A Death and an Anniversary
June 11, 2011
Today marks the passing of traveler, writer and adventurer Patrick Leigh Fermor. His obituary brought back memories. My father bought me his classic travel book, Between the Woods and the Water when it was published in 1986. It was his account of traveling across a Europe which was about to descend into a war which would change it forever. 1986 was also the year I myself caught the bus in London, traveled on it to Athens and then backpacked across Greece and Turkey to the old Soviet border at the far end of the Black Sea. I wanted not only to read Leigh Fermor, I wanted to be him.
Tomorrow is the fiftieth anniversary of the suicide of another intellectual man of action and literary giant, Ernest Hemingway. The sharp clipped prose, the beautifully constructed short stories and the amazing eloquence of the silences, of what was not said in his writing, surely gives him a reasonable claim to being among the greatest American stylists of the twentieth century.
Both men in their different ways bear witness to the creativity and tragedy of the human condition.
Tomorrow is the fiftieth anniversary of the suicide of another intellectual man of action and literary giant, Ernest Hemingway. The sharp clipped prose, the beautifully constructed short stories and the amazing eloquence of the silences, of what was not said in his writing, surely gives him a reasonable claim to being among the greatest American stylists of the twentieth century.
Both men in their different ways bear witness to the creativity and tragedy of the human condition.
