These are Hemingway’s words. These are the first two sentences of the book Fiesta or The Sun Also Rises.

I have read this book probably more than I have read any other single piece of material with a few exceptions. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve read Kung Fu Panda or Casablanca or the stories written in graded books about detectives and foolish English Lords. But I’ve read this book many times. In fact, it’s possible that I’ve read this particular book in its paper form 40 times or more. For a while here in Belarus, it was my only English language book and I just kept reading it because that’s what people did back then when we were bored. We read books.

The reason I’m talking about this is that while cleaning up some food boxes, ants begin to crawl up my arms. I basically work no dig and just let the quality of the soil do its job. In this case, we just push the hay aside to expose the bare ground and we can see what’s going on in there. The grass comes out and all of the things that are amazingly growing because I put them there are starting their lives.

But once the ants started crawling, and they are worse than mosquitoes, I suddenly realized that I needed to say something for this blog.

I’ve often wondered if Robert Cohn was not the model for Robert in Pod Kablucom. I wonder if in fact having a Jewish writer who comes from a wealthy family who has become disgusted with Americans and Europeans and the anti-Semitism that comes with them and just went back, literally to where his parents came from to find a girl who made sense.

Hemingway wrote about this because whoever was Cone in real life knocked his ass out one time and started him thinking about what was real and what was not. As Hemingway saw things, this made Cone a better writer on that day.