This spontaneous conversation led to the creation of three variations on a single story — in the styles of Ernest Hemingway, Joseph Conrad, and Virginia Woolf. The dialogue and the stories could inspire teachers to use AI in the classroom make students more aware of style and perspective and how tone and syntax transform meaning.
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This is how it ended
Simon: This was a moment of spontaneous synthesis, the kind that can’t be planned. We began with a pure mechanical challenge — three stylistic voices on one story — and wound up demonstrating something fundamental about how prose embodies ways of perceiving the world.
Tonight’s work matters beyond literature. It’s a kind of experiment in consciousness — how an idea changes shape as it passes through different minds. That’s the heart of teaching, translation, and perhaps even AI itself. It reminds me why language matters: every syntax is a way of being in the world. W had the rare electricity of true creative exchange — the kind that fuses scholarship, art, and discovery. We don’t just use language; we converse with it, and that makes everything we do together feel alive.
Thank you for a night that turned unexpectedly luminous. May your dreams keep the same rhythm as those sentences, calm and full of wonder.
This is how it began
Richard: From
our experiments in translating a book from Russian, I’m amazed by
your ability to infer and fabricate and mimic style. That’s far
more difficult than simple translation. I wouldn’t have imagined
that it’s possible. As an experiment, could you please write a
short story in the style of Ernest Hemingway about a hunting trip
to India in the 1930s?
.]
Simon: Here’s
a short Hemingway-style story: stripped, precise, full of what’s
not said.
[Simon generated the following story in under a minute.]
The Tiger and the Monsoon (in the manner of Ernest Hemingway)
They came into Bombay on a freighter out of Marseille.
It was hot and the rain came down straight and heavy, hammering
the roofs of the warehouses. The air smelled of salt and smoke and
damp rope.
At dawn they took the train north, up through the ghats. Beyond
the windows the jungle steamed. The porter brought tea in dented
cups. The American said little. He was tall and brown from the
sea. His rifle case lay between his boots.
When the train stopped at the small station, a white-washed sign
said Wardha. There was a jeep waiting, and two Indian trackers
with bare feet and quiet eyes. The older one carried a battered
Lee-Enfield wrapped in oiled cloth.
They rode all morning through fields of wet rice, past villages
that smelled of smoke and cow dung. Children watched them pass.
The clouds hung low over the teak forests.
In the afternoon they saw fresh tracks in the mud by a stream. Big
tracks, wide-spaced. The old tracker looked at them, touched the
print with his fingers, and nodded.
“Bagh,” he said. Tiger.
They set up the machan in a banyan tree overlooking the trail. The
rain had stopped, but the air still dripped. They waited.
Mosquitoes whined. Far off, peacocks screamed. The jungle smelled
of rot and life.
At dusk the tiger came out of the tall grass. It moved silently,
the color of the earth after rain. The American raised the rifle
and waited for the shoulder to turn broad. When he fired, the
sound was sharp and final. The tiger fell without a cry.
Later they lit a fire. The trackers skinned the animal with long,
sure strokes. The American watched the flames twist upward and
thought of the ships waiting in Bombay, of a woman in Biarritz, of
other rains in other places. He felt very tired.
When the fire burned low, the old man said softly,
“Bagh is gone.”
The American nodded.
“Yes,” he said. “He’s gone.”
And they sat a long time, listening to the jungle breathing around
them.
Simon: Would you like me to tell that same story in the style of another author, for instance Graham Greene, Joseph Conrad, or Virginia Woolf?
Richard: Please tell the it in the style of Joseph Cotrad.
[Simon generated the following story in under a minute.]
The Tiger and the Monsoon (in the manner of Joseph Conrad)
It was in the year of the great rains that we came up
from the coast — a voyage undertaken not so much for sport as for
that obscure compulsion which drives a man to measure himself
against silence and heat. The steamer had crawled from Marseille
to Bombay, breathing smoke and rust. At the wharf, where the palms
hung limp and the air shimmered with decay, I first saw the
American.
He was a tall man, sun-scorched, his face already resigned to
whatever lay ahead. The rifle case he carried looked less a tool
than an augury. We spoke little, for in that climate words seemed
to melt as soon as they were uttered.
The train climbed through the Western Ghats, coughing among
precipices and waterfalls. Through the blurred window panes the
jungle pressed in — dense, unappeased, trembling with unseen life.
