The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters

00:00:00.000 Hello, and welcome to Chronicles, where today we're going to be talking all about

00:00:17.920 The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway, an absolutely fantastic novel. And obviously,

00:00:25.040 I couldn't cover it without speaking to the man who recommended the novel in the first place,

00:00:30.960 which is, of course, you, Mr. Bodade. How are you? Yeah, fine, thank you. Yeah, I always enjoy

00:00:37.080 chatting to you, particularly about history and literature and stuff. So, yeah, you're sort of

00:00:43.080 on the lookout for, there's sort of endless possibilities with your series. There's so

00:00:47.860 many things. But one, it's quite a short novel. It's almost really a novella, really.

00:00:53.240 You can read it. Two hours. Two and a half hours. The audio book is only a couple of hours or so.

00:00:59.740 But it's one I've always loved. But it's very famous, isn't it? It won prizes and things.

00:01:04.900 Yes. So it came out in 1952, and it won the Pulitzer Prize in 53. And it seems to have been

00:01:12.860 something of a comeback for Hemingway as well. Because by that time in 52, I believe he'd,

00:01:22.360 by 52, he had a book called Across the River and Into the Trees. And this was critically panned.

00:01:29.860 He was just being told by critics, he's lost it. It's not as good. It's not up there with those

00:01:35.520 Hemingway classics. You know, Farewell to Arms and all those incredible novels that first made his

00:01:40.620 career. And so when he published The Old Man and the Sea, he said, I mean, it's very Hemingway of

00:01:47.480 him, but he said, it's the best thing I've ever written. He just knew that he'd nailed it with this

00:01:52.420 one. Yeah. So, I mean, a little bit about Hemingway's life or talk loads about Hemingway,

00:01:58.280 an incredible life. But one of the things to say is that, yeah, this is right at the end of the

00:02:02.160 career. He's an old man. Hemingway is an old man by this point. He sort of famously committed

00:02:06.240 suicide, but he was getting on. And yeah, even by the war years, people had said he's over it,

00:02:13.220 he's passed it. He did all his best work as a young man. Because Farewell to Arms is about World

00:02:18.720 War I, isn't it? He was in World War I. Yes. So that's sort of his date. So by the 50s,

00:02:23.620 he's getting on a bit. And where he was sort of a man's man in all sorts of ways, like he loved

00:02:33.460 hunting and fishing and boxing, womanising, shooting, all those sorts of things. This story

00:02:41.600 does deal with, among other stuff, getting old, being old. Yeah. And so it's sort of obviously his

00:02:49.760 way of, one of his ways of dealing with it. Absolutely. And it's just a great story. I

00:02:55.880 just think it's superbly written. Right. Like a lot of things, you just realise you're in the

00:03:00.460 hands of a superb writer and storyteller. Yeah, absolutely. So honestly, on this particular

00:03:06.220 occasion, I think it best to, normally what we do is, don't we, we just sort of talk through the plot

00:03:10.760 and things as they occur. But really, I think for the sense of this one, actually, to just tell you,

00:03:15.900 the plot is remarkably basic. It's just, you've got an old man and he's, there's a young boy that

00:03:22.740 also helps him out in the, near Havana in Cuba and he's a fisherman and they go off. Well,

00:03:30.680 they've had 80 days without a fish. After 40 days, the boy's parents pulled him away and told him,

00:03:36.160 yeah, this guy's bad luck. He's the worst form of luck. He's unlucky. Go fish with someone who's

00:03:41.120 actually out there catching fish. So the old man goes out alone, goes to catch a fish,

00:03:46.700 finds a humongous marlin. And then in the process of taking three days to capture this fish,

00:03:55.240 proceeds to start to bring it back to the land. And by the time he comes back, there's nothing left

00:03:59.260 because the sharks have eaten it. In a nutshell, that's what happens. Goes out, gets fish, comes

00:04:05.040 back, loses fish. But, but there's so much in it. It's such a deep story. And Hemingway layers it

00:04:15.340 in that way that he was absolutely renowned for his iceberg theory of writing, where you leave lots of

00:04:23.680 information on the surface, but you don't have to, you're not just constantly coddling the audience.

