Farther.

Justice McNeil reviews Hemingway's Boat ...

Hemingway was the captain of his own boat. He went where he pleased; he avoided places he wanted to avoid. He could admire the beauty in something that was tragic simply because it was real. He could admire and appreciate that there was more than what he could immediately see and understand. He could feel indescribably that being on the Gulf, in Pilar, gave him a part of the great flow, the greater story. This story involved all those things, known and unknown, happy and not, that he admired and that inspired his writing. Part of understanding this indefinable feeling is to understand that a stream will always flow forwards. That implies that one can never go back. There was quite a lot in Hemingway’s life that he could not go back to.

Edens lost. This is a theme flowing through his life and through his work. In A Farewell to Arms, the lieutenant in Italy is thinking about a far-off Michigan, although it is never named as being so. This recalls Hemingway’s youth. A time when his family planned on making an Eden-like retreat in the Michigan woods. But this would never be, so he must return to it only in his imagination. Then there were the lost days of his youth, lost in the war. The happy days of his first marriage with Hadley, his only “true” and “pure” marriage. There were the days in Paris and the many friendships that he lost because of pride and ego. In his writing, trying to regain the Edens lost, Hemingway is caught somewhere between how he wished things to be and how he knew things were. But even so, he can’t go back. No one can.

If you can’t go back, is your only real alternative to go farther out? Perhaps that is how we ought to understand Pilar and Hemingway in the Gulf. Again, it all goes on and the sun also rises.