Hemingway

"In that one year at Harvard, the amount and breadth of my reading were something I never again matched later. I read Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Galsworthy, Sinclair Lewis, Jane Austen, Shakespeare, and Shaw; Churchill’s memoirs of World War II; famous speeches by modern American presidents; American history; Wells’s world history; several English books about China; and I also ventured into a few classical giants such as Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, and even Marx’s Capital. Besides these major works, I subscribed to two newspapers, The New York Times and The Christian Science Monitor published in Boston, as well as Time magazine."

"As if there were some force arranging things in the dark, Mr. Morris Chang’s third uncle, with foresight, first chose a year at Harvard for him, rather than immediately entering the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which most directly matched his specialty. In his year at Harvard, he immersed himself almost in all directions in Western civilization: from Homer, Milton, Shakespeare, Hemingway, Austen, and Shaw, to Churchill’s World War II memoirs and the speeches of successive U.S. presidents; at the same time he subscribed to major American newspapers and periodicals, listened to music, watched theater, visited museums, attended ball games and dances, and made American friends."

"He likes to quote Hemingway’s words, describing what he gained at Harvard as “a moveable feast,” and believes that this feast nourished his entire life, including the technological work he engaged in that seemed to have little to do with the humanities, up to today."

"Just then, one night I reopened the Hemingway collected works [2] that I loved, and turned to his short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.” The protagonist is a writer who develops gangrene at the foot of Mount Kilimanjaro in Africa, cannot move, and waits to die while gazing at the snow-covered peak. The following are his hazy thoughts before death: Now he could never write the stories, the ones he had saved up to write when he could write them better. Maybe at least he had not written them badly. Maybe he would never be able to write them any better, and that was why he had been putting off writing them. In any case, everything was unknown now."

"Just then, one night I reopened the Hemingway collected works [2] that I loved, and turned to his short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.” The protagonist is a writer who develops gangrene at the foot of Mount Kilimanjaro in Africa, cannot move, and waits to die while gazing at the snow-covered peak. The following are his hazy thoughts before death: Now he could never write the stories, the ones he had saved up to write when he could write them better. Maybe at least he had not written them badly. Maybe he would never be able to write them any better, and that was why he had been putting off writing them. In any case, everything was unknown now."

"The story goes, that in the 1920s colleagues of Hemingway’s bet him that he couldn’t tell a complete story in just six words. They had to pay up on the bet after they read what some consider to be his finest work. What he wrote was the heartrending: ‘For sale, baby shoes, never used.’"