00:04:29.560 You don't need to explain things to them. You've just left all of the information there at the front

00:04:34.920 on the tip of the iceberg. And the further you go down, the more you realize what a philosophically

00:04:40.240 rich story it is. Absolutely. I mean, I'll go so far as to say it's, it's like largely allegorical

00:04:46.700 that there's, I mean, like the idea of, I don't know, maybe animal farms speaks to mind the most

00:04:52.660 obvious example. If you think that's just the story about animals in a farm, well, you've missed the

00:04:58.600 point. There's, there's, it's a, it's an allegory for loads of other things. And the

00:05:03.400 same goes with the fisherman or the old man in the sea. Yeah. Um, but he's actually talking

00:05:08.440 about lots and lots of other things about the entire human condition and the entire human

00:05:15.920 struggle. It's not just about this one man trying to catch a marlin and the sharks eat

00:05:21.540 it before he can get it back to shore. It's more, it's much, much more than that. Yeah.

00:05:25.120 Way more. But we'll get into that, I guess, when we, we will, we will do it. Uh, also one

00:05:29.620 thing to say as well is that this particular story, though it is very much, as you say,

00:05:33.940 very allegorical, it also seems to have been deeply inspired, of course, like with much

00:05:40.260 of Hemingway's writings by his own experiences. And you mentioned, um, just a minute ago, the

00:05:45.720 fact that Hemingway was, um, loved fishing, you know, he lived in Cuba himself and, you know,

00:05:51.560 he went sailing out into the North Atlantic, uh, and caught these types of marlin that

00:05:56.660 the story deals with. And he could recognize all the fish to the point where he was winning

00:06:00.980 all of the local fishing competitions and the locals were getting bit arsy at him, to

00:06:06.580 be honest, you know, having this foreigner coming in and just winning our, taking the 1.00

00:06:10.100 prize money from our local competitions. So Hemingway offered to settle it in the most

00:06:14.900 Hemingway possible and just said, well, if you beat me in a boxing match, you can have

00:06:18.220 the money. And, uh, let's just say none of the locals got that prize money, even older

00:06:24.360 though he was by then. And so, yeah, a remarkable character. So you have, uh, characters in it

00:06:30.580 like Santiago, the main character, the old man, uh, who was going to go into the sea. And

00:06:36.240 he seems to have been very much inspired by a captain Gregorio Fuentes, who was one of

00:06:44.620 the local Cubans that Hemingway knew very, very well, really respected them, was just

00:06:49.920 an expert on fishing. And so there's also honoring an old friend as well. And the, the

00:06:56.000 wisdom of someone that he's known in his own life amongst it.

00:06:59.360 So just a couple of things to sort of hammer the point home about Heming, Hemingway's life.

00:07:04.580 The things he loved most, absolutely loved most was hunting, shooting, fishing, uh, women's 1.00

00:07:13.960 womanizing, drinking. I mean, he's an alcoholic and for a big chunk of his life, what he loved

00:07:20.960 to do most was go out on a fishing boat and sort of drink all day. So that's what he loved

00:07:27.480 most. So, um, a lot of the stuff about the, the actual fishing, like the, the detail is

00:07:33.260 very technical is a bit technical and just very, very real. Right. Um, and so, I mean,

00:07:40.720 even though the old man in the, in the story is based on someone, I feel like it's as well,

00:07:47.340 it's Hemingway. Yes, it is. It is Hemingway. I mean, not that he was, he ever tried to fish

00:07:53.900 essentially by hand in a small skiff like that. It's not, I'm not saying it's like a retelling

00:08:00.620 an anecdote that happened to him in any way, shape or form, but the man's struggle is Hemingway's

00:08:07.140 struggle is every man's struggles. Yeah, absolutely. And also, you know, coming at a time as well

00:08:13.760 when Hemingway is struggling to write as well. And obviously that was his other, probably amongst

