How could Hemmingway be so large with his feelings and gestures in “fairwell to arms”?
I went to a talk a couple of days ago and the man said that the kind of recession greece has experienced is only comparable to wartime-type recession. There’s a hell lot of social disintegration having taken place in the past 4 years, but the most notable is on a personal level. I never thought that the good old feeling of “nothing ever happens” could take such terrific form. It went from a state of “nothing ever happens here, but the living is easy” to a kind of “jesus, whatever you do, nothing seems to change what is happening” and I’m not talking about here and now, I’m talking about around 5 consequetive years. Being a native here makes being an immigrant elsewhere seem easy. The sense of helplessness and inability to make your viewpoint or references in life understood reminds me of the struggles of having just arrived in a foreign country.
The weirdest thing of all is the slow progression of emotional transition from ambitious cravings, desires and gestures to quiet emotional subsistence.
It depresses me when I come across something on tv or go abroad and remember that is not what we used to do either. For those who turned 18 just at the beginning of the crisis the effects have been more profound, as they knew they weren’t going to live the youth the previous generations did and they would have to work a lot more for a lot less.
My brother once joked “women are incapable of profound love the way men are, they’re always primarily concerned with protecting their children” and all that said was “there is sexism”… today a lot more people have fallen into the category of “profound love handicap” and all that says is the levels of stress for this mammal are maintained high, with whatever that means for society.
You can’t escape the cage, you can’t protest forever whatever they mght say, you watch the world through your facebook window and it’s becoming more and more of how you claim your patch in the sun. Out in the street people’s thoughts are so invasively loud and thirsty for hearing, that I need this time on the internet to put it all into perspective.
Essentially, Hemmingway was fighting a war where arms were less perverse and degrading and there was more time, less people, less distraction. Reading his books, you realise that it was a time where the sense of time, interaction and work had a quality that we lost through too much human stress and nonsense. The media are there to make up for lost space, time and stimulation and that’s pretty fair, but it’s also pretty fucked up.
Why fear death when you’ve lived? Why fear facebook when it’s your window? Fear it if it’s your clock…
whatevahwhatevah 