Complicated Legacies and Time Marching On
So my MFA program is in full swing. Classes have started an everything is starting to chug along. One of my classes is an American Literature class that is focusing most of the semester on Ernest Hemingway. The professor posted a link to a PBS documentary on Hemingway’s life for the class to watch. I’d seen it before but it had been a while so I watched it again. Fascinating stuff. I’ll be the first to admit: I’m a Hemingway fan. The man could write a damn good sentence. But the man behind the writer? Kinda a douchebag. Definitely in need of therapy.
It was super weird to hear the man’s kids (much older adults when the documentary was filmed) talk about him. How casually they mentioned his drinking, his infidelity. Blows my mind. But I suppose it’s better than the alternative? I’d rather they confront the honest truth of him than try to gloss over the less than savory parts. Must be tough though, right? To live under the shadow of such a man? A man that so many revere or despise? Legacies are hard. Especially if, after you’re gone, people want to search every nook and cranny of your life to see what they can find. Is that the cost of being someone who will be missed? Or even just someone who led an, for better or worse, interesting life?
I wonder sometimes about my own legacy. Assuming I’ll have one. It’s weird, because I feel like my personal legacy is already tied up in that of my father’s. He died fairly young at the age of 48 and since then I’ve kinda considered myself his requiem. I am very aware of the sacrifices he made and how much who he was and what he did helped shape me into the person I am and the one I am constantly striving to be. So my legacy will be an echo of his. Is that how legacies work, then? Are we echoes of the ones who came before? Maybe that’s just how time and the world work.
Time is a weird thing. I had a thought yesterday that struck me. I got to know my dad for a smidge over 19 1/2 years. December of ‘87 to September of ‘07. I’ve known my two best friends for 23 years. We met in the fall of ‘00. And are still hanging around practically in each other’s pockets. So I’ve known them longer than I got to know my dad? How does that math work? How is that allowed to happen? It’s weird.
His favorite musical artist was Bruce Springsteen (me too!) and yesterday, his masterpiece of music, the album “Born to Run” turned 48. That’s how old my dad was when he passed! What the hell? Music doesn’t die (thanks Mr. Shelley). It gets to live on forever. So it’s gonna outlast us all. It shouldn’t be a surprise that this one outlasted my dad. But dang. When you start comparing timelines to lives things get weird.
So what is time but an unending, unbending march forward? And what are legacies, but the things we mark such time with?
“Forget your personal tragedy. We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to hurt like hell before you can write seriously. But when you get the damned hurt use it—don't cheat with it. Be as faithful to it as a scientist—but don't think anything is of any importance because it happens to you or anyone belonging to you.”
Ernest Hemingway, in a letter to Scott Fitzgerald, dated 28 May 1934