For Whom The Bell Tolls

In 1624, the English poet John Donne wrote the immortal words, "No man is an island, entire of itself.  Each is a piece of the continent, a part of the main...Each man's death diminishes me, for I am involved in mankind.  Therefore, send not to know for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee."  

To me, Donne is saying that all human beings are part of one universal community, all related to each other, regardless of race, religion, or nationality.  

The novelist Ernest Hemingway chose the above phrase as the title of his greatest novel, first published this day back in 1940.  I consider it the finest I have ever read.

Ernest Hemingway was born in Oak Park, Illinois on July 21, 1899.  After high school, he went to work for the Kansas City Star as a reporter.  

In 1918, Hemingway volunteered as a Red Cross ambulance driver in Italy where World War I was raging.  It became the basis for his novel A Farewell to Arms.  

In 1926, Hemingway, while living in Paris, wrote The Sun Also Rises based on his experiences there with the post-war expatriate generation that didn't return home when the war ended.

In 1937, Hemingway went to Spain to cover the civil war for the North American Newspaper Alliance.  A group of right wing generals (fascists) from the Spanish Army had led a revolt to overthrow the moderate-liberal republican Spanish government.  

Hemingway was "at the Battle of the Ebro, the last Republican (anti-fascist) stand, and he was among the journalists who were the last to leave the battle as they crossed the river."   His experiences in Spain led Hemingway to write For Whom the Bell Tolls.  I believe he chose the title because he believed what happened in Spain was everyone's responsibility, not just Spaniards.

It is the story of Robert Jordan, an American with experience as a dynamiter who went to Spain to fight fascism.  He is assigned to blow up a bridge in the mountains near the city of Segovia just before an attack begins in order to limit the enemy's ability to launch a counter-attack.

Robert (or Roberto as he is known in Spain) is assisted in blowing the bridge by a group of pro-Republican guerrillas in the area.  In the group he meets Maria, "a young Spanish woman whose life had been shattered by her parents' execution and her own rape at the hands of the fascists at the outbreak of the war."  Over the four days and three nights of the story, Roberto and Maria fall in love.

My favorite lines in the book occur at dawn just before Roberto and the guerrillas will attempt to blow the bridge.  Roberto and Maria are alone and she asks, "How much time do we have?" meaning before they will have to part for their tasks at hand, he to do his job with the dynamite and she to secure the horses necessary for the group's escape after the mission.  His response is beautiful, "A lifetime."  It is what all of us have remaining in our lives.