Which Reminds Me

Yes, I remember reading Hemingway's "The Old Man and the Sea," which was required reading in high school. So that was well-written although I suppose that some people would be tempted to just dismiss that as only some poor Cuban fisherman dying of hunger in ragged clothing whose rustic boat happened to drift a bit too far out to sea and then underwent a huge struggle to catch a huge fish and tow it back to shore, somehow escaping with his life. So why should we sympathize with that, you are asking me. And yet, all I can say is I don't know. It is true that Hemingway was a gifted writer who did have a way of making the story interesting somehow even if otherwise no one would have given those poor people a second thought. They are just the laborers of the earth. But that is one of the functions of literature, to bring these things to our attention if only for a short time and in an appropriate way. And also you thought that perhaps in reality few poor laborers are really going to seek such enormous challenges to their limited skills and resources. Most are content to stay within the limits of their territorial waters to bring home the average fish needed for ordinary consumption and marketplace demands. Yes, mostly it is the wealthy sportsmen with huge boats and plenty of money to spare who are the ones out there in the deeper waters trolling for that really big fish. So was Hemingway really writing about a Cuban fisherman or was he autobiographically describing his own fishing activities? Yes, possibly, so there's an interesting point, but I have no idea. That would be a subject of debate for another time. I am really not equipped to take that on at the spur of the moment. There is another deep subject for shallow minds.