An Essay on Hemingway and being ill
I’m fighting a vicious head cold, lying on my bed while I finish Michael Palin’s “Hemingway Adventure.” I should be finishing it at a bar, drinking whiskey as Ernest did his last few years of life in Idaho. But I’m stuck in a tiny room in Minneapolis, left to contemplate the wall.
Despite the fact that room isn’t exotic at all, there are plenty of things that Hemingway may have found interesting. Like the jade plant that has overgrown its pot. Or the Chinese painting hanging from the wall. Or the wide array of books that fill every available space. These things all become highly interesting, especially when you’re supposed to be focusing on something else. Like writing.
There is a bottle of red wine sitting on my floor. It is half drunk. The other half may have turned to vinegar by now. Considering the state of everything else, I think that’s probably the one sin that Hemingway would have held against me. It is the sign of someone who has taken something beautiful for granted.
But then I finished the biography. It was an adventure that ended in the worst possible way. One of the greatest trips I ever took while sitting in my bedroom ended in a hopeless, nightmarish way. I felt let down, I felt like I should have been able to have that time in a bar with Hemingway where I could reminisce with him about the bulls of Spain or safaris of Africa. But I was denied that.
I think what killed him was the fear of the end of the journey. Most journeys begin with an almost blind anticipation, followed by the true sign you’re traveling: boredom in a foreign land. By the end of it, though, you are stretched thin, having come back from the boredom with some new discovery, only to sink back into boredom when the novelty wears off.
And then what? A train station in Paris isn’t a gateway to the City of Lights but rather a reminder that you won’t be sleeping in your own bed that night. A hostel in Rome isn’t the setting for a romantic fling in the south but rather a listening post to the noisy Roman streets. At some haggard point, you want to return to the normalcy that you left to seek something better, if only to stop the merry-go-round.
But after arriving and re-acclimating to the life you left behind for the adventure, the boring days disappear from memory and what remains are the brilliant moments of discovery that stand up like outcroppings of mountains on the horizon. Those thin minded moments spent on park benches days before the flight home seem like clear minded moments of an ascetic rather than painfully practical moments of someone navigating a foreign language, land and currency.
So the bug bites, and the next adventure begins.
At some point, Hemingway couldn’t do it. He had to come to terms with the mortality of his body. He had pushed it to some extreme limits, and even if he wanted more out of it there was nothing left to give. He was going to have to get used to the life of the returned. There was to be no more future departures on the menu, only an extended re-acclimation. Hemingway saw that as hopeless. If I had spent most of my life traveling, eternally looking for the next departure, I suppose I would too.
But the upside of returning is that you return to those you love. With trophies. You went out and did something with yourself, and the biggest joy in returning is sharing that with those you left for a little while. I don’t suppose, there really is any other reason to return. To your new friends in the other part of the world, to go and visit them would seem like returning, and so after the first adventure, life becomes an endless cycle of returns. For some reason, Hemingway failed to see it that way.
And so I had to pour the rest of the wine out.