for whom the bell tolls (or i don't want a pickle)

I just understood something. Or rather understood something at greater depth. It came to me (heh heh, this is for Hook's benefit, or I suppose anyone who is familiar with Arlo Guthrie) "like a flash, like a vision, burnt across the clouds. I just wrote it down."

Having a moment of curiosity (blame Futurama), I looked up what it was that Ernest Hemingway was referencing with the title of his novel For Whom the Bell Tolls. Idly bowsing the net to this end, I discovered that it was actually a reference to a poem by John Donne, one of my favourite poets, entitled (funnily enough) 'For Whom the Bell Tolls.' To wit:

No man is an island,
Entire of itself.
Each is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manner of thine own
Or of thine friend's were.
Each man's death diminishes me,
For I am involved in mankind.
Therefore, send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee.

Any reference to no man being an island instantly brings to my mind the work of Joan Didion. (Okay, yes, I'm a freak.) And something instantly made even more sense to me. (To be clear, I did know that Hemingway did not coin either the phrase "for whom the bell tolls" or "no man is an island." To which Simon and Garfunkel also made reference. I also knew who did. I just didn't realise it was the same work.) In Didion's essay, 'Good Citizens' (which I am about to quote at great length) she makes reference to the latter. It's a passage which I already found very funny but I now find it moreso:

I was once invited to a civil rights meeting at Sammy Davis, Jr.'s house, in the hills above the Sunset Strip. "Let me tell you how to get to Sammy's." said the woman to whom I was talking. "You need to turn left at the old Mocambo." I liked the ring of this line, summing up as it did a couple of generations of that peculiar vacant fervour which is Hollywood political action, but acquaintances to whom I repeated it seemed uneasy. Politics are not widely considered a legitimate source of amusement in Hollywood, where the borrowed rhetoric by which political ideas are reduced to choices between the good (equality is good) and the bad (genocide is bad) tends to make evn the most casual political small talk resemble a rally. "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it," someone said to me at dinner not long ago, and before we had finished our fraises des bois he had advised me as well that "no man is an island." As a matter of fact I hear that no man is an island once or twice a week, quite often from people who think they are quoting Ernest Hemingway. "What a sacrifice on the altar of nationalism," I heard an actor say about the death in a plane crash of the president of the Philippines. It is a way of talking that tends to preclude further discussion, which may well be its intention: the public life of liberal Hollywood comprises a kind of dictatorship of good intentions, a social contract in which actual and irreconcilable disagreement is as taboo as failure or bad teeth and climate devoid of irony. "Those men are our unsung heroes," a quite charming and intelligent woman once said to me at a party in Beverly Hills. She was talking about the California State Legislature.

Yes, yes, this is just an excuse to quote Joan Didion at you all. Or more accurately, to share this particular passage with you. But it did make me go, "Oooh." (Okay, really I've lost my point 'cause today is a bad word for... um... what are those words that are... you know... naming words? Oh and, Talen, I think you might enjoy Didion. Remind me to lend you The White Album. And OSC. And more Neil Gaiman. ;p)

By the way, the reference to Hemingway could also lead me on to a discourse on Jeanette Winterson, Gertrude Stein and the influences of Cubism of literature but that is for another time. (I hasten to add that the wiki entry on Cubism states various things about literature and cubism as if they were obvious but this is not the case: these are only recent ways of viewing the work of these artists - partly thanks to Winterson - so wikipedia can fucking bite me.)