Hemingway came back to my mind recently with this great David Brooks editorial in the New York Times. Even if you’re not into Hemingway or even literature, I still recommend reading it.
I didn’t really understand Hemingway until I started crossing into my forties. By then I’d been writing professionally for many years, which helped, but I also needed a perspective that for me only came in the opening salvos of middle age.
Like many of us, I grew up not having a whole hell of a lot, and so in my younger days I thought that the key to happiness was having it all. When that didn’t pan out, I suspected that the key to happiness was not having anything: freedom in low overhead, divest of attachment, the power of having nothing to lose. Strangely enough, both routes gave me pretty much the same mix of bad days and good days. It was almost as if what I had – or didn’t have – didn’t greatly matter to the universe at large.
Strange that.
I started to understand Hemingway, at least the early work that made him famous, when I finally got around to reading A Moveable Feast, his memoirs of those early times becoming a writer in Paris. Then I went back and started to reread those stories with a different eye, and it suddenly just clicked: I got it. And it took my breath away.
Essentially, what Hemingway realized was that he didn’t have to say everything in order to say what was important. In fact, he couldn’t do both. He had to choose, and choose carefully, or else any message would be washed away on the rising banks of superfluous style. You point out Details A, B, and C, and that’s it, and the combined implied context brought out all the other things you needed to say. The real story then just popped out like a mental hologram. All from not the ideas, or the words, or the structure.. but from the economy.
You know how you can live your life in a valley, and spend all your days learning every square inch of that valley, and you’re feeling pretty knowledgeable and you’ve got a good fix on things, and then one day for whatever reason you decide to climb that hill over there to admire your lovely valley.. and suddenly see that there’s a world beyond your home that you know nothing about? That feeling of terror and exhilaration when you have to decide whether to descend back into your lovely valley or go out and start over on a much larger map?
That’s where I’ve been struggling lately on economies. Balances. As simple as possible, but no simpler. Judging that moment where more suddenly becomes less – not because there’s some sort of moral high ground in being empty of attachments, but because at some point complexity becomes counterproductive. Adding more to anything is only an improvement up to a certain point, and then progress is only made in the taking away. Because bigger, better, badder isn’t the ultimate definition of value.
I’m starting to sense that the value of anything lies in its economy, and the challenge of taking away is far more difficult than that of building, improving, adding. In writing, certainly. But also in life.
As always, we have a lot going on right now. It’s been an exhausting week, a very preoccupied week. A week of knowing that you can’t do everything, and you sure can’t do nothing, so you’re trying to figure out how to do just the best things, the right things, knowing that you’re likely not going to get a perfect outcome but hopefully you’ll get a good one.
Suddenly the chores of life and the tasks of art don’t look all that different. They’re both rooted in the economies, sacrificing the perfect decisions in order to make the good ones, and hopefully having the opportunity later to see the meaningful pattern that drives the whole thing. Because it’s relatively easy to chase an ideal and then curse yourself for not attaining what was, in fact, impossible to start with.
That leaves you at least with a sense of validation. The much harder part is reaching for the good and the right, knowing that the outcome won’t fix everything, but that it will fix some things and perhaps buy you some time to fix other things, and that one of the things you will likely have to sacrifice is the expectation of closure.
You can’t know how it will work out. Will they get it? Will they see what I’m trying to do? Will my efforts be rewarded?
Will I ever know?
Hemingway clearly never knew, and ultimately couldn’t live with that unknowing. But we’re all trying to march forward to that drumbeat in our own separate ways, trying to find our own economies – some by trying to do too much, others by doing far, far less than they should – and all in our own ways, trying to find a meaningful middle road.
Stitching bits of the imperfect for a glimpse at the sublime. Or put another way, sacrificing dreams of the great in order to have a fighting chance at accomplishing the good. And the right. And allowing the result to stand on its own, without looking over its shoulder like an expectant helicopter mom, demanding, demanding, demanding for that validation.
That’s the toughest part. Seeing with clarity, waiting with hope, acting with conscience.
Knowing that you are part of that economy, and being okay with that. In life, in art, in just dealing with day to day bullshit – focusing on what matters and letting the rest of it go.
And trusting that the universe knows what it’s doing.