Sentimentality and Modernity

© Silke Hesse, 2013

Sentimentality and Modernity

Silke Hesse

The National Gallery of Victoria is currently hosting two very different exhibitions. One is British Watercolors 1760-1900 and the other The Mad Square. Modernity in German Art 1910-3. One covers a period of 140 years in the course of which a discerning eye might discover minor changes of technique and subject choice, and the other a period of only 27 years of extreme and disturbing political, economic and social change, in which most of the pursuits and techniques of modern art were conceived or assimilated. These innovative ways of seeing and thinking were soon to be distributed widely across the world once Hitler had declared such art degenerate and forced its proponents and their patrons to flee Germany. In his preface to the Mad Square catalogue Eric Hobsbawm, one of the émigrés of that time, tells how, at a recent old boys’ dinner, he tried to give his former British school mates an impression of “the reactions of a fifteen-year-old suddenly translated to Britain in 1933”. He suggests: “Imagine yourselves [...] as a newspaper correspondent based in Manhattan and transferred by your editor to Omaha, Nebraska. That’s how I felt when I came to England after almost two years in the unbelievably exciting, sophisticated, intellectually and politically explosive Berlin of the Weimar Republic. The place was a terrible letdown.”(15)

I myself grew up in Australia during and after World War II but my parents had both lived in Berlin, my father from the autumn of 1913 and again in 1930-33, admittedly with long interruptions at war or overseas in between these dates, while my mother had studied there from 1931 to 1934. They had met there and though they were not in tune with the more extreme avant-garde, in spite of being fascinated by modernity, in particular by photography and film, for them too Berlin was an experience of great power that continued to give impetus to their lives here in Australia. The news about family and friends that reached us when I was a child during and immediately after the war was worthy of the apocalyptic and crazy visions assembled in the Mad Square exhibition: the visions of Otto Dix, Max Beckmann, George Grosz, Ludwig Meidner, Käthe Kollwitz, Ernst Barlach, Felix Nussbaum, Hannah Höch and others,  though in those years I had never seen anything that resembled their art-work. Three of my mother’s brothers were killed in action in Russia (I had met them briefly on a trip to Germany when I was two), the fourth had received a mutilating wound, we were told that my grandmother died of grief though the medical diagnosis was Alzheimer’s, my grandfather and his wife committed suicide to escape the Russians, cousins experienced rape or heroic rescue from rape, stately houses had become rubble, former homes and properties were now in foreign lands, people to whom we tried to send food and clothing packages were close to starvation: there were any number of disturbing stories. These things had all happened to people in our family, even though the Jewish streak in our “blood” was too insubstantial to lead to persecutions. I should add that in Australia, we ourselves, Australian citizens due to my father’s birth here but also suspicious aliens, spent two strange years (my father four) behind barbed wire.

From 1946 on, the year I turned ten, I was then educated in one of the more liberal private girls’ schools in Sydney, the only one without exclusive denominational ties, one that did not call itself a “ladies’ college”, and one where we did not wear ties. But in spite of the teachers’ reserved decency and the uneasy politeness of my class mates, I always felt quite out of place there and suspected it was because I had been, and perhaps still was, their enemy and represented a criminally evil country, however well-behaved I myself might try to be. But I also wondered about that: these were all intelligent and ethical people who were not patriotically chauvinistic. Seeing these two exhibitions side by side has shown me, perhaps for the first time, how different the cultures were with which we grew up. For the culture of “better class” post-war Australia remained very English for quite some years: conventional and sentimental, nostalgic for Britain as home and careful about preserving an English accent. The poorer unwanted classes once deported here, usually still laborers and Catholics after all these years, had found it far easier to become Australians.

