In the night, nice and dark, it becomes clearer to me.   Hemingway in Cuba, and before, was on his way to be a desert monk.  Like St. Anthony of Egypt.  He retreated, always, really, to nature.  To close animal friends, to like minded-outdoor men like Gary Cooper, to his childhood in a wild Michigan we'll have a hard time finding now.

It's the hardest act to pull off.  The writer artist's necessary call to the solitude where he will use words to analyze himself.  He must stride the world of society and his own private reactions.  As Hemingway did.  Finca Vigia, then driving 15 miles westward into Havana to the bars.  A social life, but balanced throughout his life, the quiet removal from the world.

"Go and sell what you own.  Give the money to the poor."  St. Anthony hears and follows the command of Jesus.  He retreats from the world, first at the edge of the town of his family, doing physical labors, prayer.  In the desert he meets the enemies of anger and greed.  He withdraws, rather than continue entangled, a victim of society, in order to escape the seductive impulsions of the world, the sinking ship.  Solitude of the desert, the furnace of transformation, to rid one's self of anger and hatred, of all the temptations Jesus found in the desert, the transformation of solitude.  This is where the writer is headed, bowing out into a longer silence with a final Brothers Karamazov after a fraught life.

There's a reason Kerouac liked to sleep outside.  He was not a lazy man.  This was the Christian road for him, the way of being a disciple, a comforting proof, similar to Hemingway's intimacy of his cats.  Perhaps in someway abetted by the sugar fuel of the port wine, but then trees run on sap and sugar too.  He knew his family, his mom, his sister, his brother in law, down  in Rocky Mount where he stays during the Dharma Bums tales, couldn't consistently provide, given their resources, the emotion support he might have needed, so, "inwardly (he) turned to God."  "Go thou, go thou, die hence, go roll your bones, go groan, go moan... go moan for man,"  or whatever it is exactly that he beautifully wrote and uttered on Steve Allen, old Jack Kerouac from Lowell, Massachusetts and other places.  Kerouac liked, enjoyed, the monkish simplicity, the setting of boundaries by going off on his own, a habit he had his whole entire professional life.

Hemingway, life in Paris, being a bon vivant, is a Christian life as well, the discipleship of the cafes, the contact with artists of different stripes, the waiters, the other writers, a sense for travel and wide possibilities.

The thoughts of Henri J. M. Nouwen playing in the background on my iPhone on YouTube, coincide at this chapter in life, looking for a bridge.  Yes, I have been a people pleaser, I have given in life to help other people, and at a cost.  I've been a person used, shut off to things and people that might have brought me joy and relationships, a wife, a different path in life, a happier one.  I've let how others look at me become as a large part of my identity.  I have not established my boundaries as I should have.  I've not thought as highly of myself, rather thinking myself inferior.  But that all seems to be a classic pattern.  "Let go of all the self-made props," Nouwen tells us.  "Trust the inner voice."  Stop seeking everyone's opinions and input, which only tangle you up, leaving you dependent on all you've listened to.  And I fit the pattern.  I worked as a bartender for more than twenty five years, alone at the end of a day or night.  You give to your people, and then you eventually discover that they aren't able to provide you the emotional support you might think they could provide.  It's not their fault.  And that realization is a help in going "back to Jesus," the places you feel you need to go to.

"The inner voice of love:  Work around your abyss.  There is a deep hole in your being. You will never succeed filling that hole, because your needs are inexhaustible.  You have to work around it, so that gradually the abyss closes. Since the hole is so enormous, and your anguish so deep, you will always be tempted to flee from it.  There are two extremes to avoid, being completely absorbed in your pain,  and being distracted by so many things that you stay far away from the wound you want to heal.

"Cling to the promise:  Do not tell everyone your story.  You will only end up feeling more rejected.  People cannot give you what you long for in your heart.  The more you expect from people's response to your experience of abandonment, the more you will feel exposed to ridicule.  You have to close yourself to the outside world, so you can enter your own heart and the heart of God through your pain.  God will send to you the people with whom you can share your anguish, who can lead you closer to the true source of love."  Henri Nouwen, A Journey Through Anguish to Freedom.  1998.  (Found on YouTube.)

There's a light covering of snow over the tops of the cars out in the parking lot, lit by three street lamps visible out the window.  I make a tuna and white bean salad for the morrow, red onion treated with lemon squeeze, zest, a forgettable dried sprinkle of oregano.

I pass the night before my birthday proper in some agony.  But I manage to rouse myself, come downstairs and the first thing mom says is, are we going to do anything fun today.  I have in mind taking a shower, and shaving.  I have lived for fifty-six years on this earth, as they say, apparently.  There's even some sunlight coming through the clouds, if not any blue sky to be found.

The television on upstairs, Christine Amanpour, mom being quiet now on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, my birthday of 56 years, a light crystalline lake effect snow falling just like It's a Wonderful Life when George Bailey is suddenly back in the present world, present in time again, back in Bedford Falls, as far as explaining what the snow is like, just as it was a billion tiny perfectly round golf balls an inch thick over the grass the night before, I think of the great void in all of us, the great emptiness at our core.  The great unquenchable thing, the abyss we must work around, by first accepting, and then asking for some kind of change.

With mom off to bed, finally, again, I let the cat out, as he's been crying at me, yelling to be released.  I do the dishes.  I gather the plastic Pepsi little bottles, into one tall kitchen garbage bag, put my boots on, coat, hat, and walk out into the night to put the bag in the back seat of the car.  Through the powder on top of tiny golf ball snow upon the grass I see our friend's paw prints, and I'm somewhat alarmed to see, so it goes, that they out into the parking lot, along the backs of parked cars.  I follow on, and they lead out into the road, so maybe mom is right about keeping him.  A big blue snow plow truck with its snow blade scraping up sparks on the road comes down the moraine hill in the distance and past me as I stand in front of the first of the two farmhouses, where the cat's foot prints in the snow lead me.   I walk back, put the bag I've carried along into the backseat of the Toyota.   I come back and up to the townhouse barns for people, and there coming along the back side, to the kitchen door, he's been waiting for me.  I take him in.  As I come in and stamp my boots, there's mom in the kitchen again.  

 At night, in the peace, praying within myself, I know the wordless truth.  There was a king with a Midas Touch who sat commanding on a Golden Defecatory from his great abyss, his absence of soul.  A crass manipulator, whose command smeared the temples of democracy with shit and lies and conspiracy theories and murderers.

And it was part of fallen human nature, untaught, manipulated, that from their own abyss and compulsions for some form of identity, their lacking, that so many have listened to him, and he preyed upon them.  He promised an identity, that he'd be there with him.  One would hope that he would only disappear into the mastering of his own illusions.

Anyone with a soul would come, at some point of wise years, to know that hollow place within that cannot be filled.   I too have tried to fill my own voids, as a less than perfect male, an escapist.  I have spent sinful time with publicans and sinners, been gluttonous and a wine-bibber, knowing myself as a weak and powerless sinner, to use a language, terms we are in rational modern life we have become detached from.

But I will go on.