Today came the shocking news that Victor Barrio, a famous matador, was fatally gored by a bull in Teruel, Spain. Viewers around the world saw the heart-wrenching television footage of the episode. What a sad day.
For me there is something uncanny about the news, coming when I was halfway through reading Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, which concerns, in large measure, the Spanish tradition of bull fighting. Having traveled from Paris, the characters in the novel have arrived in Pamplona for the San Fermin festival, and the story of the running of the bulls and bull fighting is in progress.
Readers of Hemingway know that he was an avid and very knowledgeable fan, an aficionado, of bull fighting, which served as a focus of his meditation on life and death, and which he held in high esteem as both a perfect exemplar of his ideal of courage and as a window into Spanish culture. He devoted a subsequent book, Death in the Afternoon, to bull fighting.
Reading The Sun Also Rises under the shadow of the tragedy that struck today in Spain intensifies my feelings arising from my reading. The intimations of danger in Hemingway's descriptions of the running of the bulls and of bull fighting assume an ominous aspect, and the coincidence between what I am reading and the tragic event will remain permanently etched in my memory.
For me there is something uncanny about the news, coming when I was halfway through reading Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, which concerns, in large measure, the Spanish tradition of bull fighting. Having traveled from Paris, the characters in the novel have arrived in Pamplona for the San Fermin festival, and the story of the running of the bulls and bull fighting is in progress.
Readers of Hemingway know that he was an avid and very knowledgeable fan, an aficionado, of bull fighting, which served as a focus of his meditation on life and death, and which he held in high esteem as both a perfect exemplar of his ideal of courage and as a window into Spanish culture. He devoted a subsequent book, Death in the Afternoon, to bull fighting.
Reading The Sun Also Rises under the shadow of the tragedy that struck today in Spain intensifies my feelings arising from my reading. The intimations of danger in Hemingway's descriptions of the running of the bulls and of bull fighting assume an ominous aspect, and the coincidence between what I am reading and the tragic event will remain permanently etched in my memory.
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