Percy v. Hemingway

“Though science taught that good environments were better than bad environments, it appeared to him that the opposite was the case.  Take hurricanes for example, certainly a bad environment if ever there was one.  It was his impression that not just he but other people too felt better in hurricanes…”

– Walker Percy, The Last Gentleman

“Thomas Hudson had studied tropical storms for many years and he could tell form the sky when their was a tropical disturbance  long before his barometer showed its presence.  He knew how to plot storms and the precautions that should be taken against them.  He knew too what it was to live through a hurricane with the other people of the island and the bond that the hurricane made between all people who had been through it.  He also knew that hurricanes could be so bad that nothing could live through them.  He always thought, though, that if there was ever one that bad he would like to be there for it and go with the house if she went.”

Ernest Hemingway, Islands in the Stream

Comments

  1. Jonathan Webb says

    Great minds really do think alike. Thanks Matthew.

  2. Angelico Nguyen, Esq., OP says

    I’d forgotten the fact until just now, but Papa was a Bad-Catholicish Writer, having nominally converted to the True Faith before his marriage to popish Pauline Pfeiffer (http://www.timelesshemingway.com/content/beliefsfaq).

  3. There is some reason to believe he was baptized a Catholic in 1918.

  4. What about Key Largo?

  5. Jonathan Webb says

    Key Largo was tremendous.

    My parents were baptized in Grace Cathedral in San Francisco in the early ’50s and were subsequently married in an Episcopal church in Milwaukee, OR.

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