if I pass by something worth remembering, I’ll save the quote, or whatever it is, for later. In this case, it was a quote and just as it happens, it’s somehow cleverly woven itself into my reality. Quite fittingly for the author at hand, the subject is: love and death.
Please read what I discovered on page 175:
“Then they were walking along the stream together and he said, ‘Maria, I love thee and thou art so lovely and so wonderful and so beautiful and it does such things to me to be with thee that I feel as though I wanted to die when I am loving thee.‘”
A friend of mine recently lost her husband of 60 years. The two met when they were teenagers and spent the remainder of his life together. As she described him to me, he was the light of her being. He was her soulmate. He was the first and only man she had ever loved and to lose him was to lose part of herself. As I spoke to this woman, I realized something beautiful, yet utterly disturbing. I learned that, as Ernest Hemingway so famously stated, “If two people love each other, there can be no happy end to it.” As strikingly and unnervingly true as the statement is, it somehow leaves my perception of love in somewhat of a shambles. It’s just that…there are a few aspects of the subject I had yet to consider. I feel slightly odd discussing any of this here because I’m a mere onlooker and far be it for me to insert myself into someone else’s grief, but I suppose I do have opinions and since I’m sharing my thoughts on the topic now, it’s somehow appropriate that I write about them as best I can.
Up until this point of my life, I’ve thought that the harder I love someone, the more satisfied and rewarded I’ll ultimately become. That I’ll somehow intertwine with another person to realize some sort of oneness with them. The issue with what I had initially (up to very recently) considered, or perhaps more succinctly put, perceived or believed, is that the harder I love someone, the harder I’ll fall if and when they one day disappear. Alfred, Lord Tennyson once so thoughtfully stated in his poem In Memoriam A. H. H.:
I hold it true, whate’er befall;
I feel it, when I sorrow most;
‘Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all.
If you’ve ever dismissed poetry as being trivial, I encourage you to, at the very least, glance at this poem. It’ll enlighten you to the art, to say the least.
Alfred Tennyson’s best friend died at the age of 22. For the next 17 years, Lord Tennyson crafted a poem as a tribute to his friend. I suppose the writing of the poem was somehow responsible for the processing of the author’s grief, because by the end of it, it was concluded that, “…he found hope in the notion that love itself is a miracle. And it’s worth every moment of pain-filled loss.”
As I type this post, I’m realizing that I can go on and on about this topic much longer, or farther, or deeper than I really had ever intended. I’m not actually sure what my initial goal of it all was, beyond sharing the quote with you about love. As I was typing and thinking, I began looking around for the poet who authored the “loved and lost” quote and now I find that I’m crawling down a rabbit hole, one which I never intended to crawl. I wonder if I should leave this post here or if I should continue writing. Read on below to find out.
In the book, Hemingway describes a blossoming love between the main character, Robert Jordan, and a secondary character, Maria. As you’ve seen from the quote above by Robert Jordan, he’s completely fallen for her. She’s fallen for Robert as well and as far as I can tell, the two will find themselves in as deep a love as my two friends in real life found themselves. My friend has been suffering through intense grief for the past month and it’s left me asking questions similar to the ones Alfred Tennyson asked himself; whether it’s worth it to put the effort into someone else only to have each and every emotion you’ve ever shared with them torn from you, all at once. It’s likely I’ll conclude it is, just as Lord Tennyson concluded – I mean, what am I to do at this point? Give up on the entire thing? That’s not rational and it’s likely not even emotionally feasible.
Robert Jordan and Maria, however, are at the precipice of delving into something that’s nearly impossible to stop; if they were to continue walking down their path, without the knowledge or consideration of what’s to come, they’ll certainly find themselves asking the very same questions nearly everyone who’s found true love has asked themselves. Simply put: Is it better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all? If we, or they, were to put any trust at all into the struggles and contemplation endured by Alfred Tennyson, I’m certain they’d face the risk.
Enough said. I’m going to bed.
