Hard People

I once saw Hemingway's place in Key West. There was an old-fashioned typewriter on a makeshift desk and, on the wall, a gazelle's head. I looked into the room from the outside, because that's all you were allowed to do. And there wasn't much time, even for that, because the Japanese tourists wanted to take pictures too.

Later, I bought all his books that I hadn't read, all the while thinking, "There's no way those tourists could ever understand. No way for anyone, unless they've slept out in the woods and known the hard, hard people who cut the trails up into them, that they could ever understand..."

LPK
LiveJournal
1.2.2005