men heartily applauded, but then a bearded man in a wheelchair festooned with ribbons raised his hand and said, “Chad, I don’t think thanks is enough. We need a raising up.”
Ever since Chad had introduced the ribbons, my friend had watched the proceedings with an increasingly quizzical expression. He’d let the ribbons pass him by and seemed utterly bewildered by the dance and the weeping that followed. I suspected that he’d agreed to the conference with no idea as to what the Men’s Movement was about. As the men in the circle began to drum and then rose and pressed in on him, a sudden fear flashed in his eyes and he shouted, “I have bad knees!” The circle collapsed in on him and he disappeared beneath a scrum of half-naked bodies. I could hear them whispering, “You are my brother, Thanh … you have touched my heart … you have touched my soul.” Then, borne by their uplifted hands, he seemed to levitate above us. Around each knee a red ribbon had been tied into a bow.
* * *
Essays on the conspicuous theme of wounds in Hemingway are common, but so far as I know, there’s only that one essay about waiting. And once it is pointed out, you see it everywhere. There’s the cynical Italian major of “In Another Country,” a noted fencer who endures the futile rehabilitation of his mutilated hand. There are stories that are studies in the word pati , to suffer—the root in both patient and patience —like “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” in which an old waiter prays, Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name …
Even as a young writer, Hemingway had a knack for portraying old men, not unlike certain actors who make a career of it—Hal Holbrook doing Twain—though I doubt that even Holbrook could play an aging Papa better than Hemingway played himself. It’s fitting that The Old Man and the Sea got him the Nobel Prize. That book is about waiting, too, but then what fishing story isn’t? Moby-Dick is waiting sustained over a thrashing sea of pages. That’s the problem with the insight about waiting: you have to ask, Why single out Hemingway? Think of waiting as measured by the interminable winters in Chekhov, or by the ticking of clocks in bureaucratic offices at the dead ends of the maze of cobbled streets in Kafka’s Prague. Prague, one of those cities that like London is presided over by a clock.
Limiting the catalogue to just a sample of the writers overlapping Hemingway’s time, there’s Gatsby’s green dock light waiting in darkness and Newland Archer in Wharton’s The Age of Innocence , longing for another woman during twenty-five years of loveless marriage; Winesburg, Ohio , a masterpiece about waiting, an entire community stranded in the stasis of secret lives, yearning for something mysterious and unsayable beneath the cover of night; Joyce’s Dubliners , with its phantasmal patron saint of waiting, the tubercular Michael Furey of “The Dead”; Katherine Mansfield’s heroines waiting for their lives to begin; the passengers on Katherine Anne Porter’s Ship of Fools, waiting for their baggage-ridden lives to change as they voyage into eternity; Beckett’s tramps; Faulkner’s devotion to the word endure —to suffer patiently, to continue to exist. All these writers, who we think are looking toward us into the present, are actually gazing back.
From that perspective it is as if the forward thrust of narrative, as if the very action of verbs, is illusory, that no matter what the story or how it’s told or by whom, the inescapable conclusion is that life—not just life on the page but life at its core—waits. It waits stalled in traffic, doing time at red lights, waits in line for the coffee that signals the beginning of another day, waits for the messages of the day to arrive. Sometimes the wait is imperceptible, but it can also seem interminable—waiting for a phone call from a lover or from the doctor who may pause before delivering what feels more like a
Ever since Chad had introduced the ribbons, my friend had watched the proceedings with an increasingly quizzical expression. He’d let the ribbons pass him by and seemed utterly bewildered by the dance and the weeping that followed. I suspected that he’d agreed to the conference with no idea as to what the Men’s Movement was about. As the men in the circle began to drum and then rose and pressed in on him, a sudden fear flashed in his eyes and he shouted, “I have bad knees!” The circle collapsed in on him and he disappeared beneath a scrum of half-naked bodies. I could hear them whispering, “You are my brother, Thanh … you have touched my heart … you have touched my soul.” Then, borne by their uplifted hands, he seemed to levitate above us. Around each knee a red ribbon had been tied into a bow.
* * *
Essays on the conspicuous theme of wounds in Hemingway are common, but so far as I know, there’s only that one essay about waiting. And once it is pointed out, you see it everywhere. There’s the cynical Italian major of “In Another Country,” a noted fencer who endures the futile rehabilitation of his mutilated hand. There are stories that are studies in the word pati , to suffer—the root in both patient and patience —like “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” in which an old waiter prays, Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name …
Even as a young writer, Hemingway had a knack for portraying old men, not unlike certain actors who make a career of it—Hal Holbrook doing Twain—though I doubt that even Holbrook could play an aging Papa better than Hemingway played himself. It’s fitting that The Old Man and the Sea got him the Nobel Prize. That book is about waiting, too, but then what fishing story isn’t? Moby-Dick is waiting sustained over a thrashing sea of pages. That’s the problem with the insight about waiting: you have to ask, Why single out Hemingway? Think of waiting as measured by the interminable winters in Chekhov, or by the ticking of clocks in bureaucratic offices at the dead ends of the maze of cobbled streets in Kafka’s Prague. Prague, one of those cities that like London is presided over by a clock.
Limiting the catalogue to just a sample of the writers overlapping Hemingway’s time, there’s Gatsby’s green dock light waiting in darkness and Newland Archer in Wharton’s The Age of Innocence , longing for another woman during twenty-five years of loveless marriage; Winesburg, Ohio , a masterpiece about waiting, an entire community stranded in the stasis of secret lives, yearning for something mysterious and unsayable beneath the cover of night; Joyce’s Dubliners , with its phantasmal patron saint of waiting, the tubercular Michael Furey of “The Dead”; Katherine Mansfield’s heroines waiting for their lives to begin; the passengers on Katherine Anne Porter’s Ship of Fools, waiting for their baggage-ridden lives to change as they voyage into eternity; Beckett’s tramps; Faulkner’s devotion to the word endure —to suffer patiently, to continue to exist. All these writers, who we think are looking toward us into the present, are actually gazing back.
From that perspective it is as if the forward thrust of narrative, as if the very action of verbs, is illusory, that no matter what the story or how it’s told or by whom, the inescapable conclusion is that life—not just life on the page but life at its core—waits. It waits stalled in traffic, doing time at red lights, waits in line for the coffee that signals the beginning of another day, waits for the messages of the day to arrive. Sometimes the wait is imperceptible, but it can also seem interminable—waiting for a phone call from a lover or from the doctor who may pause before delivering what feels more like a
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