It is the water-color exhibition that has stirred up my memory. As a girl, I had the reputation of being good at art and often spent weekend time with a dear and gifted friend newly arrived from England, painting some landscape or seascape. She always drew it her way, neat and a little cute like an illustration for some children’s book, but I painted with water-colors in the traditional vein and I did it, I think, to preserve what was in front of me accurately, both in my mind and on paper. It tended to be a “picturesque” scene, meaning the sort of scene that had for years been regularly turned into pictures, and it was always framed to favor conventional proportions. The actual painting slightly bored me and the result did too, but I liked being outside and looking at nature and “art” was something you could do with your day. Then, I remember once waking before dawn on a worrying morning when my parents were due to leave for a long trip into those recently war-ravaged lands. Unable to go back to sleep, I decided to paint the dark and featureless golf-course outside my window. Soon I was scribbling with charcoal in my desperation to bring structure into this structureless waste. Though I myself was quite ashamed when I gave my parents this farewell gift, this “un-picturesque” painting was the only one that an artist friend they showed my work to in Germany found interesting. In art-class at school I remember being induced to painstakingly copy a lyrebird onto the corner of a white scarf, to “beautify” it. Art was there to preserve and to beautify. The motto in one of my art-books was, as I remember it, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty”. That sounded good, though it made absolutely no sense. Beauty was something that evoked fine feelings. In retrospect, I think even I was so obsessed with the “beauty” of our coastline that I never got round to looking at its features with any exactitude.

In my school days there were a lot of things you didn’t talk about: anything to do with the body; anything “private” or “personal”; things like death (when my little sister drowned in the sea outside our home my class sent a wreath but nobody talked to me about it) or shameful things like divorce (a friend, a boarder at the school, distraught at hearing about her parents’ separation was told: no tears, a stiff upper lip, keep your feelings to yourself, and carried the scars with her for years). I was told never to speak of our internment, which was shameful, but speaking about family circumstances, parents’ professions and the like was also off limits. We were taught that it was indiscrete to ask questions, they were considered disruptive or inquisitive, and I almost got out of the habit. And men and boys were definitely off limits (though giggled about in corners) and the war was off limits for girls though its heroism was a distracting topic among boys. Chatter was permitted; conversation was considered pretentious. One girl who had had disturbing experiences in war-time Japan, experiences that were not “nice”, was asked to leave the school when she told someone about them. When the Reverend Syddens came for Scripture lessons we learned our catechism. He was, I think, constitutionally unable to answer questions about religion in his booming, mellifluous C of E voice (though our headmistress sometimes would, on the occasions she had to fill in for him). School subjects on the State syllabus were Ancient History or European History along with English literature, above all poetry. Things recent or Australian were out of bounds. We were taught nothing about our political system: too controversial. Children were raised on nonsense rhymes, cute rhymes: “The owl and the pussycat went to sea in a beautiful pea-green boat. They took some honey and plenty of money wrapped up in a five pound note”. (My brother once tried to go to sea on a home-made raft with no water, just a packet of biscuits, and was very lucky to have been spotted and rescued. We were probably what one might call disturbed children.)

So what was all this about? Though the motto of our school was “That I may serve”, the underlying motto was: do not think, nothing must change, it is our duty to preserve what we have, our school is the best of all schools, never outgrow it, remain loyal to it for evermore, it is beauty that counts, truth is beauty (all things bright and beautiful ... the Lord God made them all), listen but don’t ever think, never ask questions: “theirs not to reason why, theirs but to do and die”.  And if you feel restless, go off and play sport: “play up, play up, and play the game”. Though Queen Victoria had died almost half a century ago and her empire was dissolving and some of the boarders at our school had been evacuated from India where their fathers still served, we were brought up completely according to Victorian principles. (“Principles”, by the way, were very important.) Here in Australia, our generation was raised not only in hot and restrictive school uniforms but in a rigid and impenetrable armor against change, whereas my parents had been socialized in a post World War I German culture that was quite obsessed with change. One was too stable, the other too unstable; one too beautiful, the other too ugly; one wanted nothing to change, the other everything and at once; one was conservative, the other anarchistic; one filled the gaps with sentimentality, the other with debris. But debris could at least be reconfigured as collage, the great new technique of the period, whereas with sentimentality, which seems to me to have been the essence of that culture, you were stuck.

