The Irony of Being Earnest, or Being Ernest, or Being Important in Oak Park -- part I
Assignment 52 -- Home Town Tourist Attractions -- Ernest Hemingway Birthplace, 339 N. Oak Park Ave., Oak Park, IL
Oak Parkers are very proud of their native son, Ernest Hemingway. They're even proud of his famously derisive description of the village as "a neighborhood of wide lawns and narrow minds." I suppose that's because they think they've changed.
The Hemingway Foundation provides tours of the birthplace house, lovingly restored to Victorian splendor, with amazing attention to the accuracy of details gleaned from such hints as scraps of wallpaper and descriptions by Hemingway's sister Marcelline. The Foundation also maintains a museum a block away, with photos and artifacts. I do have to wonder what Hemingway might have to say about the fervency of his local admirers. He certainly said many irreverent, puncturing things, though he also said things that feed right into the Mythologizing of the Great Macho Writer (who did not care for his first name, by the way, because of the Oscar Wilde title).
Here are a few Hemingway quotes that resonate with me, while wandering the leafy, wide-lawned streets, on my brief ad hoc literary appreciation & walking tour:
--All stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is not a true-story teller who would keep that from you.
-- There isn't any symbolism. The sea is the sea. the old man is an old man. The boy is a boy and the fish is a fish. The shark is all sharks, no better and no worse. All the symbolism that people say is shit. What goes beyond is what you see beyond when you know.
-- The most solid advice for a writer is this, I think: Try to learn to breathe deeply, really to taste food when you eat, and when you sleep really to sleep. Try as much as possible to be wholly alive with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell. And when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough.
The Irony of Being Earnest, or Being Ernest, or Being Important in Oak Park -- part I
Assignment 52 -- Home Town Tourist Attractions -- Ernest Hemingway Birthplace, 339 N. Oak Park Ave., Oak Park, IL
Oak Parkers are very proud of their native son, Ernest Hemingway. They're even proud of his famously derisive description of the village as "a neighborhood of wide lawns and narrow minds." I suppose that's because they think they've changed.
The Hemingway Foundation provides tours of the birthplace house, lovingly restored to Victorian splendor, with amazing attention to the accuracy of details gleaned from such hints as scraps of wallpaper and descriptions by Hemingway's sister Marcelline. The Foundation also maintains a museum a block away, with photos and artifacts. I do have to wonder what Hemingway might have to say about the fervency of his local admirers. He certainly said many irreverent, puncturing things, though he also said things that feed right into the Mythologizing of the Great Macho Writer (who did not care for his first name, by the way, because of the Oscar Wilde title).
Here are a few Hemingway quotes that resonate with me, while wandering the leafy, wide-lawned streets, on my brief ad hoc literary appreciation & walking tour:
--All stories, if continued far enough, end in death, and he is not a true-story teller who would keep that from you.
-- There isn't any symbolism. The sea is the sea. the old man is an old man. The boy is a boy and the fish is a fish. The shark is all sharks, no better and no worse. All the symbolism that people say is shit. What goes beyond is what you see beyond when you know.
-- The most solid advice for a writer is this, I think: Try to learn to breathe deeply, really to taste food when you eat, and when you sleep really to sleep. Try as much as possible to be wholly alive with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell. And when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough.