"Hemingway, Ernest - Green Hills of Africa" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hemingway Ernest)

writers at a certain age. I can explain but it is quite long and may bore
you.'
'Please explain,' he said. 'This is what I enjoy. This is the best part
of life. The life of the mind. This is not killing kudu.'
'You haven't heard it yet,' I said.
'Ah, but I can see it coming. You must take more beer to loosen your
tongue.'
'It's loose,' I told him. 'It's always too loose. But {you} don't drink
anything.'
'No, I never drink. It is not good for the mind. It is unnecessary. But
tell me. Please tell me.'
'Well,' I said, 'we have had, in America, skilful writers. Poe is a
skilful writer. It is skilful, marvellously constructed, and it is dead. We
have had writers of rhetoric who had the good fortune to find a little, in a
chronicle of another man and from voyaging, of how things, actual things,
can be, whales for instance, and this knowledge is wrapped in the rhetoric
like plums in a pudding. Occasionally it is there, alone, unwrapped in
pudding, and it is good. This is Melville. But the people who praise it,
praise it for the rhetoric which is not important. They put a mystery in
which is not there.'
'Yes,' he said. 'I see. But it is the mind working, its ability to
work, which makes the rhetoric. Rhetoric is the blue sparks from the
dynamo.'
'Sometimes. And sometimes it is only blue sparks, and what is the
dynamo driving?'
'So. Go on.'
'I've forgotten.'
'No. Go on. Do not pretend to be stupid.'
'Did you ever get up before daylight...'
'Every morning,' he said. 'Go on.'
'All right. There were others who wrote like exiled English colonials
from an England of which they were never a part to a newer England that they
were making. Very good men with the small, dried, and excellent wisdom of
Unitarians; men of letters, Quakers with a sense of humour.'
'Who were these?'
'Emerson, Hawthorne, Whittier, and Company. All our early classics who
did not know that a new classic does not bear any resemblance to the
classics that have preceded it. It can steal from anything that it is better
than, anything that is not a classic, all classics do that. Some writers are
only born to help another writer to write one sentence. But it cannot derive
from or resemble a previous classic. Also all these men were gentlemen, or
wished to be. They were all very respectable. They did not use the words
that people always have used in speech, the words that survive in language.
Nor would you gather that they had bodies. They had minds, yes. Nice,
dry, clean minds. This is all very dull, I would not state it except that
you ask for it.'
'Go on.'
'There is one at that time that is supposed to be really good. Thoreau.
I cannot tell you about it because I have not yet been able to read it. But
that means nothing because I cannot read other naturalists unless they are