Latest / The Data Shaman Podcast - Quant Mind, Shaman Soul / Season 3, Ep 6 - The ADHD Book Club: The Old Man and the Sea

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Season 3, Ep 6 - The ADHD Book Club: The Old Man and the Sea · The Data Shaman Podcast - Quant Mind, Shaman Soul

0:00
SPEAKER_00: If you have ADHD, you probably have a pile of books you mean to read.
0:06
SPEAKER_00: And I know I have lots of them.
0:09
SPEAKER_00: And every one of them comes with a small dose of guild.
0:15
SPEAKER_00: My pile has been growing larger.
0:18
SPEAKER_00: For years I thought the problem was me.
0:20
SPEAKER_00: Sitting alone in silence with 900 pages in a way of working built for someone else's brain.
0:27
SPEAKER_00: So I built one that fits mine.
0:29
SPEAKER_00: I turned the books into conversations.
0:32
SPEAKER_00: Two imagined guests, Professor Clara Benedict, a literature scholar, and Dr.
0:38
SPEAKER_00: Theo Marsh, a clinical psychologist, who talk a book through slowly to my good friend would over dinner.
0:46
SPEAKER_00: I remember a conversation far better than a page.
0:50
SPEAKER_00: And this is my way of sharing them with you.
0:52
SPEAKER_00: I am Daniele Forni and this is the Little Shaman Podcast.
0:57
SPEAKER_00: What are we worth when the results stop going our way?
1:02
SPEAKER_00: If you hold yourself to very high standards, you've probably asked yourself that more than once.
1:10
SPEAKER_00: Today's book Ask It With Almost Nothing.
1:13
SPEAKER_00: One old man, one boat, one fish.
1:17
SPEAKER_00: An old fisherman far out on the water, locked in a struggle with a fish bicker than his boat.
1:23
SPEAKER_00: It sounds very simple.
1:25
SPEAKER_00: It is anything but it is a story about dignity, aging, and what it means to keep going when the world has started to cut you out.
1:36
SPEAKER_00: Today The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemiway.
1:40
SPEAKER_00: Let us begin.
1:44
SPEAKER_01: Part one.
1:50
SPEAKER_05: I'll start with my usual confession.
1:53
SPEAKER_05: I know one sentence from this book.
1:57
SPEAKER_05: A man can be destroyed but not defeated.
2:01
SPEAKER_05: And I know there's an old fisherman and an enormous fish.
2:05
SPEAKER_05: That's the whole of it.
2:07
SPEAKER_05: I've never read a page.
2:09
SPEAKER_02: That's almost the perfect amount to start with, because the book itself is almost that simple on the surface.
2:18
SPEAKER_02: It's short, you can read it in an afternoon.
2:21
SPEAKER_02: There's essentially one character, one fish, and the sea.
2:26
SPEAKER_02: And yet people have been arguing about what it means for 70 years.
2:31
SPEAKER_02: It's one of those rare books that a child can follow and a philosopher can't exhaust.
2:38
SPEAKER_06: Give me the whole thing in the time it takes to boil a kettle.
2:44
SPEAKER_02: An old Cuban fisherman named Santiago has gone eighty-four days without catching a single fish.
2:52
SPEAKER_02: He's poor, he's aging, he's considered unlucky, the worst kind of unlucky.
2:59
SPEAKER_02: A boy who loves him, Manilin, used to fish with him, but the boy's parents had made him move to a luckier boat.
3:07
SPEAKER_02: On the eighty fifth day, Santiago rose out further than anyone else, alone, into the deep Gulf Stream, and he hooks a marlin, a fish so huge it's longer than his own boat.
3:22
SPEAKER_02: For three days the fish toes him out to sea while he holds the line with his bare hands, unable to let go, unwilling to.
3:32
SPEAKER_02: Eventually he kills it, but it's too big to bring into the boat, so he lashes it alongside and starts the long journey home.
3:41
SPEAKER_02: And on the way back, the sharks come.
3:44
SPEAKER_02: They smell the blood, and one by one they tear the great fish apart, and Santiago fights them with everything he has harpoon, knife, club, the tiller itself, and he kills several, but he can't save the marlin.
4:00
SPEAKER_02: He reaches shore in the dark with nothing but the skeleton lashed to his boat.
4:06
SPEAKER_02: He staggers up to his shack and collapses into sleep.
4:11
SPEAKER_02: And the boy, seeing his ruined hands, weeps.
4:16
SPEAKER_02: And the old man sleeps and dreams of lions.
4:20
SPEAKER_06: That's not a triumphant story.