What is sentimentality? It is, in the first place, an untruth, and a sneaky, dishonest untruth at that. It consists, according to Oscar Wilde, who came out of that Victorian culture, of beautiful feelings that have not been earned honestly. In “De Profundis” he writes:

Great passions are for the great of soul, and great events can be seen only by those who are on a level with them. We think we can have our emotions for nothing. We cannot. Even the finest and most self-sacrificing emotions have to be paid for. Strangely enough, that is what makes them fine. [...] Remember that the sentimentalist is always a cynic at heart. Indeed sentimentality is merely the bank-holiday of cynicism.     

Literary words can come heavy with expectations; they invite or trick us into letting unwarranted feelings arise. There are also lazy gaps a writer can leave where the reader jumps in to help, in both their interests. People enjoy a little emotionality, like a pretty sunset glow over the landscape, when it does not require them to question the assumptions according to which they live. True tragedies will; they demand, to speak with Rilke, that we change our lives: “Du mußt dein Leben ändern”. Cultures like the one we grew up in that try to forestall change at all cost are great breeding grounds for sentimentality. People are not allowed to talk about the things that deeply disturb or move them; but they do have feelings and so they end up attaching them to something more acceptable, more trivial, and in the process their feelings become shallow and warped and no longer help them to understand their own lives. Deep feelings, even painful ones, can have great beauty; shallow ones can become mere kitsch. Our generation eventually became excessively suspicious of any emotion at all; and we had good grounds for this. We liked things neat and cold and without resonances.

I can remember a night, now many years ago, on which I was deeply and legitimately sad and went to see a film to divert myself. The film was shallow and cliché and I was so angry that I was on the point of walking out when a trigger word or gesture or situation, I’ve forgotten the details of that film, brought on my tears and to my deep embarrassment and the bemused curiosity of my immediate neighbors I was tricked into putting my own real sorrow at the service of the film’s fake sorrow. This is what the film’s cynical makers would have counted on: true feelings for which there was no outlet and which could therefore be harnessed to sell their cheap wares. I felt violated and humiliated and vowed to harden myself, to be on the defensive from now on. I have noticed that true feeling rarely calls on my tears; not in life and not in art.   

I finished my schooling in 1952, the year in which Ernest Hemingway published what is generally acknowledged as the greatest of his works: The Old Man and the Sea. My father had discovered it as soon as it hit the bookshops and we all read it in turn. Its impact was huge, perhaps partly because we lived right by the sea and it showed us an extension of our shore-bound world. But there was something else and because I couldn’t remember what it was that made this story so moving and convincing for us sixty years ago, I have just reread it. Looking back from this great distance in time, I would say it was in the first place that The Old Man and the Sea had succeeded in tackling sentimentality head-on and emerging victorious. For it courageously worked with a raft of topics popular in sentimental literature: the simple life; dignified poverty; the love between a boy and an old man; the freshness of youth; the wisdom of age; selflessness; empathy with dumb creatures; oneness with the natural world; heroic endeavor and achievement; the tragedy of aging; the beauty of the sea and its moods; loneliness; loyalty; an old-fashioned caring village community; the timeless laws of the human family: one could extract others more. Many of these are topics that were discovered in their importance and beauty by the Romantic movement (on which our excellent English teacher at school had concentrated as the genuine source of what came later) but had then been exploited and debased, stolen by its epigones. Here in Hemingway’s story they are once again pristine and wholesome. How does he do it?

It is often words and phrases that hide the dangerous clichés, those booby-traps. Hemingway’s old man, whose consciousness colors most of the text, speaks Spanish and the English of the story sounds a little like a somewhat clumsy translation with the occasional unavoidable Spanish word left standing.