00:08:20.440 all of the others writing was his first love. And he had a very consistent style of writing

00:08:26.740 of course, which was, um, something, uh, that was first, um, inculcated into him, uh, when

00:08:32.920 he first became a journalist. Um, and there was a particular style guide for the, um, journalistic

00:08:38.640 outfit he was writing for at the time. I believe it might've been in Chicago. And one of the things

00:08:43.320 was just short, clear, clear sentences and vigorous English. And that style to a T is exactly what

00:08:52.820 you get in the old man in the sea. It's very George Orwell in that respect. It's not full

00:08:57.600 of complicated, pompous language and words. It's very clear, very concise. And they also

00:09:03.560 a wonderful style of repetition that just really powers through. And I find just barrels the story

00:09:10.580 forward with this tremendous energy and urgency to it. Um, but it's so vivid, it's really unique.

00:09:18.180 It's really unique. You can just read it and you, you kind of will just know subconsciously

00:09:22.800 if you know what to look for, that you're reading Hemingway. It's so particular.

00:09:27.080 Yeah. And it is, as you say, very sort of straightforward. It's not something where you need to, uh, be a

00:09:34.580 reader particularly, or you need to get your ear in. Like there's certain things, you know,

00:09:38.580 like Shakespeare maybe, or Edward Gibbon, or even like a 19th century novel. Like, um,

00:09:44.180 I was reading as one of Disraeli's novels the other day, and it's, it's a little bit,

00:09:50.180 you have to work a bit hard, or even Dickens sometimes. Yes. Yeah.

00:09:54.180 I know Dickens less so, but even Dickens sometimes you have to really work at it a bit. You've got to

00:09:58.180 kind of want it to power- You have to trust the process.

00:10:01.780 To power through some of like the really long convoluted sentences and things.

00:10:05.780 Yeah. Well, this is not what you get in Hemingway. No.

00:10:07.780 It's very just short, sharp, boom, boom, boom. No, no potential. No really, really long, obscure words.

00:10:13.780 Like at all. No. Really at all. And I'll just read this. So this is the second paragraph,

00:10:20.020 um, of the text. And it just, it'll perfectly convey to people the, the sort of style that he

00:10:26.260 goes for and how quickly Hemingway is able to set up the story. So he talks about the fact that it's

00:10:32.340 been 40 days and 40 nights, and obviously the loads of biblical symbolism in the story as well,

00:10:38.740 that we'll get to. But just for, uh, to read this passage. The old man was thin and gaunt,

00:10:44.260 with deep wrinkles in the back of his neck. The brown blotches of the benevolent skin cancer

00:10:49.860 the sun brings from its reflection on the tropic sea were on his cheeks. The blotches ran well down

00:10:55.700 the sides of his face, and his hands had the deep creased scars from handling heavy fish on the cords.

00:11:02.020 But none of these scars were fresh. They were as old as erosions in a fishless desert.

00:11:08.500 Everything about him was old, except his eyes, and they were the same color as the sea,

00:11:14.740 and were cheerful and undefeated." So all of a sudden, you understand so much about this man

00:11:23.460 immediately. You understand he's old, you understand the fact, the limitations of his body,

00:11:27.780 he's got skin cancer. And in some ways, he just looks like he couldn't accomplish anything anymore.

00:11:35.380 It's his time's over. You know, the best days of his life are spent. And yet in the eye,

00:11:40.900 there's that undefeated glance of magic.

00:11:44.500 Yeah, I was going to say that he's old and broken in many ways, but completely undefeated. That's the

00:11:54.020 thing, that he has still got strength. He has still got strength. And that's sort of, again,

00:11:58.340 unless you're truly, truly ancient, truly, truly sort of bedridden.

00:12:05.380 When you get a bit older, like in your 50s, 60s, maybe even a sprightly 70-year-old,

00:12:10.820 you're not done yet.

00:12:11.220 No.

00:12:12.420 You're not prepared to just completely roll over and just be bedridden. You're not wheelchair ridden.

00:12:17.460 No.

00:12:17.780 But you're obviously not 19 anymore.

