I can't say that I have read Naguib Mahfouz, but I want to. I want to read about his reverence for the dervish Umm Khulthum. I do not know Khalil Gibran; I read him only a few times, ever so briefly, as a teenager. But I wish to read Gibran more closely now, not for all the rage of rediscovery but to understand his meter. This renewed interest has led me to ask, as others have asked before me, did not Hemingway spoil us for choice with his writing style so much so that almost everyone his writing touches is influenced by it? And so, in my search for writing styles close to Hemingway's, I have come across a few authors who, through their essays and stories, have deeply settled into that uncharted dark blue corner of human fragility. Perhaps none so acutely as Orhan Pamuk and Joan Didion. It's with no small measure of commitment that I mention these two names here. Let me demonstrate what I mean. Orhan Pamuk writes, 'To be happy I must have my daily dose of literature. In this I am no different from the patient who must take their daily spoon of medicine everyday. When I learned as a child that diabetics needed an injection every day, I felt bad for them as anyone might. I may have thought of them as half dead...'

He continues in this vein, 'When we meet great writers on the street, we treat them as dead (ghosts), not quite believing our eyes, that they are there. A few brave souls do approach them. Sometimes I remind myself that even writers will die soon. And once they are dead, the books that are their legacy will be even more cherished in our hearts...' This fascination with mortality then is constantly creeping into the sentence, in many essayists' works, along with the fear of the mediocre. Here again he writes, 'Let me explain what I feel on a day that I have not written well. I am unable to lose myself in a book. First the world changes before my eyes; it becomes unbearable, those who know me can see it happening to me. My daughter can tell when I haven't written that day. From the abject hopelessness on my face in the evening. I would like to hide this from her, but I cannot.

During these dark days, I feel as if there is no line between life and death. I don't want to speak to anyone. Just as well maybe, since no one desires to speak to me too when I am in this state...

Now compare this with the opening passages of Hemmingway's A farewell to arms, which Didion alludes to in her essay Last Words. Didion was criticizing the posthumous publication of Hemingway's unfinished writing. Arguing that it violated his right over his precise control over his words. This was not the case in posthumous publications, as the author is usually absent from any edits to their work. Didion points this out by looking at his work in the following manner.

Hemingway writes, 'In the late summer of those years we lived 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 swifly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees were dusty, and the leaves fell early that year, and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and the leaves stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterwards the road bare and white except for the leaves.

Didion then writes about this passage. 'So goes the famous first paragraph of Ernest Hemingway's A farewell to arms, which I was moved to reread by the recent announcement that what was said to be his last novel would be published posthumously next year. The paragraph was published in 1929. Four deceptively simple sentences, 126 words, the arrangement of which remains as mysterious and thrilling to me as when I first read them, at twelve or thirteen, and imagined that if I studied them closely enough and I practiced hard enough I might one day arrange such 126 words myself. Only one of the words has three syllables. Twenty-two have two. The other 103 have one. Twenty-four of the words are 'the', fifteen are 'and'. There are four commas. The liturgical cadence of the paragraph derives in part from the placement of the commas (their presence in the second and fourth sentences, their absence in the first and third), but also from that repetition of 'the' and of 'and', creating a rhythm so pronounced that the omission of 'the' before the word 'leaves' in the fourth sentence casts exactly what it was meant to cast, a chill, a premonition, a foreshadowing of the story to come, the awareness that the author has already shifted his attention from the late summer to a darker season. Orhan Pamuk dwells on dark seasons too. The despondency that comes with being lost in literature. That by not being able to write well- and not being able to criticise ones own work as good or bad makes the author suffer in a silent way that others rarely see. Hemingway, who wrote so profusely every day of his life, lost his ability to write so abruptly that he fell into deep despair, leading him to take his own life. But in the Old man and the Sea, its as if Hemmingway is chiding himself for being this weak in character. In the story, aging, dying, and death are metaphors themselves for growing weak, enduring and rising above the human condition. Santiago, constantly facing the reality of his declining strength, views his own struggle with being unsuccessful as a profound test of his dignity and grace under pressure.

There is another writer, who I must mention, who deals with death and despair differently and yet manages to touch on the humanness of his subjects. Stephen King's treatment of his characters is sublime, as David Perell notes. 'It's hard to find realism in the world of fantasy or science fiction, but this is what King does. He can humanize more acutely; when horrific inhuman things begin to occur in the story, the characters he involves become sharper and more genuine, and the unreality becomes authentic.'

King writes, 'No one can tell what goes on in between the person you were and the person you've become. No one can chart the blue and lonely section of that hell. There are no maps of change. You just come out the other side - or you don't.'

The inescapable and often arresting fear of the word written on the page and then lived, or unlived, by the author forms such a desperate bond, and yet touches the sensitivities of others, that this change in life and the struggles are lived much deeper than any film or screen can manage to arrest our minds, rather than read those words. Before we conclude lets mention one more writer who manages to completely arrest us with his writing, often as a voice that overcomes generations. Haruki Murakami creates and weaves a world that is altogether poignant and painfully deliberate at times. His words strike readers as if they live the story. Watanabe a 37 year old man recounts the memoirs of his student days in Tokyo when he fell in love with his best friend Kazuki's former girlfriend Naoko. The enduring theme of unrequited love in Murakami's novel moves from infatuation to human loss and suffering and eventual resignation, a form that was once Hemingway's forte, but has since been carried screaming into our generation by writers like Murakami.

'Naoko was unusually talkative that night. She told me about her school, her childhood, her family. Each episode was a long one, done with the painstaking detail of a miniature. I was amazed at her memory, but as I sat listening, it began to dawn on me that there was something wrong with the way she was telling these stories. Something warped. Each tale had its own internal logic, but the link from one to the next was odd. Before you knew it, story A had turned into story B contained in A, then came C from something in B with no end in sight. '

Isn't it striking that Murakami mentions this so casually, but it's something that he does constantly in his writing. And so in our search for Hemingway, at this point, we come to an abrupt stop. Arrested by the words of Murakami.