A Hemingway kind of love

I thought it appropriate to read some Ernest Hemingway while we were in Tanzania. Along with The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories, I also read Green Hills of Africa, a work of non-fiction Hemingway penned based on a hunting expedition he personally experienced in Northern Tanzania in 1933.










While reading the latter work, I realized I love Africa the way Hemingway loved Africa (minus the hunting part of course!)  In it he wrote,

"Now, looking out the tunnel of trees over the ravine at the sky with white clouds moving across in the wind, I loved the country so that I was happy as you are after you have been with a woman that you really love, when, empty, you feel it welling up again and there it is and you can never have it all and yet what there is, now, you can have, and you want more and more, to have, and be, and live in, to possess now again for always, for that long, sudden-ended always; making time stand still, sometimes so very still that afterwards you wait to hear it move, and it is slow in starting. But you are not alone, because if you have ever really loved her happy and untragic, she loves you always; no matter whom she loves nor where she goes she loves you more. So if you have loved some woman and some country you are very fortunate and, if you die afterwards it makes no difference. Now, being in Africa, I was hungry for more of it, the changes of the seasons, the rains with no need to travel, the discomforts that you paid to make it real, the names of the trees, of the small animals, and all the birds, to know the language and have time to be in it and to move slowly."

Yeah, that's the way I love Africa. I am going to miss it when we go ...