The Lesson of Sunday Morning
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP- The Lesson of Sunday Morning
We always learn the wrong lesson— and it's never humility, seldom sobriety, or an antidote for hubris.
In upstate New York the day Ernest Hemingway died Gore Vidal "popped into an afternoon
cocktail gathering to announce 'Everyone moves up one!'" as if writing were just another
sport or a war, which Hemingway himself too often thought. But the lesson should be what
the lost one himself might have learned had he lived— only shaken, left trembling
by his foolish act, renouncing life for a moment, but never meaning the finality,
the reality not even the best— including those who move up— can capture despite cutting
every superfluous word, all of them.
David Ray, a poet, was the editor of New Letters for many years. The scene to which he alludes in this issue appears in a reminiscence about William Humphrey written by Hilary Masters ("Proud Flesh," SR, summer 2000).