00:12:19.860 Right. Well, you look at actors like Anthony Hopkins or Ian McKellen, who are in their 80s,

00:12:25.060 but they still act because they just have that fire in them to still get up, to still live, to still

00:12:32.420 be a part of that experience that is life.

00:12:34.740 And that type of person that has spent their life doing something physically hard, like being a

00:12:41.140 fisherman out in the open in the Caribbean or wherever. Or, yeah, any sort of laborer that's

00:12:48.420 spent, and they're not, yeah, they're obviously nowhere near their prime, but they've still got

00:12:53.460 the strength to do it though, still.

00:12:55.220 Yes.

00:12:55.700 And that's sort of a vast experience and just, yeah, undefeated. Not quite done.

00:13:02.340 No.

00:13:02.900 Yeah.

00:13:03.460 There's still a spark of energy, of life still in there.

00:13:09.540 They've still got a few stories to tell.

00:13:11.540 Yeah.

00:13:11.940 Yeah.

00:13:12.340 There's still a few to come.

00:13:13.300 Still capable of achieving things.

00:13:15.620 And so that's exactly what we have in this particular story. And so obviously, let's just

00:13:20.100 say you've got the whole thing of, well, they were out at sea for 40 days and managed to find

00:13:26.820 nothing. And obviously you've got Jesus in the desert for 40 days. You've got Noah on the ark

00:13:32.500 for 40 days as well. This feeling of trial, of patience, of endurance, of waiting, of trusting

00:13:40.740 that eventually your look is going to change, that something good is going to come on the other side

00:13:45.700 of this. And so already we get the sort of temperament of Santiago before he's even said anything,

00:13:54.020 just through knowing what these past few months have been like for him and the fact that he's

00:13:59.300 still going out there every day and trying to do it.

00:14:02.100 Yeah. I said before the boy is forced to leave him because I think he says it's like 80 days,

00:14:07.780 isn't it?

00:14:08.100 Yes.

00:14:08.660 After he finally gets back, it's like 83 days. So it's more like 80 days. And yeah,

00:14:13.380 it gives you, again, with very few words, it gives you, some of his short stories are excellent,

00:14:19.780 some of the best writing. It's like really, really economical with words to a sort of a

00:14:25.780 masterful degree though. Yeah. Where it paints this picture of like a fishing community. And if you

00:14:35.700 keep going out to sea day after day and coming back with nothing, you get this reputation as

00:14:39.300 being unlucky. And then that's like a really real thing. It's not just like, yeah, it's not just like,

00:14:47.060 like a bit unlucky and people say it as a joke. No, it's very real that you're unlucky now.

00:14:51.940 The boy's parents don't want him being with the old man because he's his unlucky company.

00:14:58.340 And it's also just another point as well as for Hemingway's writing style, how he just simply says

00:15:04.100 something along the lines of the old man taught the boy how to fish and the old boy loved him.

00:15:10.820 That's all you really get as to how these two characters have come together. There's not

00:15:16.020 paragraphs and paragraphs. There's not flashbacks. You just, you feel the relationship. You feel the

00:15:22.500 history. You feel the warmth, the respect. All of it just comes through in their dialogue, in their

00:15:28.500 routine, which is not even the bulk of the story. Obviously the old man's on his own for the most part.

00:15:33.220 Yeah. But he builds up this relationship so quickly.

00:15:37.140 So just to say that the vast majority of this story is the old man alone at sea in this battle

00:15:44.020 with a giant marlin. But the first quarter of it, or maybe the first third, something like that,

00:15:49.780 is before that. And it's much more about the boy. And there's some dialogue with the boy. They talk

00:15:54.500 about baseball. I guess it's set in the 40s. It never explicitly says what year it's supposed to be.

00:15:58.740 Joe DiMaggio.

00:15:59.460 It must be the 40s or the 50s because he's talking about Joe DiMaggio. And yeah, this

00:16:05.700 relationship with the boy is very rich because the old man, you get the impression that he's

00:16:15.380 basically destitute. Like he's got some sort of hovel, some sort of broken down little hut.

