The Great
Quiet
of Hemingway's
Attic
by William Elliott Hazelgrove
The following essay first appeared in the Hemingway
Despatch, August 1998, published by the Ernest Hemingway
Foundation of Oak Park.
These days,
there is Marcelline's old steamer trunk, a wine bottle from Spain,
a cello, two wrought-iron gas stanchions from the late 19th century
and National Geographics from 1912, 1915, and 1918 complete with
scribbling on the pages from Ernest's father, or perhaps from
Ernest himself. There are two small lithographs from 1945 advertising
bullfights in Spanish, parts of a Victorian bed and a crib, as
well as boxes and boxes of bronze heads that look curiously like
the great writer, marked "Hemingway Busts." There are
doors propped up that are from the days when a young Ernest Hemingway
burst through a screen door on a hot summer day in Oak Park.
There's also the normal bric-a-brac of any attic at any time:
a wrapped Christmas tree, ornaments, and sheets spread over nondescript
boxes. But that is all that remains of the man and his era. The
big adventure of the 20th century is drawing to a close and all
those larger-than-life writers are making their exit along with
it. I came up here to find the ghost of a man who did not grow
up on television, a man for whom commerce was a necessary stream,
not the flood we find ourselves in now.
I write on Marcelline's stremer trunk. She must have opened
it many times while crossing the wide dark seas in the last adventure
of our time. 
Marcelline
would open her trunk and sit down to write in a room of wood
paneling while the ocean liner crashed throught the stormy night.
She may have felt the roll of the seas, and her one lamp was
small in the baseless night as a yellow beacon of humanity against
the black sea. There was no jet screaming overhead, no disembodied
voice instructing her from afar. She was simply writing letters
to her brother in Africa, Spain, Paris, and Key West. And while
she sat with only the sounds of her pen scratching on paper and
the distant howl of the ocean, she possessed what frustratingly
eludes us now--the great quiet of the moment.
The trunk no longer makes voyages across seas to an old world.
That world has come to rest here among the dusty rafters and
the pattering of squirrels across the roof. My mind is not as
hers. Mine is cluttered, over instructed, overfed. Flickering
ghostly images crowd out the single moment, and at times there
seem a hundred different voices competing for my attention.
I realize now, that for all our progress, our technology,
we still can't buy passage on that liner crossing the stormy
seas of our dying tranquility.
