"That was where he stopped in the hunt that morning. He knew he did not have it right yet."

 

That was where he stopped in the hunt that morning. He knew he did not have it right yet. He had not gotten the enormity of the skull...He had not made the great length of the whitened bones nor how the elephant's tracks had moved around the scene of the killing and how following them he had been able to see the elephant as he had moved and then had been able to see what the elephant had seen. He had not gotten the great width of the one elephant trail..nor the worn smooth rubbing trees...He had not made the light in the forest where the trees came together at their tops and he had not clarified certain things that he must make as they were then, not as he recalled them now. ...Tiredness brought the beginning of understanding. The understanding was beginning and he was realizing it as he wrote. But the dreadful true understanding was all to come and he must not show it by arbitrary statements of rhetoric but by remembering the actual things that had brought it. The Garden of Eden, 182.

Hemingway writing on Hemingway writing.