Exestential Questions

You'll often see "The hardest lesson I’ve had to learn as an adult is the relentless need to keep going, no matter how shattered I feel inside,” attributed to Papa Hemingway. While it matches what we know of how his life ended, he doesn't appear to have actually said it. I don't know that he believed it.

Although he wrote about a man who spent the last of his strength to catch a fish, only to have the sharks eat it, he never spoke directly about the futility of life, but constantly indirectly.

Most of my writing involves these existential questions. Hidden in my stories, and sometimes in plain sight, I discuss people trying to make their way through the existential question and whether or not to leave something behind, including me.

At lunch with Brent and my boy Sam, we discussed the number of professors who, upon being forced to retire, either gave up on life like Lance or decided to actively end their long and storied lives. We don't think of teaching as a particularly stressful career, but the stress seems to come from giving it up for some. Without it, they questioned the need for breath.

Papa died knowing he was dying. That changes the narrative.

This leaves us with John Kennedy Toole and Sylvia Plath. Both wrote books that my bespectacled literary classmates carried in their backpacks. Both found no answer to the existential question and chose to stop asking before they were forty. Toole drove to Biloxi to do it to save effort on his mamma, but only after visiting the home of Flannery O'Connor, which wasn't yet open to the public.

Some people called Emily Dickinson "The New England Mystic." Others called her a ghost. I once spent a year and thousands of dollars trying to save a promising woman who told me she had nothing left to live for. I wrote a play about it, but it dangles in a web of indecisiveness. She gave me a framed copy of "I shall not live in vain," then begged for understanding as she left Mississippi forever.

Before dying, Dickenson wrote "The Dyings have been too deep for me, and before I could raise my Heart from one, another has come." And then it was her turn. She had no answer to the existential question.

My parents described writing as a "dangerous profession," saying they ended up drunks or worse. Of the writers I knew, that was pretty accurate. It was accurate of lawyers, too. Watching Jackson's most famous criminal lawyer run down the street to avoid reporters when his own weakness was exposed changed my perception of humanity forever. Reading what he testified to in the murder trial of Frank Haines changed it again,

I never knew if my parents were addressing the profession of writing or my melancholic personality. To them, I must have seemed to vacillate between Jason Compson demanding that Benjy be sent to Jackson and Quentin Compson buying four Taylor's goose weights in Cambridge. In truth, I was both, although I never really considered the question of Caddies' soiled bloomers; I could feel the creeping declivity in the once pure fecundity of our Jackson home. Although there are shimmers of green, I still do.

I spend a great deal of time encouraging young writers, which must seem insane considering what I know about writers. What I know is that nobody encouraged it in me. There were people who thought they were carrying my child (they weren't), or surviving off my largesse, who never knew I wrote a word, even though it happened every day. "Oh, he's on the computer again."

You have to let the thing breathe. It might end up in disaster, but so far, I've known more lawyers who met the same fate, although there were always questions about whether or not a client did it.

Lance believed and taught that, among actors, writers, and painters, you should only do it when you can't do anything else. Working with Lance on his last two plays, he would weep bitterly about his diminishing ability as we made our way from his car into the Christian center. Hiding his declivity from everyone we could, I pretended to be the only one who could see him giving up. I wasn't. Not too many years after Lance gave up, his last actor, Matt Henry, gave up too. Maybe their fates were entangled.

Some number of the young writers I see are the child and grandchild of people I've loved since long before they were imagined. It becomes an ancient debt of honor to believe in them. It helps that they're often quite good. Rather than telling them stories about Willie Morris drinking himself blind or Faulkner digging holes in his driveway so fans can't visit, I tell them stories about Miss Eudora and Charlotte Capers, driving around Jackson with Rowan and Susanne as Belles of the ball in their last years. It doesn't have to end badly.

Although I'm pretty sure I've only ever really loved just one person, I was pretty excited about having my first ever girlfriend, even though she was somebody else. Before earning her learner’s permit, her family found her feet swinging freely in the air one afternoon.

"Oh. Thanks for telling me." I said.

"Are you ok?'

"A hundred percent. I promise. I. I, uh got stuff to do, can I be excused?"

A hundred percent is almost always a lie, but what did they think a fourteen-year-old would say?

I always thought it curious that Quentin chose Taylor's goose weights to complete his task. I always suspected it had something to do with their swan-like shape. Swans symbolize life, death, and lust. Faulkner never explained these things.

Toole ran a piece of pipe from his exhaust to the window of his car. One lawyer hung himself from the balcony of his condo. Another opened the back of his head parked in front of the Hinds County courthouse. Young Stewart was found by his brother. Neither were young anymore. All seeking answers to the existential question.

Before "The Old Man and the Sea," Papa wrote "The Sun Also Rises" about young expats asking the existential question. It's said that he helped invent the Bloody Mary in this period, but nobody knows who Mary was.

Typing this with my bandaged finger, Feist-Dog points out that I can see the sun peeking over the trees from my window. I should make coffee. Feist-Dog is an imaginary talking dog I stole from a long-dead morning DJ. Some of you have never heard a DJ on am radio.

Feist-Dog is back again to remind me that The Sun Also Rises. I can see it. Every day, I can see it.