I buy a lot of books, probably a hundred a year. I suppose I am building a library, though I don’t have nearly enough room, so in addition to a couple of hundred feet of built-in shelves I economize table, floor, and desk by stacking books in piles. Though the piles  rarely go higher than two feet, a footprint of 6 x 9 inches can accommodate as many as twenty books. Not a bad tradeoff for the danger of these towers near my head.

All of which is to say that when selecting the next book to read, I have a large collection within reach, and if I want a war story or a comedy or a biography, all I have to do is slip it out of its stack, and I’m on my way. Sometimes I’m not sure what I want to read, or read about. Maybe it’s a setting. Maybe it’s a genre. Maybe it’s a biography of an artist. Or a collection of essays. So I pore over the stacks and slip one out and “test” it, by flipping it to a random page, reading a few paragraphs, and if I find what I’m looking for, it becomes my next or one of my next reads.

Setting lately has been a purchase incentive. Cuba, Key West, the islands — these wafted across my brain recently, and I bought or dug out some volumes: Thomas McGuane’s Ninety-two in the Shade, Hotchner’s Papa Hemingway, Walker Evans’s Cuba photographs (see below), and Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not and Islands in the Stream.

While these yens for particular books come and go with alarming frequency, I did get into the last four of that list. Islands in the Stream is not considered vintage Hemingway by many, a posthumous publication  (1970) written in the early 1950s (as recounted by Hotchner), but it does contain some good material, here and there. I’m not deep in the book by any means, but there occurred a couple of really strong paragraphs that I want to call out. They occur on page 144 of the Scribner paperback. This is Thomas Hudson, the protagonist, rendered in third person and, annoyingly, always called “Thomas Hudson” rather than one or the other of his names, an odd effect. Nevertheless . . .

What a miserable, selfish way to be thinking about people that you love, he thought. Why don’t you remember the day and not analyze it and tear it to pieces? Go to bed now, he told himself, and make yourself sleep. The hell with anything else. And pick up the rhythm of your life in the morning. You don’t have the boys for much longer. See how happy a time you can make for them. I’ve tried, he said to himself. I’ve tried truly and for Roger, too. And you have been very happy yourself, he told himself. Yes, of course. But something about today frightened me. Then he told himself: truly, there is something about every day to frighten you. Go on to bed and maybe you’ll sleep well. Remember you want them to be happy tomorrow. 

What I find astonishing here is how Hemingway renders this self-conversation in first, second, and third person, with such strength and simplicity, and how its crisscrossing patterns of speech and thought mimic the mind’s bedtime rush. You can almost hear the final settling breath as the guy tries to leave it all behind.

Following this is just a lovely description of the world around Hudson’s bed:

A big southwest wind came up in the night and by daylight it was slowing with almost the force of a gale. The palms were bent with it and shutters slammed and papers blew and a surf was piling on the beach. 

Here I love the combining of inside and outside sounds in the second part of the second sentence, how he went from papers to the beach so effortlessly.