How do we dispel the...
Illustration
How do we dispel the spirits that possess us? Ernest Hemingway, renowned American author, had an unrequited love for Agnes von Kurowsky, the nurse who cared for him in Milan when he was wounded in the leg during World War I. After a letter she wrote informing him of her love for another, he in turn wrote to a friend later, "I set out to cauterize out her memory and I burnt it out with a course of booze and other women and now it's gone." But, perhaps not. In his 1929 classic Farewell to Arms, there is a nurse, the beautiful, young Catherine Barkley, who treats and falls in love with an American soldier in an Italian hospital. The spirit of Agnes had not entirely been "cauterized out."
