Hemingway would hear none of it, saying the best parts of
those stories had been written long ago. “And now,” he
said, “I can’t finish it.”
“But perhaps it is finished, and it is just reluctance . . .”
“Hotch, if I can’t exist on my own terms, then existence
is impossible. Do you understand? That is how I’ve lived,
and that is how I must live—or not live.”
That was the last time Hotch saw his friend. Later that
year, Hemingway lost his life to a self-inflicted gunshot
wound.^1 Beloved by the world, Papa died a lonely,
depressed man. In the end, what he had accomplished—
publishing several best-selling books, traveling all over the
world, winning the Nobel Prize for literature—was just not
enough.
Every person faces the ultimate insufficiency of their
work. Every worker knows the limits of their labor. And
every person who is called understands that there is danger
in such a compulsion; the work can consume you if you let
it. There is something in a compulsion that makes a person
creative—it is the will to not quit, to obsess over a single
phrase or paint blotch until it is just right. That thing that
makes you stay up late or get up early or spend an
inordinate amount of time on that project that no one will
see—that’s what makes the work great. But there is also an
implicit warning in such compulsions.
There is a great temptation in the pursuit of meaningful
work to lose yourself in the process. That’s what an
addiction promises: total annihilation of self. You begin to