4:24
SPEAKER_06: He loses the fish.
4:26
SPEAKER_02: He loses the fish.
4:28
SPEAKER_02: Hold on to that.
4:30
SPEAKER_02: Because it's the whole question of the book.
4:32
SPEAKER_02: Did he win or did he lose?
4:36
SPEAKER_02: Hemingway spends a hundred pages making you unable to answer that cleanly.
4:42
SPEAKER_02: And that difficulty is the point.
4:45
SPEAKER_06: When was it written?
4:47
SPEAKER_02: And who was Hemingway?
4:50
SPEAKER_02: Published in 1952 by Ernest Hemingway, an American writer who by then was world famous, hard-living, and many critics felt past his best, his previous book had been savaged.
5:05
SPEAKER_02: And then he produced this small, quiet, almost biblical story, and it was a sensation.
5:12
SPEAKER_02: It won the Pulitzer Prize, and it's specifically cited when he won the Nobel Prize in Literature two years later.
5:20
SPEAKER_02: It was his comeback, which, once you know the story is about an old man proving he's not finished, is almost unbearably personal.
5:30
SPEAKER_04: Ah.
5:31
SPEAKER_04: So the book about the aging master proving he can still do the great thing was the aging master proving he could still do the great thing.
5:43
SPEAKER_02: The art and the life rhyme completely, and that's worth holding.
5:49
SPEAKER_02: Because one of the things the book is about is exactly that.
5:53
SPEAKER_02: What do you do when the world has started to write you off?
5:57
SPEAKER_02: When the run of failures is long enough that people, maybe including you, begin to believe the failure is who you are?
6:05
SPEAKER_06: That's a question that lands hard for anyone who does difficult work over a long career.
6:14
SPEAKER_06: Keep going.
6:16
SPEAKER_06: But first, there's a term I half remember about Hemingway's style.
6:22
SPEAKER_06: The iceberg.
6:24
SPEAKER_01: Part two The Iceberg and the Psychology of What's Left Out.
6:32
SPEAKER_01: The iceberg theory.
6:34
SPEAKER_02: Hemingway's own phrase for how he wrote, he said the dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one eighth of it being above water.
6:45
SPEAKER_02: Meaning you write the surface, the simple, concrete actions and objects, the fishing line, the hand, the fish.
6:54
SPEAKER_02: And you deliberately leave out the emotion underneath, the backstory, the explanation.
7:01
SPEAKER_02: You cut it away.
7:02
SPEAKER_02: And if you've truly felt it, the reader feels it anyway through what isn't said.
7:09
SPEAKER_06: That's a fascinating thing to hear as a psychologist, because it's the opposite of how therapy usually talks.
7:17
SPEAKER_06: We're always trying to bring the submerged part up and name it.
7:21
SPEAKER_06: Hemingway deliberately keeps it submerged.
7:25
SPEAKER_02: And why do you think that works on a reader emotionally?
7:32
SPEAKER_06: A few reasons.
7:33
SPEAKER_06: And they're real psychology.
7:36
SPEAKER_06: First, understatement makes the reader do the work.
7:40
SPEAKER_06: And what you generate yourself hits harder than what you're told.
7:44
SPEAKER_06: If I hand you the feeling fully labeled, Santiago was devastated and lonely, you receive it at arm's length as information.
7:54
SPEAKER_06: If I just show you an old man carefully washing his one clean shirt or talking to a bird that lands on his line, and I say nothing about loneliness, then you supply the loneliness from your own store of it, and now it's yours, not mine.
8:12
SPEAKER_06: Second, and this is maybe deeper, it mirrors how a certain kind of person, often a certain kind of man of that era, actually holds pain by not speaking it.
8:25
SPEAKER_06: The style isn't just describing Santiago's Stoicism.
8:29
SPEAKER_06: The style is stoicism.
8:32
SPEAKER_06: The form embodies the psychology.
8:35
SPEAKER_02: Say more about that, because I think it's the key to not misreading the book.
8:41
SPEAKER_06: There's a way to read Hemingway's restraint as coldness or macho posturing, all clipped sentences and no feeling.
8:53
SPEAKER_06: But I'd read it the opposite way.
8:56
SPEAKER_06: The restraint is evidence of how much feeling there is.
9:02
SPEAKER_06: You only need that much discipline holding a door shut if there's a great deal pressing against it.
9:09
SPEAKER_06: The flatness of the surface is the measure of the pressure underneath.
9:14
SPEAKER_06: When Santiago, alone and in agony, simply says to himself, But man is not made for defeat, and then goes back to the work of his hands.
