Not your typical diary
So cool
Liked It...The thoughts in between the spoken dialogue paints a glaringly introspective picture of a man and his relationship with a woman. I believed his perspective. I felt that he was seeing the relationship through a honest and real lens of death, while she seemed to be in a living shroud of "love" born out of her need and convenience. It is a rather typical portrait, a woman clinging to a man for emotional security and a man clinging to a woman out of a sense of failure to do anything else. The way he describes their relationship is telling about who he is: bare - real - a dying dog who wonders when and how he lost his bite. He can still perform the motions of everyday living, for her sake, but his truth is inescapable in his head. I found this relationship, and the discussion about passion vs. wealth and his reasons for choosing one over the other very intriguing.
What did the writer feel was left unwritten? We don't know what he wrote in the first place, maybe more of the same. It is written on the cover of my book that Hemingway said "I put all the true stuff in" this short story; with enough material to fill up four novels. Perhaps this was a story born out of a "writers block" period that felt like death to his spirit.
Why did the leopard go up the mountain and freeze to death? Not for food, not curiosity. Perhaps out of a desperate fling, like the writers reason for coming to Africa - to shake of the excess wealth and find his passion again. Instead, he found death and unrealized dreams. The writer found stories left unwritten, the panther a summit unreached, for us: something different.
My vote on one of the most interesting passages from the story: "We must all be cut out for what we do, he thought. However you make your living is where your talent lies. He had sold vitality in one form or another, all his life and when your affections are not too involved you give much better value for the money. He had found that out but he would never write that, now, either. No, he would not write that, although it was well worth writing."
Hemingway perhaps questioned wether or not he was supposed to be a writer - at the same time, however, he felt he had figured out one of the keys to be a successful writer: "A message bogged down with the writers own feelings and partialities decreases its merit or value". He seemed to feel that writers should retell their observations, without "making the waters muddy" with their own attachments. Yet if he wasn't meant to be a writer, if he didn't have "talent" or wasn't "cut out" for what he did, he wouldn't have understood that. So in the end, he feels vindicated...
Of course, he could have meant that affections were the death of vitality?
At the start of the book, it has it's special parts to fill out stuff about you, your family, etc.
Then it starts off. It goes on a month by month basis, starting with January and ending with December. For each month it starts out with a bit from a popular Fear Street book, and that would be the focus for each month. Each included things like quizzes about youself, quizzes about Fear Street characters, fun activities, and much more, and of course places to write your thoughts, feelings, secrets, etc.
For example, on one part, you write down secrets about you and others, then there's instructions where to fold the page up halfway and then tape it so that "no one will find them".
This book is a definite recommend for anyone into the Fear Street books or who just likes something a little on the scary side. Like I said, interesting and original to the fullest.