 “The old man was now definitely and finally salao, which is the worst form of unlucky”

 or:

“Ay,” he said aloud. There is no translation for this word and perhaps it is just a noise such as a man might make, involuntarily [...] “Galanos,” he said aloud.

The language’s formal awkwardness allows it to double up as the speech of a simple man, but with no cute condescension. And as clichés rely on familiarity they cannot survive in such language. That has one problem solved.

Precision is another failsafe against sentimentality which always relies on vagueness:

The old man was thin and gaunt with deep wrinkles in the back of his neck. The brown blotches of the benevolent skin cancer the sun brings from its reflection on the tropic sea were on his cheeks. The blotches ran well down the sides of his face and his hands had the deep-creased scars from handling heavy fish on cords.

Had we been shown only the old man’s neck, we might have managed to insert some remembered sentimental image of old men but the cancer, followed by the unexpected word “benevolent”, and then the mapping of the blotches, to which we are hard put to give significance, put us off our trail. We’ll have to listen instead of sorting facts into pre-labeled boxes and such listening will become a habit. Hemingway leaves no gaps for us to fill, either. During the narration we have to concentrate, for seafaring is an unfamiliar world and much of the vocabulary will be new to most of us. When the author occasionally cuts out a few hours, which of course he must, he does so cleanly and for the reader invisibly. There is no room for us to dream.

Next we will notice how sparing of drama the author is in this dramatic tale. Hemingway published a summary of the story, as he had been told it, in 1936 (my birth year; the story had taken my whole life to mature in his mind). Carlos Baker tells us:

The story of Santiago matured in Hemingway’s mind a full fifteen years before he set it down. In the course of an article on the Gulf Stream published in Esquire magazine in the spring of 1936, he told of “an old man fishing alone in a skiff out of Cabanas” who hooked “a great marlin that, on the heavy sashcord handline, pulled the skiff far out to sea. Two days later the old man was picked up by fishermen 60 miles to the eastward, the head and the forward part of the Marlin lashed alongside. What was left of the fish, less than half, weighed 800 pounds. The old man had stayed with him a day, a night, a day and another night while the fish swam deep and pulled the boat, When he had come up the old man had pulled the boat up on him and harpooned him. Lashed alongside the sharks had hit him and the old man had fought them out alone in the Gulf Stream in a skiff, clubbing them, lunging at them with an oar until he was exhausted and the sharks had eaten all they could hold. He was crying in the boat when the fishermen picked him up, half crazy from his loss, and the sharks were still circling the boat.” (ix) In Introduction by Carlos Baker, Three Novels of Ernest Hemingway, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1962.

The old man of Hemingway’s novel, however, found his own way back home, utilizing the trade wind. He was, as was always obvious, an experienced professional. And though Santiago was disappointed, injured and exhausted, he wasn’t crying nor half crazy from his loss. He was also able to analyze where he had gone wrong. Even at the conclusion of the novel, when the villagers and above all the boy reverently acknowledge the old man’s survival and heroic feat and suffering and loss, there is no drama and our tears are forestalled. Only the boy, who has always truly loved the old man and has unobtrusively and tactfully been supporting him in every way he can, has a right to tears, which he has the discipline to suppress in the presence of the old man.

“ I’ll bring the food and the papers,” the boy said. “Rest well, old man. I will bring stuff from the drugstore for your hands.”

“ Don’t forget to tell Pedrico the head is his.”

“ No. I will remember.”

As the boy went out the door and down the worn coral rock road he was crying again.

At the end, we the readers are then left in the company of tourists who don’t speak Spanish and have never seen a marlin but do show an interest in “sharks” that have “such handsome, beautifully formed tails”. That is our proper place. We have been fortunate to catch a glimpse of something very unusual and beautiful that most people like us will never get to see.

