good analysis on interdependence and individualism
https://doi.org/10.2307/2922437
Then there is the other secret. There isn't any symbolysm [sic]. The sea is the sea. The old man is an old man. The boy is a boy and the fish is a fish. The shark are all sharks no better and no worse. All the symbolism that people say is shit. What goes beyond is what you see beyond when you know.
― Ernest Hemingway Selected Letters 1917-1961
Cartman: [whistling] Kay Pasol! Kay Pasol! [Mexicans come forward] Cartman: Alright, did you read the book? Mexicans: Si, si... Kyle: What was it about? In case our teacher asks us? Mexican #1: It starts there the old man... and he job is to catch the feesh... so he get in the boat to try and catch feesh. Mexican #2: So he catches feesh... but the feesh is very strong, so the old man can't reel in the feesh. Mexican #3: So then he fight the feesh some more and he finally catch the feesh. Kyle: So he catches the feesh so he can make money? Mexican #1: No... on the way home the sharks come and eat the feesh and so [takes off his hat] Mexican #1: ...he no make money. [Sniffs, other Mexicans take off their hats]
No good book has ever been written that has in it symbols arrived at beforehand and stuck in. ... I tried to make a real old man, a real boy, a real sea and a real fish and real sharks. But if I made them good and true enough they would mean many things
— Time 1954
christ stuff, ay he said aloud nail in hands
climbing hill with mast / christ with cross
a nice reddit comment:
Santiago's art is fishing. He was once great but is now considered washed up. With great struggle he goes out to find a last great piece of art, the marlin . . . but finding it is only the beginning. The marlin out in the middle of the sea is the equivalent of a novel that's only in the author's mind. Getting it actually written––back home for people to see––is the real struggle. And as Santiago brings it home, it is gradually torn apart. The perfect ideal he had out in the middle of the sea gradually becomes something else, something not as beautiful or elegant as he'd hoped, and in fact by the time he actually gets it home it is nothing but the bare skeleton of the thing.
Santiago considers himself to have failed, as what he brings home for people to see is but a fraction of what he imagined he would. The process of bringing it home––writing the novel––wore away at the ideal. And yet the people still appreciate it, are in fact greatly impressed by it. Because the perfect is the enemy of the good. The skeleton of the thing where people can see it is better than the intact fish left out in the sea, just as an imperfect piece of art that is actually made is better than a perfect piece of art that exists only as an idea.
The sharks ate the flesh, sure. But that was inevitable. Art, especially great ambitious art, will be degraded as it's put into a consumable form, will never be realized by the artist as perfectly as what is in the artist's head. In fact the artist may end up with the nothing but a haggard skeleton when he thought he'd have the intact and beautiful full body. But still the artist should make his art, and still people will find beauty in it.
from www.jstor.org/stable/27549780:
He is saying he and Santiago are the same. It is simple: one fishes, one writes, both die. This is not sentimental or self-pitying: it is the truth for Hemingway about what it means to be alive - that each of us is dying. When we are young we believe otherwise, as does Nick Adams in trailing his hand in the warm water on a sharp chilly morning at the close of "Indian Camp," the first story of in Our Time (1925): "In the early morning on the lake sitting in the stern of the boat with his father rowing, he felt quite sure that he would never die." The questions Hemingway confronted were these: Since finally we know that everyone dies, how should we live? Why should we live?
i really like this bit this is what i got from Our Time as well. the doctor scene especially
rest of article about mortality and art and i do like the rest of it as well
He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish. In the first forty days a boy had been with him. But after forty days without a fish the boy’s parents had told him that the old man was now definitely and finally salao, which is the worst form of unlucky, and the boy had gone at their orders in another boat which caught three good fish the first week. It made the boy sad to see the old man come in each day with his skiff empty and he always went down to help him carry either the coiled lines or the gaff and harpoon and the sail that was furled around the mast. The sail was patched with flour sacks and, furled, it looked like the flag of permanent defeat.
Everything about him was old except his eyes and they were the same color as the sea and were cheerful and undefeated.
“I wanted to take him fishing but I was too timid to ask him. Then I asked you to ask him and you were too timid.” “I know. It was a great mistake. He might have gone with us. Then we would have that for all of our lives.
Why do old men wake so early? Is it to have one longer day?
In the dark the old man could feel the morning coming and as he rowed he heard the trembling sound as flying fish left the water and the hissing that their stiff set wings made as they soared away in the darkness. He was very fond of flying fish as they were his principal friends on the ocean. 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? She is kind and very beautiful. But she can be so cruel and it comes so suddenly and such birds that fly, dipping and hunting, with their small sad voices are made too delicately for the sea.
The iridescent bubbles were beautiful. But they were the falsest thing in the sea and the old man loved to see the big sea turtles eating them. The turtles saw them, approached them from the front, then shut their eyes so they were completely carapaced and ate them filaments and all. The old man loved to see the turtles eat them and he loved to walk on them on the beach after a storm and hear them pop when he stepped on them with the horny soles of his feet.
But what a fish to pull like that. He must have his mouth shut tight on the wire. I wish I could see him. I wish I could see him only once to know what I have against me.
As the sun set he remembered, to give himself more confidence, the time in the tavern at Casablanca when he had played the hand game with the great negro from Cienfuegos who was the strongest man on the docks. They had gone one day and one night with their elbows on a chalk line on the table and their forearms straight up and their hands gripped tight. Each one was trying to force the other’s hand down onto the table. There was much betting and people went in and out of the room under the kerosene lights and he had looked at the arm and hand of the negro and at the negro’s face. They changed the referees every four hours after the first eight so that the referees could sleep. Blood came out from under the fingernails of both his and the negro’s hands and they looked each other in the eye and at their hands and forearms and the bettors went in and out of the room and sat on high chairs against the wall and watched. The walls were painted bright blue and were of wood and the lamps threw their shadows against them. The negro’s shadow was huge and it moved on the wall as the breeze moved the lamps.
It was dark now as it becomes dark quickly after the sun sets in September. He lay against the worn wood of the bow and rested all that he could. The first stars were out. He did not know the name of Rigel but he saw it and knew soon they would all be out and he would have all his distant friends. “The fish is my friend too,” he said aloud. “I have never seen or heard of such a fish. But I must kill him. I am glad we do not have to try to kill the stars.” Imagine if each day a man must try to kill the moon, he thought. The moon runs away. But imagine if a man each day should have to try to kill the sun? We were born lucky, he thought. Then he was sorry for the great fish that had nothing to eat and his determination to kill him never relaxed in his sorrow for him. How many people will he feed, he thought. But are they worthy to eat him? No, of course not. There is no one worthy of eating him from the manner of his behaviour and his great dignity. I do not understand these things, he thought. But it is good that we do not have to try to kill the sun or the moon or the stars. It is enough to live on the sea and kill our true brothers.
After he judged that his right hand had been in the water long enough he took it out and looked at it. “It is not bad,” he said. “And pain does not matter to a man.”
I cannot be too far out now, he thought. I hope no one has been too worried. There is only the boy to worry, of course. But I am sure he would have confidence. Many of the older fishermen will worry. Many others too, he thought. I live in a good town
Luck is a thing that comes in many forms and who can recognize her? I would take some though in any form and pay what they asked. I wish I could see the glow from the lights, he thought. I wish too many things. But that is the thing I wish for now.
And what beat you, he thought. “Nothing,” he said aloud. “I went out too far.”