March 6, 2013

The song "A Rose for Emily," by The Zombies, may not be directly about Faulkner's short story, but it is definitely loosely based on the plot. A girl named Emily, seeing lovers all around her, but not one for herself. Faulkner made darkly clear the miserly attempts at love, made by a Miss Emily Grierson. In short, Miss Emily killed a man by the name of Homer Barron and left him in a bed upstairs, simply so that she could sleep next to him – quite possibly every night. While this seems outrageously crazy to current society, in all actuality, she just wanted someone to love... Homer Barron just happened to be that person, in the creepiest way possible.
Ernest Hemingway's "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" wasn't exactly my type of read. I love Hemingway's use of the outdoors in his stories and such, but "SoK" just simply didn't keep me entertained. However, I did enjoy the fact that Harry never told his wife Helen that he didn't love her before he died, even though he might have been rather ill-tempered and down in the dumps at the time.
When I first began to read John Cheever's "The Swimmer," I must say, I thought it was kind of silly. The unrealistic idea – not to mention pointless – that a man, Neddy Merrill, would swim across all the pools of his neighbors to get back to his house? I was rather confused. But then it clicked. He saw his life passing in this sort of dream. He realized all of the relationships that he had left unattended to, the most serious of which was with his wife, who had left the house by the time he got there.
Recently, my mother joined Facebook, and found all of her old high school friends. I also recently graduated high school, and separated from all of my high school classmates. Over the past year or so, my mom has been encouraging me to keep in touch with not only those classmates, but everyone that seems like they would prove to be beneficial (not by use, but by friendship) in my life. I didn't take her seriously, seeing as how I didn't care much for my classmates anyway. Plus, it's difficult to keep up with so many people all the time. It requires extra time and energy out of your day. However, this short story, "The Swimmer," put the importance of mending relationships and keeping in touch with old friends into perspective for me. It made me realize that not only is it important to keep those friends, but life will pass seemingly too quick to ever get back in touch with them, as difficult as it would be years down the road.