There is another device which Hemingway employs to block sentimental reactions. In his story, as told through the consciousness of Santiago, all things are brothers and equal, the flying fish and dolphins and marlins and birds and the fishermen and storekeepers and the boy and even the sea itself, la mar (not the more usual le mar ) who seems to make love with someone or something under a heaving raft of floating Sargasso weed. Sentimentality thrives best when there are hierarchical structures, when things are taken out of their true context and placed on a pedestal. Even after his achievement, this is not where the old man ends up in this story. The boy knew that from the start:

“Qué va,” the boy said. “ There are many good fishermen and some great ones. But there is only you.” (10)

This “only you” is something far more complex and intimate than hero worship, something that is hard to grasp and needs to be pondered about.

So far, we have spoken about formal devices. But the most powerfully persuasive deterrents to sentimentality are the behavior and attitudes of the characters themselves, in particular Santiago. It is from them we learn how to be truthful and competent in our times. A year before Hemingway published The Old Man and the Sea, the scientist Rachel Carson had published The Sea Around Us, a highly influential and widely accessible introduction to what was at the time the almost unexplored realm of the oceans, unexplored though they covered 70% of the Earth’s surface. In it, many of the phenomena Hemingway’s Santiago encounters are also mentioned and even illustrated: the rafts of golden Sargasso weed with their tiny resident shrimps; the schools of baitfish; the Portuguese men-of-war; the brick-red cloud of microscopic creatures (noctiluca scintillans) one can sometimes find in the water; and the deep trenches and canyons of the ocean floor. With the publication of her book Silent Spring ten years later, which drew attention to the poisoning of the song-bird population with DDT, Carson then initiated the environmental movement. It has steadily grown in importance in the following fifty years as the evidence of human mismanagement of the earth’s resources has become ever more obvious. The serendipitous, coincidental timing of these two books about the sea positions Hemingway’s novel and what it teaches us at the very centre of present day concerns. In other words, Hemingway not only provided a formula for overcoming Victorianism; he also indicated a way ahead into a more responsible, scientifically guided future.

Santiago’s professionalism is one of the first things we notice about him. He has for years been a careful observer of the creatures of the sea and his knowledge of their characteristics and their behavior is wide, though he is always eager to enlarge and amend it. His bait is 125 fathoms down but he can tell whether the marlin is nipping at the sardines, coming back for more, or taking the hook and bait. Eventually he also knows where the hook has lodged. He can tell from the slope of the line how deep the marlin is swimming. Even when nothing much is happening, he forces himself to concentrate of the job:

It would be wonderful to do this with a radio. Then he thought, think of it always. Think of what you are doing. You must do nothing stupid.

And a little later:

How did I let the fish cut me with that one quick pull he made? I must be getting very stupid. Or perhaps I was looking at the small bird and thinking of him. Now I will pay attention to my work and then I must eat the tuna so that I will not have a failure of strength.

He knows his boat: “It is too dangerous to rig the oars as a drag if you must sleep”. Even when exhausted “he sailed the skiff to make his home port as well and as intelligently as he could.”  And he works with precision:

He kept them [the lines] straighter than anyone did, so that at each level in the darkness of the stream there would be a bait waiting exactly where he wished it to be for any fish that swam there. Others let them drift with the current and sometimes they were at sixty fathoms when the fishermen thought they were at a hundred.

But, he thought, I keep them with precision.

