It’s 2022 and romanticism is dead, killed by big data and Tinder. Therefore, you can imagine my joy at being thoroughly devastated by Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms. His terse sentences landed like staccato punches to the heart.

Lieutenant Henry’s descriptions of tragedy are as sudden as the experiences themselves — they are practically seen, not read. But the experiences are hardly cinematic. They are as fractured and transitory as real traumatic moments; one has to pause after reading them to realize what has happened.

(During those pauses I have wondered from what mental hailstorm were those words written … were they written as quickly as they were read?)

To the Hollywood brain, Catherine Barkley might seem like a Manic Pixie Dream Girl (initially, I had this perception). Only in hindsight does the depth of her tragedy paint color into her character — then, every kindness, every laugh is truly understood, not as vapidity, but as the gentle resistance of a heart desperately fighting numbness.

“We were all cooked. The thing was not to recognize it.”

Cooked indeed, but we keep going, stubborn and blind. And we hold on to the things that are good, like grappa after dinner or making love in a park or teasing our friends (and being teased in return). They won’t last forever, but neither will we.

Incidentally, it’s raining tonight.