Years ago, in my high school English classes, Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man And The Sea and A Farewell To Arms were part of the reading list. The teachers explained that the main characters in these books illustrated a philosophy called stoicism. This outlook was described as exhibiting self-control when confronted with pain (this is the dictionary definition). An associated aspect of stoicism is the acceptance of situations that one has no control over. When Hemingway's outlook was introduced to our 10th grade English class, the jocks were immediately swept away by this idealized macho perspective on life.

In The Old Man And The Sea, the main character is an old fisherman who struggles, for several days, to catch a giant marlin. Due to the great size of this fish, the fisherman is forced to pull the dead fish beside his boat. During the journey back home, sharks eat most of the marlin, leaving only its skeleton. The book ends somewhat anticlimactically with the old fisherman going home to sleep.

The somewhat autobiographical A Farewell To Arms tells the story of an ambulance driver for the Italian army during World War I. The driver is wounded and meets a nurse with whom he begins a relationship. During the course of the book it is revealed that the nurse has become pregnant with the main character's child. At the end, the nurse goes into a long, painful labor, only to deliver a stillborn child. She dies from a hemorrhage. The main character then walks home from the hospital, "in the rain."

In both books, the message is that the unfortunate final outcome must be accepted. No amount of complaining or crying can bring back a devoured marlin or a dead girlfriend. In my opinion, this outlook may seem a bit foreign today. At least, this seems to go against the themes of "getting in touch" with one's emotions that has been in vogue for the last few decades. What do you think? Were Hemingway's characters providing good advice on how to deal with challenging situations, or were they promoting a type of dysfunctionality? If Hemingway was on the right track, how could his philosophy be applied to contemporary challenges?

Alfredo-

Been spending some extra time alone in your thoughts? Not a bad thing really.

I believe we are made for relationship. The stoicism in both these books are dramatized in order to give the sense of hopelessness and loss. A heart wrenching gulp by which we as readers have to deal with much more than the characters.

We are also emotional beings too. When pain and loss happen people grieve. I think our society has a hard time with grieving. You're given about a 2 week grace period then you need to pull it together and get on with life. No amount of crying and emotional outbursts are going to change the situation.

In many other cultures death and loss are felt by the entire community. In some tribes across Africa, one person in the village will paint their bodies in white. The color white represents death. They will dance among the villagers announcing that someone has died. The family is then allowed a full year of grieving the loss of the loved one. The community comes together in their grief so the family or persons don't have to go through this alone.

We are so afraid to show pain and grief. Our society somehow links it to weakness. Vulnerability is actually a strength that is a door towards healing. And ultimately that is where one ends up if grieving is allowed to follow it's natural course.

Two years ago our family walked through that door with the death of my mom. Many years earlier my parents walked through the doors of grief with the death of my older sister at 3 and half. My grandmother's reaction to dealing with grief of losing a grandchild so young was to force my parents to have the funeral the day after she died so my grandmother could get back to her own town and not have to show her own personal grief. It made the grieving process for my folks that much more difficult. However my grandmother's response, though not appropriate, was certainly understandable from the generation she came from.

Alfredo, I'm not sure if this is where you wanted the thread to go so I hope you didn't mind my time in the pulpit.

"I need my pain!" James Tiberius Kirk - "The Undiscovered Country", Star Trek

When I follow down the path of just being totally rational and suppress emotions in this fashion, bad things happen!

As people, we really do need to express things, or we end up with a lot of bottled up energy that can be dangerous.

I'm very weary of the phrase, "getting in touch with your self, or emotions". Really, that too can be dangerous as you could end up in a self-feedback kind of loop, where you end up drained, or over stimulated emotionally.

Part of self-acceptance is understanding how that dynamic actually works. The other part then is managing it, and a huge part of that is simply being ok with who you are and what your current life is.

Perhaps one is not ok. This happens often, and if we are stoic about it, perhaps those healthy cues necessary to motivate us to do stuff, build stuff, go places, love people and all those other things we feel compelled to do, might not happen!!

