"I of my own knowledge…"

On July 2, 1961, Ernest Hemingway, old and ill, shot himself to death – “took the family exit,” to put it his way, as he was neither the first nor the last Hemingway to kill himself. My column this month for The Meta Arts concerns some unfinished business of his. Not a retrieval – he himself told me when I contacted him first that it wasn’t necessary. Something else, instead.  I wish we could find someone to finish it.
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In rereading The Sun Also Rises, I realized for the first time that Hemingway did not admire or entirely approve of his narrator. At least, that was my conclusion. So, I asked him.

Papa? That right?

Is your narrator you, however many of your traits you may have given him? Yes, I didn’t approve of his pimping his love to Romero. It amounted to betraying himself and his aficion. “It was not pleasant,” I said, not meaning that he was misunderstood but that he was reaping where he had sowed. A man may share one of our passions as he may share our politics or our taste in art, and yet have no fundamental connection to us.

Of course. Thank you. Is there anything that we who have profited from your life and words can do for you?

Our reputations don’t mean anything to us now in terms of ego or career-building — but they do matter in that they can make it easier or harder for someone who needs us to find us. So merely spreading the word about how you see us helps us.

My recurring theme is that our culture, by turning its back on its spiritual roots, has lost contact with the reality of spiritual (that is, non-physical) life. In so doing, it has lost contact with reality, for how can you understand the meaning of things if you systematically disregard a significant portion of what exists? And how can you know who you yourself are, if you systematically discard millennia of tradition and scripture designed to teach that aspect of things?

In reaction to our culture’s downgrading of spiritual knowledge, some have turned to fundamentalism: blind belief. But this won’t do either. If you don’t know, you don’t know, and neither blind belief nor blind disbelief substitute for knowledge. And our culture is not teaching that knowledge, because it has forgotten where to find it.

In short, materialist civilization is lost, and those who are fated to live in it are lost too, no matter how intelligent, no matter how insightful, unless and until they free themselves from this delusion. As an example, I offer a long quotation from Hemingway’s posthumously published True at First Light, which was pieced together by his son Patrick.

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