Hemingway

The other day, a palm reader in New Jersey Maryland told me that I was Ernest Hemingway in my past life. Of course I’m sitting there thinking, that’s crazy – Hemingway wouldn’t be caught dead getting his palms read.

When I got back to the hotel, I couldn’t put it out of my mind – not about the past life information – but about Hemingway. So I had a drink. And then another. And then I wrote something about how I feel and then I deleted the entire thing.

I don’t know if I believe in past lives, but how can you ignore the silly idea that we all seem to be someone famous in a past life? What if I was Hemingway’s cat Willie, the one he had to shoot to put out of its misery because of two broken legs. Maybe I was one of his emo love letters, tossed into a fireplace and burned to hell by the jealous new boyfriend of an old flame.

I guess I should just be glad she didn’t say I was F. Scott Fitzgerald.

“Never mistake motion for action”

“I’m not brave any more darling. I’m all broken. They’ve broken me.”

“She doesn’t love me Bill,” he wrote to Bill Horne. “She takes it all back . . . Oh Bill I can’t kid about it and I can’t be bitter because I’m just smashed by it.”

"Write hard and clear about what hurts."

"You know it makes one feel rather good deciding not to be a bitch."

"“You can hurt most awfully—’cause my loving you is a chink in the armour of telling the world to go to hell and you can thrust a sword into it at any time."

"unsynchronised passion"

Marlene Dietrich wrote this hot note to Hemingway 15 years after they met:  "Beloved Papa, I think it is high time to tell you that I think of you constantly. I read your letters over and over and speak of you with a few chosen men. I have moved your photograph to my bedroom and mostly look at it rather helplessly."