Been reading some of Hemingway’s letters in this month’s Vanity Fair. He is one of my favorite writers, and one who deeply influenced me.
I remember reading the Nick Adams stories and longing for a life in the wild. I remember Nick’s sandwiches, onion and butter wrapped in wax paper in his pocket, waiting to be eaten by the side of a stream. And nothing seemed as delicious to me as that.
Looking back I see how much of my life I modeled on this writer, who became a favorite of mine because he was my father’s favorite. Just like I adopted Black Raspberry ice cream, because my father loved it.
In my life I’ve learned to hunt and hike and camp. To sit quietly by a river. To love deeply and to think it simple, while knowing truly how complex it is. I’ve learned to love the short, declarative sentence, and to love the word ‘and.’ To love the repetitive, poetic telling of a story in lines that are bold and clean, and which, together, add up to a nuanced and detailed interior space.
I’ve loved Papa’s courage. Both Hemingway’s and my father’s. I’ve loved his boldness and his passion. And his simple egoic desire for revenge, which he took out in his fiction on those who dismayed him in his life.
I don’t love Papa’s early death. Not Hemingway’s, nor my father’s. I don’t like missing what stories might have been. What memories left unmade. What aisles gone unwalked.
But since, as Einstein said, time is not a line, but a point, truly, there is no missing unless the missing is a joy to feel, a longing in the heart, a yearning toward, like a flower leaning upward to the sun. Missing, like sadness, like grief, is just another way to feel alive. Like loving. Like playing madly in the woods on wooden skies in deepest snow. I took that too from Hemingway. My love of winter, and the winter woods. My love of Spanish and unrequited love. My love of life itself – lived brashly, fully, exultantly.