9:25
SPEAKER_06: The fact that he doesn't weep or rage is not an absence of emotion.
9:31
SPEAKER_06: It's a man managing an enormous emotion by narrowing himself to the next concrete task.
9:39
SPEAKER_06: And anyone who has survived something hard knows that move intimately.
9:44
SPEAKER_06: You don't feel your way through the worst hours, you do the next small necessary thing.
9:51
SPEAKER_06: And the next.
9:53
SPEAKER_06: And the feeling waits.
9:55
SPEAKER_02: That narrowing to the next task, that's almost all Santiago does for three days.
10:03
SPEAKER_02: Now I must do this.
10:06
SPEAKER_02: Now I must hold the line.
10:08
SPEAKER_02: Now I must eat the fish to keep my strength.
10:12
SPEAKER_02: It's a continuous present tense of small duties.
10:17
SPEAKER_06: And that, clinically, is one of the most effective things a human being can do under unbearable strain.
10:25
SPEAKER_06: When the whole of a situation is too big to face, I am a tired old man alone in the ocean, attached to a creature I cannot control and may not survive.
10:37
SPEAKER_06: You cannot hold that hole.
10:39
SPEAKER_06: It would break you.
10:41
SPEAKER_06: So you shrink your world to the one action in front of you.
10:45
SPEAKER_06: Hold the line.
10:47
SPEAKER_06: Keep the hand from cramping.
10:49
SPEAKER_06: Watch the water.
10:51
SPEAKER_06: It's not denial.
10:53
SPEAKER_06: The full picture is still there in the background.
10:56
SPEAKER_06: It's triage of attention.
10:59
SPEAKER_06: And the book is, among other things, a hundred page demonstration of how a person stays sane and functional inside something overwhelming by living one necessary act at a time.
11:14
SPEAKER_02: Which is the opposite of Ahab, if we're drawing the series together.
11:19
SPEAKER_02: Ahab's whole mind collapses into one giant idea.
11:25
SPEAKER_02: Santiago's mind, under even more physical duress, stays practical, present, almost humble, attending to rope and hands and birds.
11:38
SPEAKER_02: That's a beautiful contrast.
11:41
SPEAKER_06: Both are men alone at sea, locked to a great creature, but Ahab is consumed by a meaning he's imposed.
11:50
SPEAKER_06: Santiago is sustained by attention to what's actually in front of him.
11:55
SPEAKER_06: One is destroyed by his mind, the other is carried by his.
13:50
SPEAKER_06: When something goes wrong, you can explain it in two broad ways.
13:55
SPEAKER_06: One, it's specific, temporary, and external.
13:59
SPEAKER_06: The fish aren't running.
14:01
SPEAKER_06: It's a bad season, this'll pass.
14:04
SPEAKER_06: Two, it's global, permanent, and internal.
14:10
SPEAKER_06: I'm washed up, I've lost it.
14:12
SPEAKER_06: I'm an unlucky man and always will be.
14:16
SPEAKER_06: The first explanatory style protects you.
14:19
SPEAKER_06: It lets you keep fishing.
14:21
SPEAKER_06: The second one is corrosive.
14:24
SPEAKER_06: It's the thinking style most associated with depression and with giving up.
14:29
SPEAKER_06: And the brutal thing about a long streak is that it keeps recruiting you toward the second story.
14:35
SPEAKER_06: Day one, you can easily say bad luck.
14:38
SPEAKER_06: By day 84, the voice that says, This is just who you are now, is very loud and very reasonable sounding.
14:47
SPEAKER_06: And almost everyone around you is agreeing with it.
14:51
SPEAKER_02: And what's remarkable about Santiago is that he simply doesn't accept that story.
14:59
SPEAKER_02: Not with bravado, he's not in denial about the facts.
15:03
SPEAKER_02: He knows exactly how many days it's been.
15:06
SPEAKER_02: He's not pretending he's not poor or not old.
15:11
SPEAKER_02: But he holds a separate fact alongside it.
15:14
SPEAKER_02: He is a fisherman, a good one, and he will go out again, and today could be the day.
15:22
SPEAKER_02: There's a line, he thinks something like 85 is a lucky number, and he decides to go far out.
15:31
SPEAKER_06: That's the whole psychological spine of the thing.
15:35
SPEAKER_06: And it's subtle, so let me be careful with it.
15:38
SPEAKER_06: Santiago is not an optimist in the shallow sense.
15:42
SPEAKER_06: He doesn't believe nothing bad will happen.
15:45
SPEAKER_06: Enormous bad things are about to happen to him.
