A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway – author of The Old Man and The Sea, which is celebrated as one of the 100 Greatest Books of All Time; my note on this is at https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/2024/08/the-old-man-and-sea-by-ernest-hemingway.html together with a look at two other works from the Hemingway magnum opera, and over one thousand reviews of books and films The King Reader and Flow - 9 out of 10

 

A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway – author of The Old Man and The Sea, which is celebrated as one of the 100 Greatest Books of All Time; my note on this is at https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/2024/08/the-old-man-and-sea-by-ernest-hemingway.html together with a look at two other works from the Hemingway magnum opera, and over one thousand reviews of books and films

The King Reader and Flow

9 out of 10

 

My favorite Hemingway novel would have been The Sun Also Rises https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/2024/12/the-sun-also-rises-by-ernest-hemingway.html only somehow, I have read it twice, and on the last encounter it failed to enchant this reader, surely for subjective reasons

 

It clearly has a lot (or all of it) to do with reading about Ernest Hemingway, and other great minds, such as Leo Tolstoy, Henrik Ibsen and especially Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the latter has abandoned his children at the door of an orphanage, at a time when nine of ten would die in such conditions, and it was a chilling finding

Intellectuals https://realini.blogspot.com/2014/06/intellectuals-by-paul-johnson.html by Paul Johnson does a lot to change the mindset of readers, it did it for me, notwithstanding the fact that I was not a great fan of Hemingway to start with, however impressive, emotional the story of The Old Man fighting the elements is

 

A Farewell to Arms is a love story, and a good one at that, this note is not meant to dispute the magnificence of this, or any other major work, it is all a question of what this subjective reader has taken out of it – ‘there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so’ Hamlet – or could not bring with him, when the book is finished

There are ten essential elements of positivity: awe, interest, hope, joy, amusement, inspiration, pride, serenity, gratitude and above all, love, this is what the ultimate expert has discovered and you find it in her classic book, Positivity https://realini.blogspot.com/2015/05/positivity-by-barbara-fredrickson-life.html

 

It is intriguing to read about the relationship between Ernest Hemingway and Scott F. Fitzgerald – for some critics, the author of The Greatest Book of the last century, and certainly one of the best of all time The Great Gatsby https://realini.blogspot.com/2014/09/the-great-gatsby-by-scott-f-fitzgerald.html a masterpiece, indeed

‘Hemingway’s claim that he took a look at Fitzgerald’s member in le water, the men’s room, is treated with an odd informality given the intimacy of the act…’ there have been suggestions that there was a ‘homosexual tension in the atmosphere between the two fabulous writers’, who had very different styles…

 

Reading is not for business, I do not have a duty, ergo it must be for pleasure and then we have some formulas to see if one book fits the bill, say PERMA https://realini.blogspot.com/2014/07/july-12th-from-authentic-happiness-by.html proposed by Martin Seligman, co-founder of positive psychology, where

P is for Positive Emotions, E for Engagement, R aka Relationships, M is for Meaning and A for Achievement, I will focus on Flow and the need for a novel to bring some sort of trance, higher state of consciousness, if not Nirvana – sometimes I feel that Flow and Nirvana are not exactly near each other, perhaps even opposite

 

The conditions for Flow are explained in Flow https://realini.blogspot.com/2016/10/flow-by-mihaly-csikszentmihalyi-this-is.html and they are - nothing else matters, it is an autotelic experience aka it provides enchantment, you are in control, there is constant and instant feedback, and finally, two most important here:

Challenges meet expectations or you are on the line between boredom and burnout, and time is relative, and in a good way I would add, taking the former, and trying to apply it to books, there are times when I see that I am not exactly thrilled by what happens in the book, or else, it is too much, impossible to comprehend

 

Alternating between tedium and overwhelming situations is not auspicious – the desert was formed when temperatures were extremely low at night, and very high at daytime – and in what regards time, the experiences can be magnificent, and then you feel you fly very fast with the narrative, and alternatively:

You get so much feeling, thought provoking material that it is also a time that sometimes feels as if you had a life spent with those marvelous characters…granted, when you expect so much, you may feel disappointed – the problem of having too high expectations of being what was called the Maximizer in another psychology classic

 

The Paradox of Choice  https://realini.blogspot.com/2015/07/the-paradox-of-choice-by-barry-schartz.html offers two types of humans, the Satisfizer and Maximizer, the former is happy with the very good, while the latter is always morose, because he wants perfection, he wants the Panglossian world, with ideals coming true

Then there are some other criteria, from Schopenhauer and his interdiction for bad books, to the quote of Umberto Eco – the reader has five thousand lives, eternity backwards – to which I add, surely, but we do not want to live perpetually with personages we do not like, or amending even this, we could opt for the very best

The protagonists of A Farewell to Arms are attractive enough (nay, more than that), but let me spend more – at least four thousand of those lives – in the company of the women and men from A dance to The Music of Time by Anthony Powell, to give one example

 

Now for my standard closing of the note with a question, and invitation – maybe you have a good idea on how we could make more than a million dollars with this http://realini.blogspot.com/2022/02/unique-in-world.html?q=unique+in+the+world  – as it is, this is a unique technique, which we could promote, sell, open the Oscars show with or something and then make lots of money together, if you have the how, I have the product, I just do not know how to get the befits from it, other than the exercise per se

 

 There is also the small matter of working for AT&T – this huge company asked me to be its Representative for Romania and Bulgaria, on the Calling Card side, which meant sailing into the Black Sea wo meet the US Navy ships, travelling to Sofia, a lot of activity, using my mother’s two bedrooms flat as office and warehouse, all for the grand total of $250, raised after a lot of persuasion to the staggering $400…with retirement ahead, there are no benefits, nothing…it is a longer story, but if you can help get the mastodont to pay some dues, or have an idea how it can happen, let me know

 

As for my role in the Revolution that killed Ceausescu, a smaller Mao, there it is http://realini.blogspot.com/2022/03/realini-in-newsweek-participant-in.html

 

Some favorite quotes from To The Hermitage and other works

 

‘Fiction is infinitely preferable to real life...As long as you avoid the books of Kafka or Beckett, the everlasting plot of fiction has fewer futile experiences than the careless plot of reality...Fiction's people are fuller, deeper, cleverer, more moving than those in real life…Its actions are more intricate, illuminating, noble, profound…There are many more dramas, climaxes, romantic fulfillment, twists, turns, gratified resolutions…Unlike reality, all of this you can experience without leaving the house or even getting out of bed…What's more, books are a form of intelligent human greatness, as stories are a higher order of sense…As random life is to destiny, so stories are to great authors, who provided us with some of the highest pleasures and the most wonderful mystifications we can find…Few stories are greater than Anna Karenina, that wise epic by an often foolish author…’

 

“From Monty Python - The Meaning of Life...Well, it's nothing very special...Try and be nice to people, avoid eating fat, read a good book every now and then, get some walking in, and try and live together in peace and harmony with people of all creeds and nations.”