My children arranged our Thanksgiving vacation in Paris and London, encouraging us to do some homework on what we wanted to see there. At my son’s place, I remember spotting A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway—a book about his years in Paris. Intrigued, I picked it up last weekend.
Hemingway wrote about his life in Paris in his twenties from 1921 to 1926, and I had read excerpts of it back when I was around the same age. Some passages have stayed with me ever since.
He describes how, when facing writer’s block, he would tell himself, "All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.” From there, he found it easier to write the next true sentence, whether it was something he knew, saw, or heard. If he strayed into ornamentation, he’d cut it away, adhering to what he called “good and severe discipline.”
This struck me as sound advice for journalists. Yet, while Hemingway was writing fiction, my experience as a journalist has shown me a different reality. Even now, I appreciate his advice—but I know it’s not always feasible in every situation.
Here's one of these moments from life I’ve been thinking about lately. My sister shared that her husband’s tumor grew worse before stabilizing with a new treatment. He told her he hoped to live at least into his 80s, so he could spend more time with their 26-year-old son. My sister commented, "He didn’t even mention me."
Perhaps he feels an urgency to pass on his legacy, to share father-son moments he missed when his son was young. Or maybe he sees his relationship with his son as unfinished, feeling he still has a role to play as a father. I wondered if a more thoughtful approach might have been saying he wished to spend more time with both his son and his wife.
A Chinese saying goes, “少年夫妻老来伴”(Shào nián fū qī, lǎo lái bàn), "Young couples become old companions." The saying emphasizes the lifelong companionship between spouses. It underscores the idea that as couples grow older, they come to rely on each other even more for companionship.
I understood my sister’s feeling of being overshadowed, but I said nothing. What would Hemingway say if he were in my position? Would he tell the truest sentence—the one that expressed both his longing and her quiet hurt -- or leave it at that?