A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway:
“In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels.”
I spent a minute first trying to visualize it, then I was stumped on how the pebbles and boulders in the river bed were dry if the river bed implies being submerged under water. Can someone explain what I’m missing? This happens to me really often when I read, when seemingly basic writing doesn’t make sense to me and I spend a long time trying to make it make sense in my head. It has made reading for me arduous and a chore and I’ve unfortunately been falling out of love with it. I’ve been coming to terms that I most likely have ADHD and I think this might be a symptom of that. I hope that doesn’t mean I’ll never be able to enjoy books again. Has anyone ever dealt with something like this?
by notcoolkid01
5 Comments
I would interpret it as the river not being as wide as it can be, leaving some of the bed exposed. This happens in places where there are periods of little rain in the summer.
As for how to not get caught up on little details, I really don’t have an answer to that, unfortunately. Maybe, if something doesn’t make sense to you, run the sentence/paragraph by a friend or family member and see what they make of it?
Riverbed includes all the area where a river would be at its highest point. So, the riverbed is not always completely underwater, as water levels in rivers are often seasonal. So water could still be flowing in the middle, while on the outside, the rocks are dry.
The way I envision this, the pebbles and boulders are on the edges of the river bed (in the late summer, rivers often shrink down and the center is where the water is flowing), hot and dry in the sun. Or they could just be sticking up out of the water.
Like this:
[https://thumbs.dreamstime.com/b/ozzy-river-bed-20546486.jpg](https://thumbs.dreamstime.com/b/ozzy-river-bed-20546486.jpg)
[https://thumbs.dreamstime.com/b/river-bed-tranquil-flowing-forest-victoria-australia-42875564.jpg](https://thumbs.dreamstime.com/b/river-bed-tranquil-flowing-forest-victoria-australia-42875564.jpg)
The boulders and pebbles were above the water— think a rocky small river.
I skip descriptions— my brain doesn’t create them and overthinking makes me lose interest. So I skip stuff like that.
People have already explained the meaning of that line so I won’t, but I’m just curious, do you really care that much about description of setting in a book? I would’ve barely read that sentence, much less analyzed what it really meant. In fact I did read that book and I don’t remember that part at all because I didn’t pay attention to it. Do you like to picture the setting as you read? I tend to just picture a place I’ve seen in real life that vaguely matches but I think authors would like your way better