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The World Breaks Everyone
But that isn’t the end of the story
A Farewell to Arms was written by Ernest Hemingway. It is loosely based on his own experience serving in the Italian campaign during the First World War. However, unlike his novel The Sun Also Rises, it is not autobiographical.
The novel is deeply moving and, in the end, tragic.
There is a line in the novel which touched my heart deeply:
The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong in the broken places.
I feel this in my own life due to the ways the world has broken me. Most recently it’s been through my fight with metastatic cancer. I was given 6 months to live and so now, 20 months later, every day fills me with gratitude. That is a strength I could not have if I had not been broken.
I’ve been broken repeatedly, though, it seems, throughout my life.
I’ve fallen over and over. Each time I get up, I am not sure I will heal. But the parts that broke end up being stronger.
There is an old Simon and Garfunkle song, The Boxer. The last stanza says:
In the clearing stands a boxer
And a fighter by his trade
And he carries the reminders
Of every glove that laid him down
Or cut him till he cried out
In his anger and his shame
“I am…
