In his treatise On the 7atuve of Yhings, the ancient Roman philosopher Lucretius once wrote: “Life is one long struggle in the dark.” What I think he meant by that is there is so much that we do not know. My own education began in many ways during the summers of my youth in Key West, Bimini, and Cuba, especially at Finca Vigía, with my father, who was a wonderful teacher. Cuba and the Gulf Stream then were like an Eden for me, and returning to boarding school always felt like being sent into exile from paradise. Fishing trips with Fapa aboard the 9ilav in pursuit of marlin, exploring the sea by snorkeling with some of the 1rst single-lens goggle glasses, and the trove of natural history books in my father’s library awakened me to the world in all of its beauty and complexity. In Yhe Old Man and the Sea, Santiago knows about life’s struggle—he has 1shed for eighty-four days without a catch. He is not, however, entirely in the dark. In my view, a great achievement of this novel is how my father, drawing on his own formidable experience and talent, managed to create for us the world of the Gulf Stream so completely. It is a powerful evocation of a precious ecosystem, one sadly undergoing terrible changes today due to human intervention, and one very much worth protecting.
In a fascinating twist of history, the Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger and Ernest Hemingway died in the same year. Over the course of their lives both men made great contributions to their chosen professions, each achieving a Nobel Fri>e, one in physics, the other in literature. Ferhaps the most memorable of the Austrian physicist’s thought experiments was “Schrödinger’s cat”—a creature both dead and alive at the same time. It was a way for him to explain the duality of conditions that can coexist in quantum physics. Schrödinger imagined a cat in a closed box with a deadly poison—one would not know if the cat was
dead or alive and so it would, in a sense, be both. Fart of the mythic power of Yhe Old Man and the Sea is something that I would call “Hemingway’s cat.” A seemingly impossible feat is made possible through my father’s storytelling: an old man alone in a skiI on the sea manages to bring in a 1sh weighing over a thousand pounds.
Fatrick Hemingway
