Rooftops and
Dust
by William E. Hazelgrove
You
know, I wonder what Hemingway would have thought about
our current time? Sitting up here in the attic I cant believe
he would have had a website. I mean, he never even did a reading.
Could you see Ernest on a book tour? Or getting in his car with
a load of books and driving around to small bookstores hawking
his wares? 
He never even had
an agent and didn't seem to have to bother with all the chicanery
of modern publishing. One thing I know about writers, they usually
only do one thing really well and that is write. But no one really
gets to just write anymore.
You have to sell. I apologize to all out there whose books
sell effortlessly off the shelves and whom are able to stay safely
in their garrote. The rest of the writing community must put
down the pen or the mouse or the keyboard and turn to the daunting
task of making noise in a culture where gangster rap is king.
Think about that. Ernest sitting at one of his cafes and here
comes a car... "I ### her and then I #$## her and I took
my gun to her mother#$#% head and I blew it off..." I wonder
if he could go back to writing one of his Nick Adams stories
after hearing that?
But that is our reality. A culture gone mad perhaps. Look
for sanity and good luck doing it. The quiet pleasure of reading....
well...maybe on the Internet but is that really reading or is
that just the passive gathering of information? Sure, of course,
people read and for the modern author finding these people is
his task. But it's tricky.
Sitting up here staring at the rooftops among the dust of
his time I can't help thinking he was better off. Sure, I know,
we have all the technology and the quality of life is much more
improved, but lets face it, the written word was king then. Radio
had just begun to move in and television was a fantasy. Movies
were contained to a theatre. People sat on their porches and
in their hammocks and laid on their sofas and were bored and
listened to occasional faraway voices drift on the summer tide
and they read. They read their magazines their Saturday Evening
Posts. They read their books, the latest by Hemingway, Fitzgerald,
a woman out of Atlanta who wrote a big Southern novel.
People ate together and dogs barked outside and a train whistle
broke across the night tide but mostly there was the moment lived
and people had to talk among each other and think and imagine
to entertain themselves. There was no blue flickering in the
windows. There was no squelch
of computer modems nor the shrill of cellular phones or the roar
of jets overheard. Maybe there was the wind. Maybe the scrape
of leaves across the sidewalk. A cough in the night. You see,
I believe most people find our age intolerable. Humans aren't
cyber and they aren't synthetic and they aren't actual heroes.
We are really fragile creatures who are at their best when left
alone.
So, I don't know, maybe things are better now, but up here
among the old quiet, I'll put my nickel down on the dust and
the rooftops of Hemingway's time any day of the week.
