Reading The Old Man and the Sea again as an adult.
When I was a child, my mother placed The Old Man and the Sea in my hands and told me it was one of those classics everyone ought to read. I read it because she made me. And all I could think was:
This is unbelievably boring.
An old man.
A boat.
A fish.
The sea.
That was about all I could see in it. Then I grew up and read it again. This time, something caught in my throat.
The Misery of Growing Old
There is something miserable about growing old. Most of us carry some kind of protagonist’s story within ourselves. Some small heroic narrative about the life we have lived, the things we survived, the things we accomplished, the moments when we were strong. We have all been the hero of our own story at least once.
But as life begins to move toward its later years, we are forced to discover again just how fragile we really are. The brilliant moments that once seemed so enormous become surprisingly brief when viewed from a distance.
Strength leaves.
Youth leaves.
Recognition fades.
Even the body that once obeyed us begins to resist. And still, we keep living as though trying not to lose that last thing we call pride. Not arrogance. Something closer to dignity. The quiet insistence that, even after so much has been taken away, there is still something of myself that remains. That is what I see in Santiago.
The Sea Gives Him Nothing
For the old man, this journey may have been one of his last journeys out to sea. And the sea gives him almost nothing gently. There is no convenient hope. No sudden stroke of luck that carries him safely home. Instead, there is pain. The kind that moves sharply through the body and makes a person painfully aware that he is still alive.
Santiago leaves with an empty boat. And after everything he endures, he returns with an empty boat. He sets out to reclaim something of his former strength, glory, and honor. By almost every visible measure, he fails. The great fish he fought so desperately to bring home is gone.
What remains is a skeleton.
His hands are wounded.
His body is exhausted.
The proof of his victory has been eaten away before anyone can truly see it. His attempt to recover the glory of his past seems to end in failure. But was it really failure?
What He Would Never Have Known
If Santiago had never gone back out to sea, there are things he might never have known.
He might never have known that there was still a boy who would look at his wounded, ruined hands and cry for him.
He might never have known that if he disappeared for days, people would notice. They would look for him. His absence would matter.
He might never have discovered that although he had lost the strength, glory, and honor of his younger years, he still remembered how to come home.
That thought stayed with me.
He still knew how to come home.
Perhaps a life can look like a failure from the outside and still contain that much grace.
A place to return to.
A bed to lie down in.
Someone who grieves over your wounds.
Someone who waits for you.
And even after everything has been stripped away, the ability to sleep again and dream the dreams you once dreamed.
Was It Really a Failure?
Santiago comes home without the thing he went out to bring back. If success is measured only by what remains in the boat, then perhaps the journey was a failure. But that is no longer how I read it.
The sea took almost everything from him.
It took the fish.
It took his strength.
It opened his hands and left his body spent.
But it did not take everything.
He returned.
The boy was still there.
Home was still there.
And when the old man finally lay down to sleep, the lions were still there too. The same lions he had dreamed of before.
There is something unbearably tender to me about that now. As a child, I could not understand why anyone had decided that this old man and his miserable fishing trip belonged among the great works of literature. Now I wonder whether I simply had not lived long enough to understand what it means to lose things. Or what it means to return without them.
Perhaps growing older means slowly discovering that not every victory comes home intact. Sometimes all you bring back is yourself.
Older.
Weaker.
Wounded.
Empty-handed.
But home.
And perhaps that is not nothing. This is a book I want to read again just before I die.
A NOTE FROM THE SHELF
For readers who
Want a story about aging, dignity, loss, and the strange distance between failure and defeat.
What stayed with me
He lost the proof of his victory, but he did not lose his way home.
On My Shelf
KEEP — Worth a place on my shelf.
Book Referenced
Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea. Scribner, 1952.
