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5. Introduction
Ahoy, reader!
Considering our most read article in Agency is the edition about Steve Jobs…
I thought it would be a good idea to bring forth one of the most american hearts in history for this new Quote.#.
Ernest Hemingway was one of the most influential writers in human literature.
He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1953 for "The Old Man and the Sea" and the Nobel Prize in Literature the following year, in 1954.
This was a man that mastered the art of narrative but that even though he loved writing about life - he only could do it so well, because he lived the fullest experience life can offer.
Both good and bad.
He is the reason so many people still believe that a good writer must first be a man or woman of experience, that the page only holds what the life has already survived.
We previously studied his Iceberg Theory (with a twist) in the first edition of Writing.#
Hemingway called himself a reporter who happened to write fiction, but that was a modest title.
He was one of the writers most responsible for reshaping how the twentieth century thought and wrote about courage, violence and the quiet dignity of loss.
Until we lost him with 61 years old.
For a 12-gauge shotgun cartridge
Shot with his Boss & Co Double Barrel Shotgun
By his own hands.
In his own head.
I know, it sounds grim.
But what can we say about the shrapnels of life’s grenades in the heart of a huge colossus of a sensitive man?
Here in Agency we are not strangers to the subject of death.
We look at it with curiosity and openness, like we do with everything else.
Because when death is seen without taboos…
It can teach fundamental things about life.
In the same way that life… is a fundamental thing about death.
For the lack of agency is the absence of will.
While true abscence of will, can only come from death.
And in order not to die, you just need…
Well… To stay alive.
Back to the living memory of Mr. Hemingway.
That mythological hammerhead of a human shark.
He is not around us anymore, but he left us a will.
A true testament of what a human being can endure.
While still managing to produce wisdom, poetry and tenderness to society.
Such a blessed pen doesn’t come around very often.
PTSD, Alcoholism, head concussions and two airplane crashes in the interval of two days.
I just wrote: two airplane crashes in the interval of two days.
You just read: two airplane crashes in the interval of two days.
Skull fracture, ruptured internal organs, burns and many other serious injuries.
This man went through it all.
Like Santiago, the fisherman in his novel “The Old Man and the Sea”.
That fought off nearly seven sharks to bring his biggest catch home, even though it came back as bare bones.
And that sang softly to the sea while it was destroying him alive:
“A man can be destroyed but not defeated.”
Ernest Hemingway
