Yesterday, in one of my grumpier moments, I felt a little weary of having to constantly generate meaning in what I do as an academic. I went to a pub with a friend and yelled about it over a pint (not quite unconsciously preparing to be among Jake and company again). On a much smaller scale (and probably a different kind altogether) than people in the wake of something like the war or the loss of an entire cultural meta-narrative, I questioned my own sense of “value” in our work and sensed the weight of its constant incompletion.

Then I went home and read Chapter XIV of The Sun Also Rises. It’s a beautiful chapter, but this paragraph that follows Jake’s lamentation of “fine philosophies” and the constant expenditure wrapped up in the effort to keep existing seems to sum up so much of his experience in the story and of the larger experience of the Lost Generation/twentieth century:

“Perhaps that wasn’t true, though. Perhaps as you went along you did learn something. I did not care what it was all about. All I wanted to know was how to live in it. Maybe if you found out how to live in it you learned from that what it was all about” (153).

Throughout the novel, Jake alternates between glimpses of “good times,” detached observations, and existential despair. He reads to pass the time. He drinks to pass the conversation. Although his further move into isolation in Book III troubles me (the shift from dialogue to conversation in monologue form is especially striking), this chapter seems like an important turning point that still lingers with Jake later on some level. He reads an old book that “seemed quite new” (152) and knows that reading will help the drunk “feeling…pass.” He falls into painful reverie about Brett and sends her off to hell again, then reflects on the consequences of their thwarted relationship. He reels at the “lot of bilge [he] could think up at night” (153). He thinks about the different effects of different languages. He realizes that “remembering” something would make it “seem as though it had really happened to me” (154); then he “would always have it.” And then he goes to sleep. This idea of personal (re)memories defining true reality seems simultaneously hopeful and hopeless, an idea that all we ever keep are things that are dead in the past—and yet we still get to keep them “always,” and it makes them “seem new.”

The next morning, on the last paragraph of 155, he makes observations about everyone in the party and then describes his trip to church with Brett, how confession “would be in a language she did not know” (155). This paragraph moves me because Jake is outlining the ways that each of them are trying to live in their circumstances; they’re inextricably bound together but still stuck in their own inviolable selves. Before the fiesta, though, there’s a strange peace here: “You could not be upset about anything on a day like that” (156). Not much ever changes, but everything is different after the war. And the only way to live in a world like that is to just keep going each day.