00:16:19.620 And if it wasn't for the boy, the generosity of the boy and the boy's parents, every now and again,

00:16:26.420 giving him a morsel of food, he may well be starving to death because it's the sort of

00:16:32.420 society, the sort of person where if you're not catching fish, you don't eat.

00:16:36.260 Yeah. It's fish to sell to make money and your own food. So if you go 40 or 80 days without

00:16:43.540 catching any, if no one gives you any help, you would be starving to death. So he's actually relying

00:16:49.940 on this boy, his apprentice, to actually stay alive. Yeah. And obviously, the old man, again,

00:16:58.340 even though it's not really explicitly said, or if it is, it's only like once or twice in passing,

00:17:02.580 and then with a soft touch that obviously there's a touch of humiliation to that,

00:17:08.100 that you're supposed to be this, this great fisherman, you're supposed to be the best of

00:17:13.060 the best. You're passing down your, your, all your great knowledge. And yet you can't even catch any

00:17:19.620 fish. You have to rely on the charity of a boy. Yeah. And you also get little hints to the fact that

00:17:27.620 there's a, a old portrait or paint, sorry, a photo of his wife that's turned away and she's

00:17:34.500 obviously since gone. So he had a wife and we've obviously got imagery of, of Jesus and Christianity

00:17:40.660 in the, in the room as well. But also, yeah, as you say, absolutely destitute and poor shoving a

00:17:46.420 newspaper, rolled up newspaper into his clothes for pillows and just putting newspaper over the broken

00:17:53.140 springs of his bed. Yeah. Just absolute poverty, absolute poverty. And yet the old man never really

00:18:05.220 makes a great deal of comment about his actual material prosperity. You can tell that the things

00:18:11.540 that actually plague the man the most in the story is the sense of loneliness that he's feeling at this

00:18:19.460 particular time in his life, that people are disappearing from it, that he doesn't speak.

00:18:24.420 The boy is really his only company at this point. And they'll talk about the baseball and Yankees and

00:18:30.900 Joe DiMaggio, who he admires, which is obviously, obviously has some sort of, I mean, I'm no baseball

00:18:36.340 expert, but obviously I know Joe DiMaggio. And, you know, being one of the most remarkable baseball

00:18:42.580 players, of course, to have ever lived, but also just that willpower as well, right? He, he sees

00:18:49.140 qualities in DiMaggio that he obviously wants to find in himself as well. And this all comes together

00:18:59.780 when he says, the boy says something on the lines of, oh, the Yankees didn't win. He says, yes, but DiMaggio

00:19:05.860 is, uh, he's back on the form again and he'll carry it, you know, that actually the strongest member

00:19:11.060 of your team can just change your tide. And so that's what this is. This is him going out there

00:19:18.260 to try and be the DiMaggio of the sea. Yeah. In a way. I think there's an interesting,

00:19:25.060 well, another sort of interesting thing in the first bit of the story, but before he goes out to sea

00:19:29.460 in the Marlin, the whole Marlin episode, which is the vast majority of the story,

00:19:33.300 is that he's obviously living in this complete poverty, but he's never, there's nothing,

00:19:40.420 there's no real hint that he feels particularly sorry for himself or that it's, that he's in a

00:19:47.140 complete, complete despair and just ready to, no, it's always like tomorrow I'll, I'll catch a fish.

00:19:52.980 Tomorrow I'll catch something. It's sort of the, the mountain to the, every person has to climb

00:19:59.540 in life is that no matter really what gets thrown at you or no matter, um, how much of a dry period

00:20:09.540 you go through, um, never feel sorry for yourself. Just, it has, you have to be in the mindset of

00:20:16.260 tomorrow's going to be better. Yeah. Um, yeah, definitely. And also a really interesting aspect

00:20:21.860 to the fisherman's life as well is that he, there's a particular quote where he basically

00:20:27.060 says something along the lines of, but, you know, I, I was destined to be a fisherman, right?

