Tuesday, July 13

The Half-fish



IT so happened that my eyes fell upon an old book that I have read long ago: Hemingway’s ‘The Old Man and the Sea’. Dusting it up and re-reading it was a delight. This old book is very special to me. It reminds me of the times when I had read it as a teenager. Today, the pages have gone brown, but the scent on it remains... the youth of life has a little faded, but the fun endure. Like a vintage wine, 'the Old Man and the Sea' seizes me here and now. 

One of the most difficult things to do in anyone’s life is to go back and review their failures. History has stories of great men and women, repenting after their successes and failures, victories and losses. ‘The Old Man and the Sea’ is a tragedy of a life well-fought... it is also the celebration of an effort well done. The beauty of the story is that it leaves no one a victor or a loser. Still, as the skiff slowly pulls into the Havana shoreline, the vibrant angler suddenly loses all his feelings and is very sterile. 

Hemingway writes thus about The Old Man:
He knew he was beaten now finally and without remedy and he went back to the stern and found the jagged end of the tiller would fit in the slot of the rudder well enough for him to steer...He sailed low now and he had no thoughts nor any feeling of any kind. He was past everything now, he sailed the skiff to make his home port as well, and as intelligently as he could. 
For me, what is most remarkable of the story is when Hemingway describes the Old Man’s feelings for leaving a fish half-dead. The old man refuses to call the fish ‘half-dead’. Instead, he calls him ‘half-fish’.   

Hemingway goes on to tell us thus:
He could not talk to the fish anymore because the fish had been ruined too badly. Then something came into his head. ‘Half-fish,’ he said. ‘Fish you were. I am sorry that I went too far out. I ruined us both. But we have killed many sharks, you and I, and ruined many others. How many did you ever kill, old fish? You do not have that spear on your head for nothing’

With the old man asking the fish, today I ask myself,  "How many ‘half-fishes’ have I left on the high seas of  my life, to drift dead later?" 

Life is bad when we think of all the half-lives we have lived, of the half-killings we have killed,… of all the half-relationships we made and those ended, of all the half-attempts we attempted, and of all the half-readings we did… 

Like the Old Man, I too repent a little!

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