WHAT I WROTE 10 YEARS AGO THIS WEEK
I am 40.
I've been that way for three days.
It happened in Canada, north of Lake Huron, in the back of my van, in the parking lot beside a little hockey barn, trying to sleep as midnight passed.
I am 40 and six hours later I ran a marathon along a river in the forest where the deer flies bite. There was no reason for it, no logical reason, and no preparation or explanation.
I just got in my van and drove eight hours with a couple of bags of chips, my running shoes, a map, the sleeping bag and two books of Hemingway. And for 42 kilometers I slogged through it, not enjoying it, sometimes cursing it, wishing it was over.
Wishing I could stop.
But I didn't. And it hurt, and as I turned the corner where the volunteers sat and saw the hundred yards remaining I knew I owned it. No one could ever take it away from me.
My life can go to hell, and I can go to hell, and it can all evaporate and leave me old or alone or penniless or even dead and still it will be a fact. On a certain day at a certain place at a certain milestone of life I ran 26 miles.
I've done it before, a half a dozen times, but before I was always in shape. I had trained and prepared and schemed for months. But I can't do that now, with two jobs and a column, and after months of not running I did it.
Which means nothing.
To anyone but me.
It's like Hemingway. When he was a little boy, a toddler really, running around his parents' home, one of his first sentences. 'Fraid of nothin', he would say.
Afraid of nothing.
And yet he was. He was often terrified. Haunted through life by a series of demons that caused him incomprehensible fear.
That's why he seemed so reckless and daring, taunting danger. He went to his fears, to subdue them, maybe, or to conceal his shame, or to be something he wished he was, or to gain a token to remind himself of his occasional strength, or maybe it was just because he found feeling any emotion, even a negative one, better than feeling none.
He would have understood about the marathon. And the eight hours of cramped driving after, and the wasted day and the wasted weekend and the hours spent not speaking to another human being.
He would have understood.
Because it was Hemingway who helped me understand Van Gogh and Mozart and Gaughan. They were all crazy as hell, barely able to function in life sometimes, broken freaks on the edge. And yet they did something beautiful, each of them, touching some aesthetic purity like it was a high tension line. It arced and gave light and was exquisite, but its creation pretty much left somebody dead.
Hemingway was a drunk, and a depressive, and he wouldn't have known adult intimacy if it walked up and bit him.
But he did make some beauty.
Like no American writer had done before, and no American writer has done since.
And he paid for it with his mind and his life. And, of course, his joy. And to make sense of it all he created a world in which the primal expressions of manhood were writing and sex, and when he could no longer do either he went into a stairwell and did what his father had done.
Van Gogh was messed up in the head, yet if you could have cured him of that would you also have cured him of his genius? Would a mentally well Mozart have been a forgettable piano teacher and nothing more?
And, at 40, if I could overcome my flaws, would I also overcome myself? Would normalcy in one area of the mind impose normalcy, and consequently mediocrity, on all areas of the mind?
If you are to use your talents for the benefit of others, are you doing wrong if you extinguish them for the benefit of yourself?
Hemingway, born 100 years ago today, couldn't answer that. And I, born 40 years ago the other day, can't either.
He was the greatest American writer, and I am a loser with a computer. But we wrestle with some of the same things. And he lost.
And I'm afraid I may do no better.
So I spent the day alone, thinking and aching, and doing this stupid run. Fighting back the things which torment me.
I am 40.
I've been that way since I was a child.
- by Bob Lonsberry © 2009