00:20:33.140 There's never any idea that actually, okay, well, you've been out in the sea for 80 days and caught

00:20:38.820 nothing. Maybe it's time for a train change of job. Maybe it's time to go work for someone else,

00:20:43.780 you know, to do something to, no, I, I was born for this. This is what I am. Um, there's the sense of

00:20:51.220 destiny and actually that he, he is in the right place within the universe. He just needs to endure

00:20:58.420 this bout of bad luck that he's going through. And so there's a real stubborn level of stoicism

00:21:05.540 in the admirable, of course, but, but stubborn. And again, isn't there the allegory of it or that

00:21:11.540 the every man element of it is that, uh, nearly everyone in life, unless you're born to wealth

00:21:17.380 or you win the lottery or something, nearly everyone is staring down the barrel of, um,

00:21:24.420 trying at something constantly every day, maybe for years and years and years, maybe for most of your

00:21:29.220 life, attempting things, trying things with no guarantee whatsoever of success. In fact, you failed

00:21:36.340 over and over and over again. Yeah. Uh, but what else is there? What else is there? What other choice

00:21:43.300 have you got? Yeah. Um, so you, you have to keep going like whatever your thing is, you may, may well not

00:21:50.020 be fishing, whatever your thing is to make it in any field. Um, and there's absolutely no guarantee

00:21:57.620 of success. And you've actually been working at it for a long time with still no real results.

00:22:03.220 Hmm. But, um, that's the human condition. You've got to toil away anyway. Yeah. You've got to keep

00:22:12.020 going. You've got to keep going. Just keep moving forward. Um, there's, there's also, before we actually

00:22:17.300 get to him, uh, taking off in his little skiff, let's also just, um, have a moment to talk about

00:22:22.900 this paragraph as well, which is where he says, he no longer dreamed of storms, nor of women, nor of

00:22:28.740 great occurrences, nor of great fish, nor fights, nor contests of strength, nor of his wife. He only

00:22:36.820 dreamed of places now, and of the lions on the beach. They played like young cats in the dusk,

00:22:43.380 and he loved them as he loved the boy. He never dreamed about the boy. He simply woke, looked out

00:22:49.860 the open door at the moon, and unrolled his trousers and put them on. He urinated outside the shack, and then

00:22:56.500 went up the road to wake the boy. He was shivering with the morning cold, but he knew that he would

00:23:02.980 shiver himself warm, and that soon he would be rowing. Within that one particular paragraph, one,

00:23:08.740 this is something that reoccurs over and over again, the dream about the lions, um, which is obviously very

00:23:16.340 simple. I mean, some people obviously, you can interpret very easily. The cry, uh, the lion is Christ.

00:23:22.500 Um, but I also think, um, I think my own personal view is that it's symbolic of the virtues of youth,

00:23:32.100 right? And strength and pride and, um, capability. Yeah. Sort of like that masculine, um, sort of those

00:23:40.980 qualities that Hemingway admired in himself that he liked in other people. And obviously the old man saw

00:23:48.420 those lions on the beach many, many decades ago by this point. That's the story, isn't it? Yeah.

00:23:54.420 And so it's always there in his memory. Yeah. He says at some point when he was a young lad,

00:24:00.020 or even a child, or certainly a young man or child, he once saw some lions on a beach somewhere.

00:24:05.620 I don't think in Cuba. No, it was in Africa. All right, right. So he's in Africa and he saw

00:24:11.300 on the beach, these lions walking along and it's like sort of some sort of indelible image in his

00:24:16.500 mind. Yeah. And, uh, yeah, Hemingway, uh, recalls back to that a few times. Um, and you know,

00:24:23.700 that is actually one of the few, few sort of kind of ambiguous bits about the whole story.