Santiago is also a sportsman with a willingness to punish his body in order to achieve results. The marlin line causes deep cuts in his back and hands but he is willing to put up with the pain, occasionally moving the line to relieve bad injuries, in order to catch this fish. The old man’s hero is the great DiMaggio, a champion baseball player, himself the son of a fisherman, who has achieved his successes while enduring the excruciating pain of a bone-spur in his heel. Santiago cares for his body as for a useful machine. He tells himself: “You must devise a way so that you sleep a little if he [the marlin] is quiet and steady. If you do not sleep you might become unclear in the head.” He eats the raw dolphin meat that disgusts him and chews it well because he knows he must preserve his strength and he ceases to eat it when he fears it will nauseate him, for nausea weakens the body and he needs strength. He waits patiently for the cramp in his left hand to pass ( I hate a cramp, he thought. It is a treachery of one’s own body) in order to avoid damaging this weaker hand which he will need. He fears he may now be paying for neglecting it, not exercising it enough. Santiago also has the sportsman’s competitive streak. In a hand contest with the champion negro from Cienfuegos which lasted a day and a night, he persevered to win, and win at the right moment when his audience had to leave to go to work; then knowing he was now an unbeatable champion, he soon gave up this sport in order not to damage his right hand which he needed for fishing. He has the detached and functional approach to his body of the modern sportsman.

But Santiago is not just a professional and a sportsman; he also has a deep empathetic respect for nature and his fellow creatures.

During the night two porpoises came around the boat and he could hear them rolling and blowing, He could tell the difference between the blowing noise the male made and the sighing blow of the female.

“They are good,” he said. “They play and make jokes and love one another. They are our brothers like the flying fish.”

Then he began to pity the great fish that he had hooked. He is wonderful and strange and who knows how old he is, he thought. Never before have I had such a strong fish or one who acted so strangely.

He tells us the story of a  pair of marlin he once encountered: 

The male fish always let the female fish feed first and the hooked fish, the female, made a wild, panic-stricken, despairing fight that soon exhausted her, and all the time the male stayed with her, crossing the line and circling with her on the surface.

That was the saddest thing I ever saw with them, the old man thought. The boy was sad too and we begged her pardon and butchered her promptly.

The old man worries about a small bird that flutters onto his skiff exhausted: “You shouldn’t be that tired after a windless night. What are birds coming to?” Then he apologizes: “I am sorry I cannot hoist the sail and take you in with the small breeze that is rising. But I am with a friend [the marlin he has hooked].”

Later: “You’re feeling it now, fish,” he said. “And so, God knows, am I.” Later still:

You are killing me, fish, the old man thought. But you have a right to. Never have I seen a greater, or more beautiful, or a calmer or more noble thing than you, brother. Come on and kill me. I do not care who kills who.

But at this last thought the old man pulls himself up: Is his mind becoming confused? All the same, the contest with the marlin seems to him much like a dual between champions who honor each other and compete in the knowledge that their lives are equally at risk. In the world of the game fisherman, man no longer has unchallenged dominion over the earth by dint of his technological “trickery” but must earn his right to live just like all the other hunters in the sea.  

But once the contest is over and the huge fish is dead and lashed to the side of his boat the old man does begin to wonder about the morality of his action. Was it a sin? He is not religious and admits he has no real understanding of the concept. He tells himself that he is a fisherman who fishes for his livelihood. But then he corrects himself:

You did not kill the fish only to keep alive and to sell for food, he thought. You killed him for pride and because you are a fisherman. You loved him when he was alive and you loved him after. If you love him, it is not a sin to kill him. Or is it more?

“You think too much, old man,” he said aloud.

But you enjoyed killing the dentuso, he thought. He lives on the live fish as you do. He is not just a scavenger nor just a moving appetite as some sharks are. He is beautiful and noble and knows no fear of anything.

“I killed him in self-defense,” the old man said aloud. “And I killed him well.”

Besides, he thought, everything kills everything else in some way. Fishing kills me exactly as it keeps me alive. The boy keeps me alive, he thought. I must not deceive myself too much.

Then the sharks come, one after the other, and rob him of his catch.

He could not talk to the fish anymore because the fish had been ruined too badly. Then something came into his head.

