The Hemingway Syndrome

Originally Posted Thursday, August 7, 2014

At the factory, everyone has been taking their summer vacations.  I keep complaining I'm overworked and that I need to get away.  Yesterday at the meeting of the foremen, everyone seemed fresher than I. 

"Is everybody ready to gear up for the new project?" the boss asked. 

"I'm ready to gear up for vacation," I said.

Everybody laughed.  It is a joke, I realize.  I keep saying it but don't follow through.  The others now taunt me. 

"I visited my aunt and uncle.  I was telling them about my trip to Turkey.  My uncle said, 'Ah, we ought to go there, Edith.'  'Shut up, you,' she told him.  'All you want to do is watch it on the television. You say these things and we never go anywhere.  You just sit on your ass.'  That's what you need to do.  Just start watching the travel shows.  It will be just like going and you won't have to leave home." 

Everybody got a kick out of that.  It is funny to them because I used to be the fellow who came fresh from the jungle. 

Whatever. 

I thought about going to NYC next week, but I don't think I could walk the streets right now.  My back and knee are both killing me after my last adventure in running.  "Oh," I tell myself, "as soon as those heal up. . . . "

I also realized just this morning, maybe, that I am the only one who travels alone.  They all go with husbands or wives and or grown children, or they go somewhere they have relatives to stay with, go for weddings and graduations, taking the occasional side trip while they are gone.  It is all the sort of thing I've eschewed my entire life. Maybe I have gotten tired of going alone.  Even Q confesses he can't stand the thought of it.  I don't know.  I don't know. 

I need something, though.  I've realized it lately.  Sometimes you meet someone who causes you to see yourself, not the idealized one you have constructed in your head, but that other one, the one that has become a caricature of the idealized version in your head.  I think I have become a caricature instead of the thing itself.  It happens.  I watched it happen to my favorite professor in grad school.  He was everybody's favorite.  I knew him for a long while after I graduated, running into him from time to time around town.  The things that so enthralled us about him, the verbal phrasings, the timed responses, the gestures that once made him seem so mysterious, all those things grew larger and more obvious.  All the subtlety was gone.  I watched it happen to my ex-friend Brando, too.  Maybe we can call it the Hemingway Syndrome.  I don't want it, but the disease is difficult to conquer.  I've run into that human mirror and am dismayed. 

There is time still, though. . . perhaps. . . .  I've written myself a prescription.  It starts with silence and contemplation. It continues with doing good deeds.  I will start today.  I am going to visit a friend, my old college roommate, who has just gotten out of the hospital.  They took some things from him, and I think he needs cheering up.  I will tell him, "Keep your eyes on what's important, things like the meaning of life."  I'll wait for him to nod in agreement, then I'll ask him, "What was the meaning of life again?" just to torment him.  Perhaps we'll have a good laugh.