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“He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff on the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days without a fish.��

A masterpiece.

I know that many many young people are still forced to read this book in school and don’t quite get what all the hoopla is about, but I think it is not written with young people primarily in mind. There is the boy that supports the old man, true, but as with other stories about old people facing hardship—King Lear comes to mind—I think other stories may connect better for young people. I know I read this as a young man, maybe first at 14, and liked it just fine, then taught it in various settings, and don’t think I appreciated it anywhere as much in any previous reading as I do now. Maybe because now I begin to approach the age of the old man!

“Everything about him was old except his eyes and they were the color of the sea and were cheerful and undefeated.��

When I grew up my Dad and his brother Joe took me out fishing for decades, teaching me each time we went out how to fish. Always teaching me. We fished for decades perch and walleye and pike in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, on Lake Manistique. In a boat with a small motor and oars. Or fishing for Coho Salmon and Lake Trout in a larger boat ten-twelve miles out Lake Michigan. Neither of them spoke much in the boat, nor encouraged me to speak, or do much of anything but focus on the fishing lines before me as if in some religious observance. We’d be out on the lake before dawn and get back at dusk. I loved then as now to read, but this was not allowed, really, in the boat. Full concentration was required. I learned how to respond in such a way that I would keep the fish on the line and not allow him to spit out the hook. I learned the very specific strategies for reeling them in. I learned how the fisherman and the fish were in contest, and this required presence in every moment.

“Now alone, and out of sight of land, he was fast to the biggest fish he had ever seen and the biggest he had ever heard of. . .��

I had not read this book for decades, not since my Dad died, now many years ago, so that was part of my reading this time, connecting it to my Dad and fishing with my Dad and Uncle Joe, in a way. I didn’t think much about my own parenting or mentoring, as much, actually, though the book is about that, too.

The book conveys in simple language the fight of one man’s life, for days alone attempting to reel in the largest fish he has ever encountered, who drags him on the line farther and farther out to sea. If you like to fish, this is also a fine book. It’s a Biggest Fish Ever story. And if you like nature, you learn about the importance of the sea and various birds and fish. It's the outdoors, where Hem always preferred to be, a place of purity.

“Blessed Virgin, pray for the death of this fish. As wonderful as he is.��

In the process Hemingway manages to convey several dimensions of his code for living: Courage, humility, endurance, respect for others. And then, it's not about the fish, it's about what it means to be fully human, to the very end. Right, it can be read as allegory.

So, in this match with. . . death, he’s resourceful: “No, no time to think of what you do not have. Think of what you can do with what you have.��

“I will show him what a man can do and what a man can endure.��

“A man can be destroyed but not defeated.��

Hemingway won the Pulitzer Prize in 1953 for this book, and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954. He grew up in Oak Park, Illinois, the nearest west suburb of Chicago. He died of self-inflicted gunshot wounds in Idaho in 1961. I thought of that fact while reading this book, about whether Papa had finally been defeated, out of emotional resources himself at the very end. But as he aged, he wrote one hell of a book about "the human condition," about aging, about the importance of surviving whatever challenges we may face today, about hope and striving, as inspiration for the rest of us.