LITERARY SNAPSHOTS IN THE MIND

Favorite scenes in literature are a little like snapshots in the mind.  They become a part of our own memory album and they can be summoned at a moment’s notice.

Ernest Hemingway wrote some of my favorite scenes.  In The Sun Also Rises the novel’s protagonist, Jake Barnes, is on a fishing trip in the Spanish mountains with a friend. They rest by an icy mountain stream for lunch.  They put their wine into the stream to cool and they dine on the frosty wine and fried chicken.

Another of my favorite  Hemingway scenes  is in the short story “The Battler.”  Nick Adams has been thrown off a freight train by a railroad “bull” and  he sees the glimmer of a campfire in the woods.  When he investigates he finds a former prizefighter named Ad Francis and the prizefighter’s companion.  The man fries  ham over the campfire and invites Nick Adams to join.  When he describes dipping bread into the hot ham fat you can taste it yourself.

In Chapter Fifteen of The Grapes of Wrath John Steinbeck describes a roadside diner and a fry cook preparing a hamburger.  You can hear the sizzle of the meat and smell the sharpness  of the onions and the yeasty scent of the buns toasting on the grill.

Great writers can make fiction as real as actual life and the scenes can become treasured  snapshots in your mind.