I was a junior in college when I first heard the closing line of Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises. A literature professor sat in front of a class of thirty students and said, " 'Isn't it pretty to think so?' . . . perhaps the greatest closing line in all of literature." I remember being more taken by his seemingly sweeping statement than by the sentence itself. A year later, I began work on my departmental honors thesis, "The Importance of Being Ernest: Hemingway's Truth in Fiction and His Fiction in Truth."

My research took me in directions I never dreamed. What was originally envisioned as strictly a literary analysis soon expanded to include elements of biography and psychoanalysis. The conflicted gender identification Hemingway experienced as a child connected beautifully with the continual struggle of his characters to conceptualize their own masculine identities. The surface simplicity of Hemingway’s language proved to be a mask for the text's underlying ambiguity. When the ninety-four-page thesis was completed, I felt as if I had a better understanding of that closing sentence and of Hemingway himself.

Mark Twain once said, "never let formal education get in the way of your learning." College professors serve as invaluable resources for their students, assisting them through their many intellectual endeavors. Yet the act of learning itself remains a highly individualized process prompted not only by a professor's guidance and encouragement, but also by a student's zealous curiosity and desire for knowledge. My thesis advisor, no doubt, could have easily explained to me the significance of that famous closing line, or the fundamentals of Hemingway's "esthetics of simplicity," or the particularities of Jake and Brett's relationship that had led up to the sentence, or the many reasons why the novel could not have ended any other way. Had he done that, I suppose I would have been satisfied with his answer. I might not have later devoted an entire year to the study of Hemingway and his work. I might not have fallen in love with late nights at the library, perusing the articles and essays of Hemingway pundits, contemplating their theories while formulating my own. Could six simple words have opened my eyes to so many things: the importance of inquiry, the excitement of research, the challenges of scholarly writing, and the immense joys upon its completion? I believe Jake Barnes said it best, "Isn't it pretty to think so?".