for whom the bell tolls

i've been reading for whom the bell tolls and it's almost embarrassing because every nincompoop approaches you and tells you what a good book it is and doesn't remember anything about it. they're right though. pilar in particular is a pretty fascinating character, she's so profoundly bitter and mean sometimes and i can't grasp it but i believe in it. it's impressive to call forth all this complexity and pain and those insoluble struggles for which there's only the hope one will stop thinking so much. robert jordan calls himself "a windy bastard" because of all that dangerous thinking and i've thought of that really often. 

it makes me want to be back in school, i want to write a paper about language in the book, about a story where the protagonist speaks and thinks in different languages and the occasional breach of that divide and the significance of all those "thees" and "thous." i was just reading a passage where a character gets a bit longwinded in denouncing another and everyone practically falls over in the agony of listening to him. not that it's boring or tedious, but that he's a bureaucracy in a man. he also just talks too much. there's a kind of fragility in the laconicism of the rest of them; there's a lot they don't talk about because they could die for something that doesn't even begin to exist. the "republic" is all the less real every time they invoke it for every good thing. one can't talk much about such things because losing faith would be so easy because they're so perilously unreal.

and many other things too