Ernest Hemingway's Farewell to Arms

In his introduction to Men at War (1942), Ernest Hemingway wrote, “A writer’s job is to tell the truth.” In 1948, with much of his published work behind him, he wrote that [truth was] made of knowledge, experience, wine, bread, oil, salt, vinegar, bed, early mornings, nights, days, the sea, men, women, dogs, beloved motor cars, bicycles, hills and valleys, the appearance and disappearance of trains on straight and curved tracks.
This mostly practical and prosaic list reminds us that Hemingway was trained as a journalist to see and record objectively what is taking place in front of his eyes, but the cumulative effect of stringing together these particular words is as evocative as it is pragmatic. Hemingway was not a metaphysical thinker, nor was he religious in any formal sense, but his list of “truth things” manifests a profound reverence for the tangible details of daily life and the natural world. It is possible to trace this deepening reverence through his life and work as it would become increasingly self-defining and self-sustaining.