Author: Loren

The Old Man

There are few novels I identify with more than Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. On the simplest level, I like the fishing story itself. Santiago knows how to fish well, knows the rituals that should accompany fishing. We first meet Santiago in the midst of a string of bad luck, a string every fisherman has endured. Every fisherman worthy of his bait bucket also wants to catch “the big one,” the one that will truly show how good a fisherman you really are. It is what fisherman tales are made of.

More than that, though, I identify with the stoical philosophy that underlies Santiago’s actions. If I were put in his situation, I would hope that I would be strong enough to do exactly what he does.

Although the plot of this novella is remarkably simple and clear, the meaning of the story is anything but simple. Although realistically portrayed, Santiago seems more mythic and symbolic than realistic. Perhaps it is because we don’t see his flaws the way we see flaws in Hemingway’s characters in other works. Maybe Santiago is the embodiment of Hemingway’s Code without the all too human flaws that accompany most of his characters. In many ways The Old Man and the Sea seems more like an extended poem or a fable than a novel.

When we first meet Santiago, though, he seems an unlikely hero. Looking at his small boat, the reader sees that “the sail was patched with flour sacks and, furled, it looked like the flag of permanent defeat.” Santiago himself seems to reflect the state of his boat: “His shirt had been patched so many times that it was like the sail and the patches were faded to many different shades by the sun.” Perhaps if we saw him in the distance like this, we would merely feel sorry, sorry that such an old man still had to set out to sea to earn his living, sorry that there wasn’t someone to take care of him and do his fishing for him. Maybe if we had true empathy we would even feel sorry for him the same way he feels sorry for the small birds he later meets at sea:

He was sorry for the birds, especially the small delicate dark terns that were always flying and looking and almost never finding, and he thought, the birds have a harder life than we do except for the-robber birds and the heavy strong ones. Why did they make birds so delicate and fine as those sea swallows when the ocean can be so cruel?

Santiago, in his quest to catch the big one, is like the small tern. His small sailboat, seen from a distance, must very much resemble a small bird hovering over the ocean. And the human soul, ever in search of life’s true meaning, is surely buffeted as roughly as any bird crossing the ocean.

If we judged Santiago by his boat’s appearance or by his own appearance, however, we would be very mistaken. Only by looking deeper, by looking into his very soul would we truly be able to measure this man. Hemingway reveal Santiago’s true strength by describing his eyes, the proverbial window into the soul, “ Everything about him was old except his eyes and they were the same color as the sea and were cheerful and undefeated.”

It is, perhaps, only Santiago’s courage that saves him. Obviously life has turned against him. The boy who has accompanied him while fishing for years has been forced by his parents to leave Santiago’s boat because Santiago is “unlucky.” How else to explain why such an accomplished fisherman has gone 85 days without a catch, unless one believes in the Fates? When met by such misfortune, courage remains the last bastion against total defeat.

Santiago’s courage is revealed in his dreams of the lions he had seen when he had sailed to Africa as a young man:

He no longer dreamed of storms, nor of women, nor of great occurrences, nor of great fish, nor fights, nor contests of strength, nor of his wife. He only dreamed of places now and of the lions on the beach. They played like young cats in the dusk and he loved them as he loved the boy. He never dreamed about the boy.

All of the things he no “longer dreamed of” have been important in his life, but they are merely memories of the past, and, though memories of past victories or of past loves may comfort you in old age, alone, they cannot sustain you. Only the courage to face today’s challenges can help us prevail.

Repeatedly in the story Santiago turns to the great DiMaggio for inspiration. In the beginning this seems to be true merely because DiMaggio’s father was a fisherman, “I would like to take the great DiMaggio fishing," the old man said. "They say his father was a fisherman. Maybe he was as poor as we are and would understand." But there is a lot more to the connection than this. First of all, DiMaggio plays for the Yankees, the greatest team in baseball. When he had won the arm-wrestling tournament, Santiago had been called The Champion, and DiMaggio is the champion of baseball.

Perhaps more importantly, Santiago identifies DiMaggio with perfectionism, “ But I must have confidence and I must be worthy of the great DiMaggio who does all things perfectly even with the pain of the bone spur in his heel.” Doing things “correctly,” “the right way” or “with precision” is the essence of Hemingway’s Code. The most obvious example of Santiago’s precision is the way he maintains his fishing lines:

He looked down into the water and watched the lines that went straight down into the dark of the water. He kept them straighter than anyone did, so that at each level in the darkness of the stream there would be a bait waiting exactly where he wished it to be for any fish that swam there. Others let them drift with the current and sometimes they were at sixty fathoms when the fishermen thought they were at a hundred.

But, he thought, I keep them with precision. Only I have no luck any more. But who knows? Maybe today. Every day is a new day. It is better to be lucky. But I would rather be exact.

Most people at this point would prefer luck because it brings quicker results, but Santiago knows instinctively that doing the “right thing” is the only way to win a true victory, a victory that can stand up to Death itself.

Adrift without an Outline

I finished reading Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea yesterday and I’ve been talking about it or thinking about it ever since. Despite devoting an unusually large amount of time to thinking about the book, though, I still don’t have anything written so far.

Now, I’m nearly as concerned with why I am suffering writer’s block as I am with why I can’t write anything about this particular book. After all, I use to consider graduate classes in English pure entertainment and stopped taking them only because I felt guilty about spending money that should have been going into my kids’ college fund, or later, after the divorce, because I needed the money to eat on a regular basis.

