From Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises

In Chapter XIII, the hotel owner Montoya and the journalist Jake Barnes, the narrator in the novel, discuss the understated but essential importance of being passionate about the bull-fights.
(I would note in passing that the rituals of the bull-fights and the rituals of the Catholic Church—seemingly separate, different, and unrelated to some readers—serve as profound touchstones for the fundamental values in the novel.)

I would make the following observations: Montoya is an indisputably exemplary individual, and Jake is a physically and emotionally wounded war veteran who strives to become but falls short of being an exemplary individual.

Each time I read a Flannery O’Connor story, I come away from the experience with expanded and different impressions. My most recent reading of “The Geranium”—the first story in O’Connor’s 1947 thesis collection—provokes me to offer the following observations:

As a retired, southern gentleman—though I use the word “gentlemen” more than somewhat ironically—Old Dudley presents himself as a curmudgeonly though often pathetic old man who seemingly regrets his transplantation from the apparent comfort of his home in a southern boardinghouse to what he considers the unpleasantness of his unloving but dutiful daughter’s apartment in New York City.

Consider this from Willa Cather’s My Antonia:

As we walked homeward over the fields, the sun dropped and lay like a great golden globe in the low west. While it hung there, the moon rose in the east, as big as a cart-wheel, pale silver and streaked with rose colour, thin as a bubble or a ghost-moon.

Here are some observations and a question.

When twenty-three year old Willa Cather was working in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and living in a boarding house at 309 South Highland Avenue (a street upon which I frequently traveled in the first quarter century of my life), she wrote to a friend:

“There is no God but one God and Art is his revealer: that’s my creed and I’ll follow it to the end, to a hotter place than Pittsburgh if need be.”

Also, in My Antonia, Cather’s narrator Jim Burden highlights the tensions between his Protestant grandparents and Antonia Shimerda’s Catholic family.