I fell in love
with reading at a very young age and was so excited when I got to high school
and was required to read novels for English. I loved every book assigned—except
one. The Old Man and the Sea and I
did not get along.
Ernest
Hemingway’s Pulitzer-prize winning novella tells of an old fisherman who has
gone eighty-four days without a fish. He finally catches the biggest one he’d
ever seen or even heard of, only to have sharks eat it on the way home. When he
gets back to his shack at the end of the story, he’s lost everything.
Teenage me was
so angry when I finished the book. I hated it. To me, there was nothing more
depressing than working your butt off for something only to have it taken away.
I thought it was the worst ending of any novel ever and after reading a few
more by Hemingway, I decided that man hated happy endings.
Which is why
it’s funny that I now teach The Old Man
and the Sea to my sophomores. Why in the world would I assign a book I
hated when I was their age?
When I started
teaching, I knew I wanted to help students fall in love with reading. I was
aware that not everyone loved to read, but I wanted to change that. What I
didn’t know was how many of my students would actively hate reading. Some of
them actually spend way more time and effort avoiding it than they ever would
just reading the dang thing. But I also wasn’t aware how many struggling
readers I would have. Years ago I had a class that consisted of twenty boys and
two girls. I have no idea why it turned out that way, but it did. This being
Louisiana, the majority of my students was avid hunters and fishermen. The
majority was also several grades below where they needed to be in reading. So I
chose The Old Man and the Sea because
it was short, easy to read, and accessible on several levels.
Obviously I feel
it was the right choice, because I still choose to teach it every year. I love
seeing my students succeed, seeing their pride at not just finishing a book,
but understanding it. Who knew that the book I hated the most in high school
would be the one I spent the most time with as an adult? But because I’ve spent
so much time with it, and because I am no longer sixteen, I see it as a very
different story indeed. It’s not depressing; it’s hopeful.
If you had told
me this years ago, I wouldn’t have believed you. I read the book and saw
nothing hopeful in it. That’s because as a high schooler, I didn’t want to
believe that you could work hard for something and come away empty-handed.
As an adult, I
know how very real that it.
The theme of the
novel is “man can be destroyed but not defeated.” That is one of the most
hopeful statements I’ve ever read, but it took me years to realize it. Life is
hard. If you’ve lived it long enough, you know this to be true, no matter how
lucky or privileged you are. It doesn’t matter who you are or what you do,
sometimes life is just going to throw horrible things at you. You have no
control over these things. You do have control over your response to them.
The old man went
eighty-four days without a fish, but he went out every single day anyway,
believing that today was his day. When he hooked a fish bigger than he could
fight alone, he did not give up. When the sharks attacked, and he began losing
his tools in the fight to save his fish, he did not give up. When he realized
he was not going to bring the fish in, when he was bloody and bruised and more
exhausted than he had ever been, he still did not quit.
The fact that we
humans are capable of this kind of fight, this kind of determination, is the
most hopeful thing of all.
It means we have
the strength to keep going when faced with life’s adversities and
disappointments. When we realize we will never get to be a parent. When we pour
ourselves into our writing and fail to snag an agent. Or it fails to sell. Or
it sells but no one reads it. Or people read it and hate it. It’s a helpful
reminder when you’ve spent months training for a race only to have it storm all
during said race. We can keep going, keep fighting, even when we are sick, or sorrowful,
or so beaten up that we truly don’t think we can stand again.
We can’t control
the world, but we can control our response to it. My response is to keep moving
because I believe that even if I am destroyed, I am not defeated.
Huh. Maybe
Hemingway did write a happy ending after all.
