How Ernest Hemingway Saved My Life

Growing up my father was one seriously messed up SOB.

He constantly cheated on my mom, sometimes with me in the next room wondering what he was doing to the poor lady to make her scream like that.

He missed birthdays, baseball games, karate matches, and later the birth of my daughter. He was physically and mentally abusive and an alcoholic.Once he spent our savings taking a woman he was having an affair with to Europe, though I did not go on a real vacation until well after college.

At seven, he locked me in a dirty, dark cellar so he could have sex with a woman that was at our house. When I was eleven, he broke my nose because I opened my Christmas present early.

I carried anger and hatred for him my entire life. Worse, he was my only example of what a man should be. You can guess what happened.

By the time I hit 19, I think I had a death wish. I boxed so much that my instructors had to tell me they refused to train me until I was adequately rested from my last bout. I was in a bar fight every weekend, raced motorcycles that I was no good at racing, jumped off roofs because people at drunken parties dared me to. Once I sped down a residential street at a 120 mph on the wrong side of the road playing chicken just to see if anyone dared not to move . . . I was psychotic (everyone moved by the way).

And then, I rediscovered a world I had not seen since I was kid: the world of books. I read Nietzche, Kierkegaard, Sarte, Fitzgerald, Homer, Aristotle, Plato, Marx, Hume . . . the list goes on and on. But one man stood above them all: Hemingway.

I think my first exposure to him was an old library copy of his collected short stories. I got to the Snows of Kilimanjaro and re-read it several times. Then I went through his novels beginning with A Farewell to Arms. I was hooked.

His writing was revolutionary (read his novels and find me one misplaced word, just one), and controversial (they were burned in 1933 as examples of decadence and have been called racist and homophobic since the 1980's) and degraded by intellectuals (Gertrude Stein called it filth and overcompensation for homosexuality).

But none of that mattered to me. It was his characters that I fell in love with.

His characters have a depth to them that many overlook upon first reading. They have a depression that follows them but it's a depression that ends ultimately in the belief that life is worth living. Even beautiful and wondrous. He taught me that nature is where the meaning of life is found. It's where rebirth happens. No matter what happens in your life, rebirth is possible.

He led directly to my present personality and pursuits. I found adventure, nature, risk and in it all, the most important lesson Hemingway taught me: how to be a man.

People do not realize how difficult it is to be a good man. Most men glance over the question and most women don't understand why we can't come to terms with what being a man means.

Though I was nearly suicidal, Hemingway taught me that by facing death boldly, not encouraging it, but facing it boldly, one can live a meaningful life. His characters had fathers like mine, but they loved life. Through that example I saw that I too could love life. That the past didn't matter and all I had in front of me was the future, untouched by my childhood.

That, in the end, was what I learned a man was. Someone, that despite all the horror and pain that life can throw at you, is in love with life. This, at 33, is the philosophy I hold now. The philosophy that got me through those dark times when life didn't seem worth living.

Hemingway wasn't the first to express this philosophy, but no one in history has expressed it quite so beautifully.

 Thanks old man, wherever you are now.