TSAR #2

While the experience of war is unprecedented, and only by veterans can it be truly understood, it is a universal constant. Chaos, disordered energy, which provides a firm opposition to the cosmos, being that neither is able to exist independently, is at the root of conflict. War is an misplaced outlet for human agression, a competition for supremacy and ultimately evolutionary advantage, a cry for reconciliation, ad infinitum. War is in everything, and everything is in war, There has never been, and likely will never be world peace, and this is the true state of nature. Destructive as it is, war has the regenerative ability to reunite, reevaluate, and rebuild broken structures. Cruel as it is, war is the flame which consumes the phoenix before its rebirth.

I can’t say for sure whether I agree with William Adair’s observations about the allusions to WWI via food related scenography. Thorough and well argued, I don’t hesitate to buy his argument. However, seeing that the novel takes place in post war Europe, mid 1920’s, Hemingway having been a veteran himself, it is not a stretch nor a surprise that Adair was able to identify these hidden allusions to war in the writing, thus posing the question: what does that implicate?

In coupling food with war allusions, Hemingway is drawing a comparison between food and war; its primal nature, its universality. Foods are the raw materials which fuel life on earth, an organic material taken from nature, to provide energy to other organic material. Food is an embodiment of the cycle of life — no food has the intention of being food, and is not called food until it is killed and eaten, just as soldiers are called war casualties when deceased.

A carnivorous entity which feeds on human spirit, and in taking millions of lives and leaving them to rot with the rest of the destroyed, war, too, is a sentient being, with a voracious appetite and violent intent to keep itself alive. It seems counterintuitive, knowing the full extent of it’s damages, that we would have continued to provoke and and honor war. So, either this destructive force is essentially beneficial, even in the face of its deleterious effects, or it is forced upon us, by Mars, or by habit.