It's a slippery slope for me.

I resolved it by focusing on unhappiness and dealing with it for my reasons, not others expectations. If anything, that is one healthy element of being stoic! When in that state, it's difficult to be impacted by others.

Another slippery one too!

I'm married. Of course I want to be impacted by my wife. She matters! Of course, what Bob down the street thinks is a whole lot less significant.

And what I think then is partially a function of who I am and what I need, but also partly a function of those trusted others --family.

Friends are kind of that way, but not to the same degree.

In this complex day and age, one thing we do have more of than we did before is ways to have conversations and relationships with one another. Used to be too many of these were a luxery, as simple communication was expensive.

Today it isn't.

IMHO, some consideration about these things, from the stoic point of view is healthy, but not the answer to anything. More like a tool one can use to measure where one happens to be at, or perhaps to factor out things that might be unhealthy noise, emotionally.

I agree with a lot of what Chris said. Stuff that hurts, just needs to hurt. Same for feeling good or other things. That's human. That's being alive.

IMHO, a wonderful problem to have actually!

I see those characters as somewhat dysfunctional. Here's the noodler:

Is this an artifact of Hemmingway's own dysfunctional state, or what? In other words, the deeper thing that always made me think was, can somebody who is dysfunctional actually portray functional and accurate characters?

If so, then it's interesting on many levels, some what related to the stuff I posted.

If not, then we have a more than passing glimpse into who Hemmingway really was emotionally, don't we?


(and that's why it's called literature)

It seems that with each passing year, I am becoming more and more fascinated with how American culture has been changing. I can't remember the exact "a-ha" moment that gave me an appreciation for this, but it probably happened somewhere around age 30.

The Hemingway stoicism "clicked" after I heard the men of the WWII generation described as being "stoic" about their health: they engaged in a lot of bad habits, such as cigarette smoking, hard drinking, diets with a lot of fat and sodium, poor stress management, etc. The caricature presented was that they lived as if they were "made of iron," and when they succumbed after years of this kind of abuse, they accepted their fates. Even Edward R. Murrow, whose biography I am still trying to finish fit this pattern--he chain smoked, did not get adequate rest, and had issues with stress and depression for which he did not seek treatment. His stamina started to decline when he was in his late 30s, and at age 57, he died of cancer. This type of stoicism clearly was not good!

I figured that the school put these books on the curriculum because they wanted students to think about the themes in them. In trying to refresh my memory about the plots by reading the plot synopses in Wikipedia, I was reminded that these books were rather complex. To some extent, I felt that I have it pretty good, compared to the characters in either of these books. On the other hand, to use A Farewell To Arms as an example, I wonder how many young guys out there could handle the traumas of being wounded in combat and having a girlfriend die, all within the span of a few months. I certainly don't think I could have weathered experiences like that, and that thought humbles me. Looking back on my early 20s, I am a bit embarrassed by how whiny I was back then.

In my opinion, Hemingway was certainly dysfunctional, as he suffered from depression, became an alcoholic, and ultimately committed suicide. I think, as Missing_KSKD suggested, that Hemingway's mental health issues definitely came across through his characters. In light of that, I wouldn't take the Hemingway characters as models of how to behave. On the flip side, I often see people spinning their wheels over things that they do not have any way to change. In my opinion, the Internet has greatly facilitated this. For instance--and I mean no disrespect--there are several people on this board who spend a great deal of time on this board complaining of their displeasure with programming and business decisions that are made by people they don't even know (hint: one of these was the cancellation of the oldies format on AM 620). I can't help but think that these people are internalizing those events, which is not an emotionally healthy thing to do. I need to confess that I do this to some extent, even though I know that I need to stop. Even Murrow was known to internalize the drama behind some of the stories he reported.

Ultimately, I'm trying to find a healthy, dignified, and practical balance. I think that balance lies somewhere between Hemingway and the wheel-spinners, but I don't know the exact location. Thanks for the great discussion!