The Old Man and the Sea

When a book like The Old Man and the Sea is made the icon and becomes a synecdoche for “Made-in-the-USA” literary genius, for an entire generation, it generally means that for it to be made palatable enough to become the zeitgeist of mainstream America and to reach the level of ubiquity it has, it had to be distilled to a point where the original compounds have been removed. What is left – this sober and simple caricature of what was once an intoxicating and clever portrait- becomes an object that is all too easy for the subsequent generation to view with a sense of cynicism or outright dismissiveness. The afore, coupled with my memory of my father making my twelve year old brother read and write a report on this book as a form punishment for some reason, led me to thirty years of “The Old Man and the Sea” avoidance.

It wasn’t until I recently finished a hackneyed, heavy-handed, and disastrous first draft of a manuscript that I thought it imperative to read this book and only then because of a selfish and fancifully sociopathic turn. I had inadvertently titled my MS with the same compound sentence structure: The ___ and the ___. 

Once I realized this I had to read the book. I mean, Hemingway was not only one of my favorite authors but one of my life’s idols and even though we respectfully disagreed on matters of taste, like Victorian aesthetics and terse, Spartan sentences, maybe there was a fundamental driver that compelled us both to independently arrive at a similar naming convention. My heart swelled when the thought first flowed to my brain; did we share a muse?

I’ll save you the suspense. The above compound sentence structure is one of the most common found in the English language and I am an idiot. 

What I did find, however and finally to the point, is that I really enjoyed this novella and thought it to be very profound and illustrative of, if we are lucky (or unlucky, as one may argue), an honest acceptance of our own old age, a review of our life lead up until our old age and what it has meant, and ultimately the inevitable end of it all.

What I read was not just a story about an old man fishing, but the story of love and sacrifice. This story is the song of the stoic and the ballad of the martyr. It is simply an understanding that life as we know it thus far (and likely have always known it) is inherently an exercise in futility with which the only control one can hope to wrest is the control of your attitude and how to give other people pleasure and love. 

In my opinion the sea was a wonderful metaphor a vast and treacherous life that is intellectually unknowable by virtue of our physical and mortal limitations compared to the deep secrets and power of said vast and treacherous sea. The entire lifespan, experience and expertise of one man with a sole focus, who in this case was “born to be a fisherman”, cannot but put a dent into what can be truly known. Our fisherman, old, frail and barely able to “fish” anymore had in his short span only come to really understand the dynamics and characters at play in a small pool of water north of Cuba. With what hope can a man truly know the world and life if he is disabled with a built-in expiration date that makes investigation of every inch of the sea impossible? 

One can’t, I think the author argues, but one can make the best of his nautical miles and pass the lessons on to our inspired youth with love and sacrifice.