He lay on his side, his head cupped in the palm of his left hand on a pillow.  He felt a sensation, that of the motion, the steady roll of the earth in space.  A distinct feeling, one almost akin to flying or swimming in a moving current.  The motion had a distant silent hum to it.  Invisible ethereal particles flew past his own form, an intangible mineral atomic wind.  How could much be achieved in action?  The matter would be more about thinking, achieving a perspective.  Through which then one could make a small appropriate action.  The fault was in the thought that there should be action beyond attending to basic matters of food and shelter.  He wasn't really for wine, but nor was he against it.  It's not what goes in, but what comes out of a man that defiles.   But yes, a fair amount of his current practice was unnecessary.

Hemingway was the shyest person you'd ever meet.  It took strong women sensitive to his talents to advance him and protect him.  How to get a story out of him?  That he took care of, in his own way, just through addressing basic fears, child support, death, growing up into a responsible adult, one after another, his subconscious going through a checklist.

Action for Hemingway, despite the image making and the PR that would come later, was simple and mindful as an activity, like watching a fire burn, squeezing orange peels into it to see the colors of the flame change.  The bluster about war and safari and big fish came as later accidents of a man bored, losing some of the vitality of his philosophy in the face of life's complications, if one could put aside his physical restlessness, his need for movement, nature, hands on rods and guns, boats, horses...

Action is the chimera, the illusion...

Facing north as he lay on his side the world seemed to continue its drifting, northward it seemed, as if one was on a boat headed toward a far horizon, speeding very fast or was it going very slow and steadily.  And then he found calm, in this perspective.  Such that he too was shy and too gentle, vulnerable in the way a child would not dare to be, too much of a kind of idiot.  Far out from the world where ego and bluster and prideful actions where such things are counted as counting.  He thought of Lincoln's famous dream of being on the prow of a ship, for indeed the man had achieved some perspective in life to know that it all was moving, that all was relative.  Reassuring somehow.  Nothing needed be done except ending the war, the bloodshed, along with legal equality, along with putting things back into place.  A need for silence after the great statement of the world reacting so violently and thoroughly to an incremental measure of change.

For every action, an equal and opposite reaction, but how could one know how powerful or mighty the initial action might be, as all things are relative as far as perspective, thereby to gauge what might follow.  Best to sit calmly after rocking the boat so, as it were.  Hope fondly, pray fervently.

Yes, it must have been interesting to be there in the rented room in Paris where Hemingway worked, squeezing orange peels into the fireplace to see the reaction.

And so it is that the most revolutionary things, when you stop to think and see them then as such, are, like sayings of Jesus, very simple and ordinary almost.  Happy are the meek and the mournful and the poor with time on their hands and not enough opportunity to be engaged in profitable activities as they are put in a position in which they must think philosophically, maybe even write down a few things for the sake of clarity, as an exercise in mental health.  Because all you have in the end is that you're stuck in your own perspective, in your own head, so that you will, in turn, realize the great relativity of perspective and of how everything is in motion.

So why get worked up about anything...  All you are, can be, is a friend to the human species and see its presence in others and perhaps even in plants and trees and maybe even inanimate objects (as conventionally viewed) alive in mineral and atomic life just as we are but with different karma.



Is it that you have to learn, through long measure, how to ignore people?   Is that what Lincoln learned in his baths of public opinion...