Gentry Thomason – författare

From age to age human nature and human reality are ever the same. We live in an imperfect world; we are flawed creatures. The glory of being alive in a beautiful world is compromised by the complexities of existence and the proclivities to which we are all vulnerable.Greek myths advise us of these truths; contemporary realities continually inform us of our checkered condition. Managing one’s fortuity and personal growth is an endless challenge that demands eternal vigilance and a careful eye to one’s desired prosperity. Living one’s inner life in an extraverted world can make for tricky business. Life is a struggle; roadblocks and obstacles surround us. We are all in this together. We choose, individually, to make a heaven of this hell or a hell of this heaven. Along the way, we inevitably encounter and experience a baseline of human roguery that is our natural inheritance. All are born into original sin. Describing that condition and contemplating how to escape its circumstance is a preoccupation of Rogues’ Gallery. Recognizing such truths is a fi rst step on the road to recovery and to wholeness, wholesomeness, and balanced well-being.

Are you comfortable living on the surface of life, or do you strive to explore life’s enigmatic deeper core? Are you conscious of the possible immense insignificance of life when viewed as a tiny splinter in the fabric of a multi-universe some astrophysicists speak of? Can that realization be grounded in an existential sound sense that might make for communal coherence?How do you discover truth? Does a probing deep introspection help? How important is it to understand one’s Self? How severely do our existential confinements restrict our ability to grasp enlarging awareness? Is higher honesty something mankind is capable of?Exercising our God-given capacity for Reason may be the only outlet available to us for escaping the indited cloisters and confinements of our human condition. Becoming a pioneer in the forest of doubt may be the only way to attain to a newer vision of human reality.

Nick Adams was Ernest Hemingway's first major literary protagonist. In some twenty stories and two vignettes Hemingway created a character that was in many respects a product of his own youth. In their published order those stories tell the story of Nick Adams as he develops in a world very like to real one. The character's metamorphosis is a series of encounters with the harsh and pleasurable realities of life. Nick Adams grows and moves in a realistic world where events take place in fortuitous, if not gratuitous, fashion. Together his experiences suggest a figure of man in the modern age.Hemingway's mode of writing with his character was characterological: Nick's development traces from the feeling, reacting subject he is in the early stories to the perceiver and doer he is in the later stories. While Hemingway doesn't create a continuous chronology (age wise) for his character, he frequently shifted the narrative point of view to Nick, thereby implying his continued characterological growth. The senses of renewal and acquisition of a complex consciousness in Nick disclose Hemingway's energetic mode of writing.Hemingway wrote the Nick Adams stories over a ten year period. His fashioning of Nick Adams follows a concave emotive curve. The world and the experiences of Nick Adams are coordinates of Hemingway's realism which engages a network of motifs, images and symbols. The themes of loss and death are juxtaposed in the later stories with elements of irony, satire and comedy. Hemingway's use of image and technique reveal a complex vision of man and world that is intricately woven throughout the stories. The overarching ethos of the Nick Adams stories is one of dying and rebirth.