Hunter on Hemmingway on Xmas
Hi there, I’m back home at Owl Farm finally. It was a long hard trip getting here as DIA was closed for 3 days. But I did make it home for xmas. I stayed in my pajamas for two days and only covered them up with ski pants to take Athena out for hikes in the 3 feet of snow. It was great.
Xmas was not easy. I miss him more than ever this year. I’m sure many of you do too. I’ll post more often now that I’m home and working on the Gonzo Way, which several thousand of you have already pre-ordered, so I am making it clear and concise and fun! Here is some HST wisdom on Hemmingway:
Hemingway was not a political man. He did not care for movements, but dealt in his fiction with the stresses and strains on individuals in a world that seemed far less complex, prior to World War II, than it has since. Rightly or wrongly, his taste ran to large and simple (but not easy) concepts — to blacks and whites, as it were, and he was not comfortable with the multitude of gray shadings that seem to be the wave of the future.
It was not Hemingway’s wave, and in the end he came back to Ketchum, never ceasing to wonder, says Mason, why he hadn’t been killed years earlier in the midst of violent action on some other part of the globe. Here, at least, he had mountains and a good river below his house; he could live among rugged, non-political people and visit, when he chose to, with a few of his famous friends who still came up to Sun Valley. He could sit in the Tram or the Alpine or the Sawtooth Club and talk with men who felt the same way he did about life, even if they were not so articulate. In this congenial atmosphere he felt he could get away from the pressures of a world gone mad, and "write truly" about life as he had in the past.
–Hunter S. Thompson National Observer, May 25, 1964
Until next time, your friend,
Anita Thompson
P.S. I did finish the semester triumphantly! thank god. I don’t think I hit the 4.0 mark like I thought, but it’s okay, I’m 34 years old. It was Hard for me at first as you know, but I think I’m actually catching on. And thank you sweet Hunter. And thank you Columbia University!
