There was no wind, and, outside now of the warm air of the cave, heavy with smoke of both tobacco and charcoal, with the odor of cooked rice and meat, saffron, pimentos, and oil, the tarry, wine-spilled smell of the big skin hung beside the door, hung by the neck and all the four legs extended, wine drawn from a plug fitted in one leg, wine that spilled a little onto the earth of the floor, settling the dust smell; out now from the odors of different herbs whose names he did not know that hung in bunches from the ceiling, with long ropes of garlic, away now from the copper-penny, red wine and garlic, horse sweat and man sweat died in the clothing (acrid and gray the man sweat, sweet and sickly the dried brushed-off lather of horse sweat, of the men at the table, Robert Jordan breathed deeply of the clear night air of the mountains that smelled of the pines and of the dew on the grass in the meadow by the stream.
- Ernest Hemingway, For Whom The Bell Tolls
2 comments:
Nice post!
Hemingway said that the way to create a mental image, a “word picture” for the reader, is by the use of prepositional phrases. Here there are prepositional phrases within prepositional phrases and some that overlap, as well. This all goes toward “showing” the reader, not “telling” the reader. I mean, he could have written, “Robert Jordan went from the cave, where the cooking smelled just OK and the men smelled bad, outside, where the pines smelled good and nothing smelled bad.”
Thanks, Randy.
Hemingway spoke of "boiling it down always, rather than spreading out thin."
"Write one true sentence."
"Write about what you know."
Harrison speaking about the monk Dogen ... life is a blink of the eye, opportunity passes ... AWAKEN! NOTICE! Don't waste a second.
Hem wrote the way he did because of awareness.
Thanks, again, Randy. I really appreciate your insights.
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