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It’s been a mammoth couple of months, during the summer of last year I decided to take a step back from my studies of pure philosophy, don’t get me wrong I still love Nietzsche, Carl Jung as well as the enduring wisdom of the Stoics and many more besides, but I felt the need to look to the world of the literary classics, immersing myself in the depth of their storytelling. I had the strange sensation that I was missing out on something, I’d never read for instance ‘The Old Man and the Sea,’ yet everybody talks about it, it’s frequently raised in reference to the Nietzschean ideal of man triumphing over nature. Now that I’ve read it all I can say is that it’s a nice story, not really intended to be anything more than what it was, but I digress.
“Then there is the other secret. There isn’t any symbolysm. 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 are 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.” ― Ernest Hemingway, Ernest Hemingway Selected Letters 1917-1961
For me this kind of makes the novel disappointing, but nevertheless I do see Nietzschean themes in it, the struggle of indomitable will over nature for instance… There must be something unconscious about it perhaps, from the writers raw imagination than deliberate intent. So it goes to show, sometimes when looking for symbols, looking for meaning, looking for anything you can mistake shadows for the real thing…