00:24:29.220 Uh, well, or not obvious, should we say exactly what Hemingway's saying or doing there, but I think

00:24:35.300 you may well be right that it's just, uh, it's just an image of, I don't know, like youthful strength,

00:24:41.460 virility, or just some sort of incredible otherworldly. Um, just, yeah, just like some

00:24:48.180 sort of incredible image. Um, yeah, someone from Cuba would, would, doesn't, doesn't have lions on the

00:24:56.820 beach. Right. So if you saw something as incredible as that, when you was a child in what the very,

00:25:03.220 very early 20th century or late 19th century, um, obviously where there isn't, there isn't, uh,

00:25:08.820 multimedia and you're not bombarded with images in any way, shape or form, that would have been

00:25:13.220 something that would have stuck with you for life. Um, definitely. Yeah. Also just this part towards

00:25:19.700 the end as well, where he just talks about, again, so many sentences like this with, he was shivering

00:25:25.140 in the morning cold, but he knew he would shiver himself warm and that soon he would be rowing.

00:25:29.940 Just things like that. Oh, I've got a problem. I'm cold. Well, you won't be cold when you do this

00:25:34.340 thing. Right. Santiago does this all the time. This is a problem. This is a solution. So just do this

00:25:42.100 thing. Right. He always is just giving himself practical advice or doing away with things. It's

00:25:49.220 like, you know, don't focus on what you don't have, focus on what you do have and what you can work with.

00:25:53.700 Just all the time. You're like, there's a, you can tell he's very, very mentally sharp.

00:25:58.260 There's a lot going on up there all the time. He's not dithering. He's not, it's not Biden. He's

00:26:04.260 really, really on it still. And it's the most simple sort of poverty, uh, solutions to everything.

00:26:12.740 Yes. It's like there's some sort of, uh, hardship or problem or whatever. And, uh, well, I can just

00:26:19.140 manage, I can just do without it. I can just, I'll be fine. To jump ahead a little bit, a few

00:26:25.380 times in the stories, he says something like, um, there's like pain or misery or hardship, but I'm

00:26:31.620 okay. Cause that means nothing to me. Essentially one way or another says something like that. Yeah.

00:26:35.860 It's like, I'm cold. Well, that's okay. Men handle cold. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like, uh, yeah,

00:26:43.940 I know, I know in a minute that, um, I know for a fact that me in and of myself, um, I can just hack

00:26:50.580 it. So it's not a problem. I always, I've always hacked it. Yeah. And I always will. Yeah. Yeah,

00:26:56.180 absolutely. And then there's also just this other, um, paragraph as well that I really think is worth

00:27:01.380 dwelling on because I think, again, there's a lot of, um, symbolic meaning in it where he says,

00:27:06.500 he always thought of the sea as Lamar, which is what people call her in Spanish when they love her.

00:27:12.660 Sometimes those who love her say bad things of her, but they are always said as though she were

00:27:18.100 a woman. Some of the younger fishermen, those who use boys as floats for their lines and have motorboats,

00:27:24.420 bought when the shark lovers had brought much money, spoke of her as Elmar, which is masculine.

00:27:30.900 They spoke of her as a contestant or a place or even an enemy. But the old man always thought of

00:27:37.300 her as feminine and as something that gave or withheld great favors. And if she did wild or 0.94

00:27:43.620 wicked things, it was because she could not help them. The moon affects her as it does a woman, 1.00

00:27:49.220 he thought. So I think there's a lot in that because obviously the gendering of the sea, I mean, yeah,

00:27:57.060 since the dawn of writing, of course, things have had taken on kind of a spiritual femininity or a

00:28:03.220 spiritual masculinity, whether it's Apollonian or Dionysian, you know, in Greek tales. And I think

00:28:10.340 with this as well to really the man's skiff being on board there where things are ordered and he has

00:28:16.900 his tools and it's structured and everything against the untamed chaotic feminine of the sea 0.99

00:28:24.340 and sort of its swings and moods and the lunar cycles that obviously Hemingway is very, very clearly

00:28:30.900 alluding to there. There's this whole symbolic fight in it between feminine and masculine.

00:28:37.860 If you enjoyed this piece of premium content from The Lotus Eaters, head to our website where you can find more.

PREVIEW： Chronicles #25 ｜ The Old Man and the Sea with Beau Dade

Episode Stats

People

Summary

Transcript