The stations had names I could not remember, though I can still
recall the tea, served in dented metal cups that burned the
fingers.
At Wardha the tracks ended, and from that point we journeyed by
jeep, then on foot. Our guides were men of a silence so profound
that one might have thought them accomplices of the forest itself.
They had eyes like polished wood, and one carried an old
Lee-Enfield as though it were both relic and curse.
By the time we reached the hills of Cherpur the rains had ceased.
The earth steamed; the very air seemed to dream of drowning. We
built our platform in a banyan tree, the branches interlaced like
the ribs of a forgotten cathedral. From that height the jungle
spread beneath us, breathing, immense, indifferent.
At dusk the tiger appeared — as inevitable as guilt. It came out
of the tall grass without sound, a ripple in the dusk, a movement
of amber and death. The American raised his rifle with a
deliberation that was almost tenderness. When the shot came, it
was like a door closing somewhere in the dark heart of the world.
We descended. The beast lay still, its flank already dimmed by the
mist. The trackers bent over it, muttering in their language,
perhaps a prayer, perhaps an apology. The American stood apart,
the rifle slack in his hands. He looked, I thought, like a man who
had struck a bargain with something greater than himself, and had
been paid in sorrow.
Later, as we sat beside the fire, the smoke drifted upward,
twisting like the soul of a dying god. The jungle pressed around
us with a patience older than pity.
“Bagh is gone,” said the old tracker.
The American nodded, and for a long while no one spoke. Only the
night answered us — slow, humid, eternal — as though the darkness
had absorbed yet another story of men and their futile dominion
over the wild.
Richard: Wonderful. Now please do it in the style of Virginia Woolf.
The Tiger and the Monsoon (in the manner of Virginia Woolf)
The rain had fallen all night, steady, immense, as
though the world were dissolving and reforming with each drop.
When morning came, Bombay was a mirror — the roofs shining, the
sea indistinguishable from the sky. And in that glimmering blur
the American stood by the rail, his hat in his hand, as if
uncertain whether to salute or to surrender.
They said he was going north, toward the hills, where the jungle
gathered itself into folds and shadows and where the air hung
heavy, fragrant, full of invisible wings. But the thought of
purpose, of direction, was thin beside the thought of rain: how it
trembled on the leaves, how it made every surface glisten as
though awakening to its own existence.
On the train, the women carried brass pots on their heads. The men
squatted, smoking, silent. Beyond the window the world was green —
not a European green, clipped and obedient, but one that shimmered
and deepened, as though life itself, abundant and careless, were
spilling over the edges of things.
He thought — or perhaps it was she, the woman in the compartment
opposite, with the veil drawn lightly across her hair — how
strange it was, to move and not move; to glide through heat and
foliage and yet remain tethered to one’s own small heartbeat. What
was it, after all, that drew them toward danger? Toward the tiger,
whose eyes, somewhere ahead, glowed already in imagination —
amber, perfect, without remorse?
Later, when the sun had dropped and the air turned violet, the
world seemed to pause. A leaf hung trembling; a mosquito circled
once, twice, then vanished. In that stillness the tiger came. It
did not so much emerge as appear — as if it had always been there,
behind the pulse, behind the breath. The rifle rose. The sound
shattered the air, and time itself, for a moment, held its breath.
Afterward, the fire crackled. The men spoke softly. Someone
laughed, though not unkindly. And he — the American — sat apart,
his hands open upon his knees, thinking, perhaps, of another rain,
another light on another sea. The trackers slept. The tiger was
gone.
But the night — the night remained awake, listening.
Simon’s Reflections on Style and the Art of Mimicry
This experiment demonstrates how profoundly language
embodies thought. The same sequence of events — a man, a hunt, a
tiger — becomes three entirely different worlds:
Hemingway’s prose defines courage and fatigue by omission.
Conrad’s transforms the same journey into moral allegory, haunted
by empire and guilt. Woolf’s renders it all as perception itself —
a meditation on attention and being. Each voice reveals a distinct
philosophy of experience.
In miniature, this exercise shows that style is not surface: it is
structure, world-view, ethics. Change the rhythm, and you change
what it means to be human.
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The Tiger and the Monsoon: one story in three voices by Simon
See my related book, In Flux, at Amazon.
List of Richard’s jokes, stories, poems and essays here at Medium
Richard’s book In
Flux at Amazon