I once got in an online argument with a well-known novelist who’d written a screed in a high circulation national magazine urging people to stop reading The Old Man and the Sea. The novelist in question considered himself an environmental fiction writer and considered Hemingway’s Nobel Prize-winning novel an anti-environmental book, because it depicts the killing of a fish. At the time this struck me as exactly wrong, and it still does. Let me explain why.
We sometimes forget how revolutionary The Old Man and the Sea was when it first came out in 1952. After all, it’s a short novel about an elderly man out in a boat by himself. It contains no love story, not much in the way of plot, and hardly any real dialogue between humans. The old man talks to himself, to the fish, to a lost bird, to his own hand—and the thing is, these are really interesting conversations. The old man is interacting with these specific manifestations of nature—with the ocean and its denizens—with an intimacy, respect, and love that is too often absent in humankind’s attitude towards the nature that surrounds and sustains us, and that we have in our greed and shortsightedness put at great risk. Which is one reason I think that we, in the 21st century, still have so much to learn from The Old Man and the Sea.
A further aspect of the novel’s unique impact comes from the many powerful passages of descriptive writing, which use closely observed sensory detail to harness our powerful human imagination and launch us into the world of the story in a profoundly immersive way. Here are two examples of this kind of prose, taken from the novel almost at random:
“In the dark the old man could feel the morning coming and as he rowed, he heard the trembling sound as the flying fish left the water and the hissing that their stiff set wings made as they soared away in the darkness.”
“The clouds over the land now rose like mountains and the coast was only a long green line with the gray blue hills behind it. The water was a dark blue now, so dark that it was almost purple. As he looked down into it, he saw the red sifting of the plankton in the dark water and the strange light the sun made now. He watched his lines to see them go straight down out of sight into the water and he was happy to see so much plankton because it meant fish.”
Reading this kind of prose, and experiencing it as it comes alive in our minds, we can’t help but appreciate the specific richness of an ecosystem we may never have experienced in our lives. I think this is what Hemingway was talking about when he wrote:
“All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it belongs to you; the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was.”
The Old Man and the Sea celebrates, in the course of an indelible and enduring fictional story, a beautiful ocean ecosystem that has been considerably degraded in the seven decades since the book was written. It is a novel that models the kind of outlook on the global environment that we all need to adopt, and quickly, if we hope to survive as a species beyond our current age of environmental crisis. It is a timeless work of art, and in my opinion one of the greatest environmental novels ever written.
Tim Weed is the author of A Field Guide to Murder & Fly Fishing, Will Poole’s Island, and The Afterlife Project. A former international travel guide, Weed serves on Salve Regina University’s core faculty for the Newport MFA in creative writing and is a cofounder of the Cuba Writers Program. When not at his writing desk, he can most often be found skiing, fishing, or tending to his trees. To find out more, visit www.timweed.net.