“How little we know of what there is to know. I wish that I were going to live a long time…I’d like to be an
old man…I wonder if you keep on learning or if there is only a certain amount each man can understand.
I thought I knew so many things that I know nothing of. I wish there was more time.”
~Ernest Hemingway, passage taken from ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls’
In what many consider to be Hemingway’s greatest work, For Whom The Bell Tolls is the penultimate treatise on the brevity of life. Centered on the character of Robert Jordan, Hemingway masterfully boxes in the reader so that they have no other choice than to confront their own mortality. In this passage, Jordan, a soldier who has been given the assignment of blowing up a bridge behind enemy lines in the middle of the Spanish Civil War, is fixated upon his death. Knowing that he will not survive the day, it is in these quiet moments just before his life ends that he utters these words.
In 1941, For Whom The Bell Tolls was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize of letters. For some strange reason–some speculate that it was because the subject matter was much too intense to be considered worthy of such recognition–Nicholas Murray Butler, President of Columbia University dissented.
There was no award given that year.
Sunset, Eastern NE
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