WHO WOULD TAKE ADVICE FROM HEMINGWAY ABOUT LIVING A JOYOUS, WELL-BALANCED LIFE?

Though I’d not ask Earnest Hemingway for advice on how best to live a joyful, peacefully rewarding life, this Nobel Prize winner’s  professional take on writing is unquestionably worthy of serious consideration.

Hemingway on writing:

“When I was writing, it was necessary for me to reread after I had written. If you kept thinking about it, you would lose the thing you were writing before you could go on with it the next day ... It was necessary to read in order not to think or worry about your work until you could do it again. I had learned already never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that replenish, overnight ...”

“The best way is to read it all every day from the start, correcting as you go along, then go on from where you stopped the day before. When it gets so long that you can't do this every day read back two or three chapters each day; then each week read it all from the start. That's how you make it all of one piece.”

“I was trying to write then and I found the greatest difficulty, aside from knowing truly what you really felt, rather than what you were supposed to feel and had been taught to feel, was to put down what really happened in action; what the actual things were which produced the emotion that you experienced. In writing for a newspaper you told what happened and, with one trick and another, you communicated the emotion aided by the element of timeliness which gives a certain emotion to any account of something that has happened on that day; but the real thing, the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion and which would be as valid in a year or in ten years or, with luck and if you stated it purely enough, always, was beyond me and I was working very hard to get it.”

Hemingway's adult life was spent challenging women (wives and mistresses) to carry a torch for him and men (friends and foe) to box with him—and if you ask me why I believe his psyche was tortured with self doubt, exacerbating his need for dominance, I’ll ask if you know that as a boy, his mother, Grace, played with his mind by raising him as a 'twin' girl to his sister, Marcelline.  In addition to having been dressed as a girl, his father’s lack of courage and ultimate suicide compounded the author's repressed emotional scars suggesting why, genius though he was, his personal life was misspent 'proving' his macho-man virility to no one as much as himself ...

Subconscious wounds to our egos, which remain buried alive in unhealed hot-tempered spots of tightly wound frustration, darken our perceptions, and as personal perceptions influence our attitudes, decisions, actions and behaviors throughout every stage of our lives—genius is not immune to self condemnation, imprisoned within an unidentified mental block, repressed behind our conscious mind’s wall of denial ...