One possible reason for the writer’s block is that I discussed the book with Leslie, and she let me know in no uncertain terms that she didn’t like Hemingway. This immediately reminded me of some nasty graduate class "discussions" where women just plain went after Hemingway, and after the professor, because of Hemingway’s obvious sexism and disdain for women, particularly his mother who he apparently blamed for his father’s death. Now, I’m beginning to wonder if this isn’t going to turn into one of those nasty Mars/Venus things.

It’s quite obvious, after all, that Hemingway’s philosophy could be classified as a "jock" philosophy. His references to DiMaggio and to the arm-wrestling championship are not unintentional. His code is the kind of code that you were likely to learn while competing in sports, and it is definitely the kind of mentality you need to survive in combat. In my opinion, though, that doesn’t mean that it can’t serve as a philosophy for life in general, and that’s certainly what Hemingway intended.

Another possible explanation of the writer’s block is simply that this book means more to me than I originally thought. There were poems that I would never teach in high school because they meant too much to me to have them put down by students. Or, they just meant so much that I wasn’t willing to try to explain them over and over again to students. You can ruin any work of art if you talk about it too much.

Hearing favorite works openly criticized or attacked can be painful. Perhaps Hemingway’s philosophy is very close to my own philosophy, and I subconsciously realize that it is an inadequate philosophy. Though it may well carry you through some of the life’s more traumatic of events, it doesn’t do a very good job of guiding you to positive experiences with others.

It is certainly a stoical philosophy that would have served a Greek soldier well. Whether such a philosophy is an effective guide to getting through everyday life is still open to question.

Meanwhile, that’s what I’m doing, questioning. So far I have copious notes that I’m pushing around trying to organize into something that truly reflects what I feel about the novel. I’m getting there, wherever there is, and I should actually have something worth saying shortly.

It would certainly be difficult to come up with much worse than what I found browsing the web. My god, a teacher’s organization in California had the nerve to suggest on the basis of one short quotation that the novel would be a good vehicle to start the exploration of the endangered status of the turtle. If that’s a teacher’s quide to this novel, heaven help the state of education in California.

A Good Blogger is Hard to Find

Like Visible Darkness I’m more interested in knowing the people behind the blogs than I am in discussing the machinery behind these blogs, but I still would like help finding people who I want to be part of a community with and that’s a major reason I go to sites like Keeping Trying.

I’ve been going through my list of blogs that appear in my bookmarks, not the one that appears on my blog, and trying to add new blogs that are informative and delete old blogs that no longer seem quite as interesting or have quit updating regularly.

What I’ve discovered in my efforts, though, is just how difficult and time-consuming it is to find new blogs that are worth spending time on. Time is precious. Time I spend looking for interesting blogs is time that I can’t spend updating my own site. Now I’ve tried going to sites like Soul or aortal, but they’re not really much help in screening sites. In general, I’ve been quite frustrated.

For instance, I still haven’t found any bloggers that consistently comment on environmental issues, though that is certainly one of my passions, and I would like to find people who are knowledgeable in that field who have their own opinions but who aren’t spokesmen for environmental groups.

In the end, I usually just search the links on pages that I admire. I’ve found most of the blogs I like best this way, but I still don’t enjoy having to click through each site and read several entries before deciding whether or not I want to read more. I’m sometimes amazed how wildly different people’s tastes are. But, the point is that this is more time consuming than it needs to be, and I end up missing sites like Jonathan Delacour for months before I finally get a chance to check out his blog.

In other words, I tend to agree with Mike Sanders that if we’re going to build a positive community of webloggers one of the things we all need to do is to provide more links on our own sites.

But I would like to add another suggestion, one that I’ve yet to implement on my own site, of course, but that I will shortly, and that is that we should each set up a link page that offers short descriptions, and perhaps recommendations, to the sites that we link to.

To Link or Not To Link, That ‘Tis the Question

I’ve largely stayed out of the ongoing debate within the blogger community of the relative merits of providing links versus writing your own material because the subject doesn’t particularly interest me. Even though my interest in blogging was triggered by wood s lot, I’ve always focused on writing my own essays and providing links as best I could.

Partially that’s been determined by the content of my blog. I’m writing about self-discovery, and I am THE expert in that field. After all, I’m discovering MYSELF. Also, as a life-long reader and English teacher, I feel pretty confident discussing literature, even though I’m purposely not providing the kind of in-depth analysis required by some colleges.

It turns out that part of who I am, though, is someone who is concerned not just about himself but about others and about the evironment that we all have to grow out of.

It’s when I am interested in these areas outside my expertise, though, that I think direct linking makes the best sense. Now, I can rant about a topic as well as anyone I know. Unfortunately, although ranting may provide motivation to get involved, it doesn’t provide the information needed to make intelligent decisions. That requires information and opinions that can only be provided by experts in the field.

I have some very strong opinions about the environment, and I like to think that I know more about it than the average person. However, I know I don’t have the kind of expertise to make sound decisions here.

If I had all the time in the world, I would probably just write extensive research papers on these topics and break the papers down into manageable, or not-so-manageable, entries. The trouble is that I don’t have that kind of time. So I’m going to have to rely on a short summary essay and provide the kinds of links that can give an in-depth analysis.

Unfortunately, I’m not the wood s lot of links, so even this set of links, like my earlier attempts to discuss NAFTA’s Chapter 11, will probably be inadequate.

Still, it’s better than sitting around doing nothing and feeling bad about it and yourself. I’m not going to devote my life to saving the environment, but neither am I going to sit around quietly watching it be destroyed.