Big Two-Hearted River - Hemingway

1. Big Two-Hearted River - Hemingway “There was no town, nothing but the rails and the burned –over country.”

2. Big Two-Hearted River - Hemingway Nick looked at the burned-over stretch of the hillside, where he had expected to find the scattered houses of the town and then walked down the railroad track to the bridge over the river. The river was there.

3. Big Two-Hearted River - Hemingway He felt he had left everything behind, the need for thinking, the need to write, other needs. It was all back of him

4. Big Two-Hearted River - Hemingway Seney was burned, the country was burned over and changed. But it did not matter. It could not all be burned. He knew that.

5. Big Two-Hearted River - Hemingway Even the surface had been burned off the ground.

6. Big Two-Hearted River - Hemingway He watched them [the trout] holding themselves with their noses into the current… Nick’s heart tightened as the trout moved. He felt all the old feeling.

7. Big Two-Hearted River - Hemingway The grasshopper was black. As he walked along the road, climbing, he had started many grasshoppers from the dust. They were all black.

8. Big Two-Hearted River - Hemingway He wondered how long they [the grasshoppers] would stay that way.

9. Big Two-Hearted River - Hemingway “Fly away somewhere.”

10. Big Two-Hearted River - Hemingway It was a long time since Nick had looked into a stream and seen trout.

11. Big Two-Hearted River - Hemingway His pack was heavy and the straps painful as he lifted it on.

12. Big Two-Hearted River - Hemingway He walked upstream through the meadow.

13. Big Two-Hearted River - Hemingway Already there was something mysterious and homelike.

14. Big Two-Hearted River - Hemingway There were plenty of good places to camp on the river. But this was good.

15. Big Two-Hearted River - Hemingway Still it was too heavy. It was much too heavy.

16. Big Two-Hearted River - Hemingway The road ran on…always climbing. Nick went on up.”

17. Big Two-Hearted River - Hemingway Nick knew it [the canned beans] were still too hot… For years he had never enjoyed fried bananas because he had never been able to wait for them to cool… Across the river in the swamp…he saw a mist rising…

18. Big Two-Hearted River - Hemingway He shook the skillet sideways and the cake was loose on the surface. I won’t try and flop it, he thought.

19. Big Two-Hearted River - Hemingway As Nick’s fingers touched him [the first trout he catches], touched his smooth, cool, underwater feeling he was gone, gone in a shadow across the bottom of the stream. He’s all right, Nick thought. He was only tired.

20. Big Two-Hearted River - Hemingway Nick did not like to fish with other men on the river. Unless they were of your party, they spoiled it.

21. Big Two-Hearted River - Hemingway Nick’s hand was shaky. He reeled in slowly. The thrill had been too much. He felt, vaguely, a little sick, as thought he would be better to sit down.

22. Big Two-Hearted River - Hemingway He went over and sat on the logs. He did not want to rush his sensations any.

23. Big Two-Hearted River - Hemingway It was no fun to fish upstream with this much current.

24. Big Two-Hearted River - Hemingway Nick did not want to go in there now. He felt a reaction against deep wading with the water deepening up under his armpits…the fishing would be tragic.

25. Big Two-Hearted River - Hemingway He climbed the bank and cut up into the woods, toward the high ground. He was going back to camp. He looked back. The river just showed through the trees. There were plenty of days coming when he could fish the swamp.

26. “Now I Lay Me”

27. “Now I Lay Me” - Hemingway (up until this point in the story the young soldier (Nick, Hemingway) is recovering from wounds and believes that if he goes to sleep he will lose his soul…he also believes he has incredible hearing and can hear the silk worms chewing on leaves) …..the room and I listened to the silk‑worms eating. The silk‑worms fed in racks of mulberry leaves and all night you could hear them eating and a dropping sound in the leaves. I myself did not want to sleep because I had been living for a long time with the knowledge that if I ever shut my eyes in the dark and let myself go, my soul would go out of my body. I had been that way for a long time, ever since I had been blown up at night and felt it go out of me and go off and then come back. I tried never to think about it, but it had started to go since, in the nights, just at the moment of going off to sleep, and I could only stop it by a very great effort. So while now I am fairly sure that it would not really have gone out, yet then, that summer, I was unwilling to make the experiment. I had different ways of occupying myself while I lay awake. I would think of a trout stream I had fished along when I was a boy and fish its whole length very carefully in my mind; fishing very carefully under all the logs, all the turns of the bank, the deep holes and the clear shallow stretches, sometimes catching trout and sometimes losing them. I would stop fishing at noon to eat my lunch; sometimes on a log over the stream; sometimes on a high bank under a tree, and I always ate my lunch very slowly and watched the stream below me while I ate. Often I ran out of bait because I would take only ten worms with me in a tobacco tin when I started. When I had used them all I had to find more worms, and sometimes it was very difficult digging in the bank of the stream where the cedar trees kept out the sun and there was no grass but only the bare moist earth and often I could find no worms. Always though I found some kind of bait, but one time in the swamp I could find no bait at all and had to cut up one of the trout I had caught and use him for bait.

28. “Now I Lay Me” - Hemingway Sometimes I found insects in the swamp meadows, in the grass or under ferns, and used them. There were beetles and insects with legs like grasshopper that would not stay on the hook and emptied into nothing, and wood ticks under logs where sometimes I found angle‑worms that slipped into the ground as soon as the log was raised. Once I used a salamander from under an old log. The salamander was very small and neat and agile and a lovely color. He had tiny feet that tried to hold on to the hook, and after that one time I never used a salamander, although I found them very often. Nor did I use crickets, because of the way they acted about the hook.

29. “Now I Lay Me” - Hemingway Sometimes the stream ran through an open meadow, and in the dry grass I would catch grasshoppers and use them for bait and sometimes I would catch grasshoppers and toss them into the stream and watch them float along swimming on the stream and circling on the surface as the current took them and then disappear as a trout rose. Sometimes I would fishfour or five different streams in the night; starting as near as I could get to their source and fishing them down stream. When I had finished too quickly and the time did not go, I would fish the stream over again, startingwhere it emptied into the lake and fishing back up stream, trying for all the trout I had missed coming down. Some nights too I made up streams, and some of them were very exciting, and it was like being awake and dreaming. Some of those streams I still remember and think that I have fished in them, and they are confused with streams I really know. I gave them all names and went to them on the train and sometimes walked for miles to get to them.

30. “Now I Lay Me” - Hemingway But some nights I could not fish, and on those nights I was cold‑awake and said my prayers over and over and tried to pray for all the people I had ever known. That took up a great amount of time, for if you try to remember all the people you have ever known, going back to the earliest thing you remember‑which was, with me, the attic of the house where I was born and my mother and father's wedding‑cake in a tin box hanging from one of the rafters, and, in the attic, jars of snakes and other specimens that my father had collected as a boy and preserved in alcohol, the alcohol sunken in the jars so the backs of some of the snakes and specimens were exposed and had turned white‑if you thought back that far, you remembered a great many people. If you prayed for all of them, saying a Hail Mary and an Our Father for each one, it took a long time and finally it would be light, and then you could go to sleep, if you were in a place where you could sleep in the daylight. On those nights I tried to remember everything that had ever happened to me, starting with just before I went to the war and remembering back from one thing to another. I found I could only remember back to that attic in my grandfather's house. Then I would start there and remember this way again, until I reached the war…