[Spoiler alert: Mystic River (movie), The Old Man and the Sea (novella). Not that my blog is some grand thing worth returning to, but I recommend watching one and reading the other and then coming back.]
I decided to read some fiction. I picked something near the top of my reading list. I chose Ernest Hemingway’s Nobel winner, The Old Man and the Sea. A short read, dense with illuminating narration about a good man’s inner dialogue.
Santiago was an old fisherman living in Cuba. His lifetime of fishing had led him to have more than one dry spell, and he was now in the middle of the second longest dry spell he’d ever had. It had been eighty-four days since he caught a fish. He made the decision that, in order to end his dry spell, he was going to venture far out into the Gulf Stream and work on catching something big. Something worthy of breaking the drought. Something that would bring luck back to him.
Santiago found his big fish. Over the course of three sleepless days and nights, he wrestled and maneuvered against the biggest fish he’d ever seen. He struggled against hunger, fatigue, loneliness, cold, physical injury, lack of equipment, and his cornucopia of human temptations and weaknesses. All the while adopting a monk-like serenity that kept things ever in perspective. In the perspective of needing to earn that fish. Needing to beat it. Needing to be the man who would finish the work.
After he finally bested the fish, exhausted and grateful, he opened his sail and aimed back towards Cuba. His inner dialogue was, at the same time, one of the most encouraging and depressing things I’ve heard. He knew he earned that fish - but he berated himself for ever having done this in the first place. He knew better than to go this far out in the Stream. He worried now that his prize would be taken from him by roaming sharks.
And it was. It was taken from him, bite by bite on his course home. Sharks surfaced and took from him everything he had bled for for three miserable days. The old man’s glory was gone, along with the thousands of pounds of flesh he planned to sell to buy back the equipment he had lost. He had no more wind in his emotional sails - he had only the wind of the sea. He had no more heroic welcome beckoning him home - he had only the distant lights of Havana to guide him there through dark emptiness.
The old man lost nearly everything for that marlin. And he came home with nothing but its barren skeleton - a testament to both his short-lived victory and his utter defeat. The only things he held onto were his life, the skeleton, and the skiff that carried both.
Towards the end of the book, I was reminded of the movie Mystic River. As we work our way into adulthood, we realize that so many of the great human stories, the stories worth telling, are not full of typical heroes and triumph the way we are taught as kids to expect. Sometimes there is no redemption or happiness in the story other than survival. Sometimes all we have is the golden glow from Havana. Sometimes, as in Mystic River, the nonstop assault of tragedy is only perforated by the faint glow of the human spirit.
When I first watched Mystic River, and each subsequent time, I can't help thinking "my God, there is just nothing happy or redeeming about this movie. At all. It's just a continuous onslaught of horrible unfairness and pain. It’s just unbearable darkness in the suffering of human mistakes." And yet I want to keep watching. And I want to watch the movie again. Why?
Maybe there's something we morbidly enjoy in that ungodly level of pain and torment. Or something we need. Maybe we need to be shown how dark and lost the human spirit can get. Or how badly mistaken people can be even when they’re sure they’re right. Maybe we need to see and feel the limits of human resolve, because we want to distantly guess at what we’re capable of.
Maybe, as in the old man's case, we are encouraged by his inner dialogue and his self-imposed asceticism. Maybe it's not in the hero’s "triumph," but rather in his sturdiness and survival that we actually find our helping of redemption. Perhaps the real story the old man was offering to us was not of a large fish caught but of a life well lived.
A life of earned wisdom, the life of a mastered trade... maybe even the mastered self. The whole life story of the old man led up not to the fish itself, but to the struggle against the fish. The self control it took to stay alive and keep fighting; the memory of piece after piece of timeless fishing wisdom in the midst of the battle of a lifetime; the sturdiness it takes to go one more hour, and then one more hour, without succumbing to the need for physical comfort - maybe these are the old man's real offerings. Survival and self-control. The pushing off into tomorrow what comforts and rewards we wish we had today. The ability to poke and prod at oneself in the midst of misery and get oneself to stand up just a bit straighter and try just a bit harder. Not for triumph, but because it's the most right and noble thing to do. Because survival against such misery is perhaps the real essence of the human spirit.
Maybe the old man was a hero. And maybe he wasn't.
If he wasn't a hero to Hemingway, then maybe his real story was just the wisdom and luck that pass through a man in the 100 years he's given. And that’s worthy of a book all on its own.
And if the old man was a hero to Hemingway, he's not a Disney hero. He's not Hercules who saved everyone with his muscles. He's not Simba who saved everyone with his bravery. Maybe he's just the man who saved what it means to be a man. He's the man who, through 3 days of sleepless anguish, proved to himself one more time how deep was his own resolve. How he earned that marlin.
He earned victory in that fight. Not just during those three days, but rather in his entire lifetime of becoming the man who would beat it. Santiago’s catch was earned over decades, not hours. The compound interest of a steady, attentive life served to bring him the biggest fish anyone on the island had ever caught. To make him the man who could and would catch that fish.
But maybe victory isn’t even the right word. Because his prize was lost.
Suffering, it seems, is the cost of winning. And pain, it seems, is the cost of wisdom.
The old man slept alone in his shack, having won and lost the greatest battle of his life. He proved that he was capable of finding his luck again, and of beating the king of marlins… but he also earned some hard new wisdom through his pain. He knew now that there were some parts of the sea that were too big for him. And that’s okay. We are but men.
Mystic River ends even more enigmatically. I’d be curious to hear what the characters in that movie learned. All I can think of is “our mistakes will cost us dearly. They will absolutely rip us apart. And we have to survive anyway.”
Drink some water and be grateful for someone.
JDR
“There goes my hero; he’s ordinary.” - Dave Grohl