 “Half fish,” he said. “Fish that you were. I am sorry that I went too far out. I ruined us both. But we have killed many sharks, you and I, and ruined many others. How many did you ever kill, old fish? You do not have that spear on your head for nothing.” (65)

Santiago’s sin is not that he killed the fish, who was himself a killer, but that he fished in an area where he should have known any fish he might catch would be not only too large for a single old fisherman (he had done the almost impossible and managed to hold him and kill him) but too large for his skiff so that the beautiful creature would be lost, wasted on sharks who were but “moving appetites”. He was guilty of a professional miscalculation, not a sin. But the result of this was that he lost his great fish, also his other catch, his lines, his harpoons, his knife, the tiller; and his health. And on his last night he spat out into the sea for the sharks something that had broken in his chest; on his return his hands are also so badly cut that the boy cries when he sees them. 

In Hemingway’s works, religion tends to hover around the edges as an uncomfortably open question. There are holy pictures on the walls of the old man’s palm-frond hut but they belonged to his wife, now deceased and much missed, and have nothing to do with him. But there is, nevertheless, one metaphysical question that haunts the story: that of luck. For the fisherman, luck is quite unpredictable: it follows no rules. After weeks of bad luck, you may have a week of extremely good catches while the bad luck settles on other previously lucky colleagues. When the story begins, Santiago has not caught a fish for 84 days; his luck had turned salao, according to the boy’s parents. In consequence the old man had run out of money even for food. And the parents had ordered the boy, over whom they had parental jurisdiction, to work on another, luckier boat in spite of the fact that the old man and the boy had gone out together since the boy was five. In a situation such as this, even a professional may become reckless and decide to go out further than he should.

Luck is personal and individuals with a scientific bent will have theories about what influences it and what one must do to secure it. Santiago believes that 85 is a lucky number for him; he gets the boy to borrow money to buy a lottery ticket with that terminal and though we do not hear of a win, he hooks the great fish on that 85^th day. But you also need luck to bring the fish in and kill him and twice in moments of crisis the old man resorts to prayer: ten Our Fathers, ten Hail Marys and the promise of a pilgrimage to Cobre the first time, and a hundred of each the second, though he’ll have to postpone the actual saying till later. In extreme peril, it is worth trying anything that could work. There is, of course, no divine intervention in this story. (Nowadays you often hear people who have had a disappointment or a bad experience saying that now they no longer believe in God. The god they prayed to did not promote their personal luck and so they discard him as useless.) For a modern man without religion it is easiest to think of luck as a commercial transaction, as something you can buy, if not with prayer then with goods.  

“I’d like to buy some if there’s any place they sell it,” he said.

What could I buy it with? he asked himself. Could I buy it with a lost harpoon and a broken knife and two bad hands?

“You might,” he said. “You tried to buy it with eighty-four days at sea.. They nearly sold it to you too.”

I must not think nonsense, he thought. 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.

The old man is wise; he knows luck is something far more mysterious and elusive than a commercial transaction, which we expect to be reliable. Even empirical science cannot get a hold on luck though it seems worth continuing to observe her wayward habits closely and analytically for clues as to the laws that govern her.

I mentioned earlier that Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea had a huge effect on our family, and on many others at the time, I’m sure. It demolished the old Victorian ways and brought in a new era. Perhaps under its influence, who knows, one of my brothers fought to become a sailor and when that was not possible, for a while chose boat-building as his trade. Another became a marine biologist. And since reading this little novel, I have often wondered about our times and the trends that govern them. We have, of course, still not solved the problem of luck though, in view of climate change and the catastrophe it may well bring for humanity and nature, we could now do with luck more than ever. But in the course of my adult years sentimentality has been unmasked though perhaps not ousted, beauty has learnt to step back in favor of what was once thought of as ugliness which is far more encompassing, and many of us now prefer topics we can investigate like scientists rather than adore as worshipers. While not everything has changed, things have moved on at their pace. Our lives too have moved on; we are old now. What once was new for us is no longer new and the young will be yearning for change in just the way we once did. For the generation of  my children and grandchildren The Old Man and the Sea can be a tedious text, belabored at school, that tells them things they already know from innumerable nature and travel and sports documentaries watched on TV: things that have now become a natural part of their lives.