Try to learn to breathe deeply, really to taste food when vou eat, and when you sleep, really to sleep. Try as much as possible to be wholly alive with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell. And when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough. – Ernest Hemingway
My favorite Hemingway novel is Islands in the Sea, which title I inevitably struggle to recall despite that favored status, because while there are boats and islands in the book, it is the human connections and loss thereof that stuck and stick with me. It’s a beautiful novel, one I intend to read again to see if it will still resonate with me as it did when I first turned its pages, during the 80s, after college, when I could read anything and anyone I wanted.
How joyful beyond words I was then at the sense of freedom I had: no deadlines, no papers to write, no required reading lists!, I decided to make my way through the “big writers” of the 20th century to date. Hemingway was one. Graham Greene (love all of his novels, pretty much), Bellow (favorite: Henderson the Rain King), Roth (nope, not for me and why does he hate women so much?), Heller (Catch-22 is a work of genius), Mailer (see Roth, above), and others including what I hadn’t yet read of Doris Lessing, Erica Jong, Judith Rossner, Germaine Greer, Margaret Atwood, Alice Walker, Anne Tyler, and many more.
Hemingway was my favorite of the “great male writers”, I think, perhaps because I related to a childhood spent in the woods, or tramping along streams looking for a good spot to fish. How I longed to fish when I was a kid; for some unknown reason, it seemed romantic and wonderful. Blame Huck Finn? Tom Sawyer? Neither of which I recall reading as a child (we must’ve seen the film, though), but the image of a child in summer armed with a stick and a worm, chilling by the water’s edge in a straw hat, bare-footed and wholly at ease… very compelling.
When I finally tried it for reals, however, as a teen, the bugs and boredom – I”m supposed to just stand here?!! – drove me mad. So much for the romance of fishing.
Hemingway committed suicide at a young age having lived big, per his words above – and having lived in the shadow of his father’s suicide when Ernest was 28. Hemingway’s grandfather also took his own life, as did 2 of his siblings, and his granddaughter. There is ample evidence that they inherited a predisposition toward depression, as well as suffering with an inherited metabolic disorder known as hemochromatosis, which is – simplified – an inability to properly metabolize iron, leading to overload in the major organs of the body.
Overloads of any kind are not good (everything in moderations, folks!), and illnesses we cannot recognize as such can destabilize our mental health. How many times in my life did I blame my inner person, my thoughts or actions past or present, on what turned out to be literal physical illnesses? Girl, you sick, not crazy!
Hemingway also suffered numerous concussions and other brain injuries during his WW1 service and go all out style of living, which undoubtably added falling dominos to the pile upon which he finally succumbed to death at just shy of 62 years old. Live hard and die young? It has its appeal, as does the idea of a still lovely corpse. But. As I said at a funeral I recently attended, I’m going to live ’til I’m 130, and all of my enemies are dead, dead, dead! And I meant it. That it won’t happen is okay too.
If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry. – Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms