“Why did they make birds so delicate and fine as those sea swallows when the ocean can be so cruel?”
To read Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and The Sea without remembering its contemplative and thrilling playfulness is difficult. I haven’t read much of Ernest Hemingway besides A Moveable Feast though I have all of his works; The Old Man and The Sea, in its entirety, is the loneliest book I’ve read in a long time.
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It’s more than enough to read about a gruesomely tiring tale of an old fisherman and a fish. But to have the little boy cast a spell of more solitude and persistence in the old man gives you, the reader, a deeper sorrow to swallow.
Hemingway once wrote, “Writing, at its best, is a lonely life.” And that if a writer is good enough he is destined to “face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.” This is deeply and eloquently mirrored in Hemingway’s writing. Those simple words do more than their definitions to illuminate a desolate and cruel world. A world in which old age is often spoken about for longer than it is understood.
This book doesn’t speak of old age. Nor does it show you what it's like for the world. The structure and language are omnipresent in that they offer you a voyage where you inhabit the vast nature of the sea and the undying and unforgiving nature of the old man. And how the roles keep reversing from one to the other.
You say this is just a story about an old man unwilling to let go. I say this is human nature. To find something that serves you and to see an image of yourself reflected in it, no matter how young or old and small or big it makes you, something that you know better than anyone or anything, and it knows you. I figured it doesn’t matter whether you lose or win to the world. You’ve already won by never giving it up.