15:48
SPEAKER_06: What he keeps is something sturdier than optimism.
15:52
SPEAKER_06: He keeps his identity intact, independently of his results.
15:57
SPEAKER_06: I am a fisherman who fishes well is for him a fact about who he is and how he does the work.
16:04
SPEAKER_06: And crucially, it is not up for a vote by the scoreboard.
16:08
SPEAKER_06: The ocean can withhold fish for eighty-four days, it cannot touch the thing he actually values, which is the quality of his craft and his willingness to go out.
16:19
SPEAKER_06: He has quietly refused to let the outcome be the judge of the man.
16:24
SPEAKER_02: And you can see how much that matters the moment he hooks the marlin, because now his skill gets to express itself.
16:33
SPEAKER_02: And for three days he is unmistakably a master.
16:38
SPEAKER_02: Patient, canny, reading the fish, conserving himself, suffering without panic.
16:46
SPEAKER_02: The eighty four days didn't make him worse at fishing, they just made him look unlucky.
16:52
SPEAKER_02: The skill was there the whole time waiting for its chance.
16:57
SPEAKER_06: Which is the quiet, hopeful argument buried in the setup.
17:02
SPEAKER_06: A long run of failure does not necessarily mean you have gotten worse.
17:07
SPEAKER_06: It may mean exactly nothing about your ability.
17:11
SPEAKER_06: The fish simply weren't there.
17:14
SPEAKER_06: And the people who survive long droughts in any demanding field, the arts, science, building something, any craft where you can do everything right and still catch nothing for a season, are very often the ones who can hold that distinction.
17:31
SPEAKER_06: Keep the standards, keep going out, refuse to let the streak rename you.
17:37
SPEAKER_06: Santiago is almost a patron saint of the long dry spell.
17:42
SPEAKER_02: And notice the cost of it.
17:45
SPEAKER_02: Because Hemingway is honest, this refusal is lonely.
17:50
SPEAKER_02: The only person who still sees Santiago truly, who still calls him a great fisherman and means it, is the boy.
17:58
SPEAKER_02: Everyone else has quietly filed him under finished.
18:03
SPEAKER_02: Which brings us to the relationship that I think is the warm heart of this cold-seeming book.
18:10
SPEAKER_01: An interlude.
18:17
SPEAKER_06: You mentioned earlier they talk baseball, Santiago and the boy.
18:23
SPEAKER_06: I didn't expect baseball in a book like this.
18:27
SPEAKER_06: Does it matter or is it just color?
18:31
SPEAKER_02: It matters enormously, and it's one of the loveliest psychological threads in the book.
18:37
SPEAKER_02: Santiago loves baseball, and above all, he loves the great Joe DiMaggio, a real player, the Yankee star who was active when the book was written.
18:48
SPEAKER_02: Santiago talks about DiMaggio constantly, thinks about him out on the water, measures himself against him.
18:56
SPEAKER_02: And the specific thing he fixes on is this.
18:59
SPEAKER_02: DiMaggio played through a painful bone spur in his heel.
19:03
SPEAKER_02: A bone spur is a small, chronic grinding injury, the kind of pain that doesn't kill you but never lets up.
19:11
SPEAKER_02: And Santiago, out at sea with his hands cut to ribbons by the fishing line, his body failing, keeps asking himself whether he is worthy of DiMaggio, whether he can endure his pain the way DiMaggio endured his and still perform at the highest level.
19:30
SPEAKER_06: So DiMaggio is his standard.
19:34
SPEAKER_06: His measuring stick for how to suffer.
19:39
SPEAKER_02: His measuring stick for how to suffer while still doing the thing beautifully.
19:45
SPEAKER_02: That's the key.
19:46
SPEAKER_02: It's not suffering for its own sake.
19:49
SPEAKER_02: It's can I, like DiMaggio, keep performing at the level of a master even while in constant pain, without complaint, without letting the pain lower the quality of the work.
20:03
SPEAKER_06: That's a really precise and useful piece of psychology, the way Santiago uses DiMaggio.
20:10
SPEAKER_06: Because notice what a role model is actually for here.
20:14
SPEAKER_06: Santiago is alone.
20:16
SPEAKER_06: No coach, no teammate, no witness, nobody to tell him he's doing well or to push him through the hard hours.
20:24
SPEAKER_06: So he internalizes a figure of excellence and carries him into the boat.
20:29
SPEAKER_06: When his hands cramp and bleed and he wants to ease off, he doesn't have an external motivator.
20:36
SPEAKER_06: He has DiMaggio in his head, a standard he's chosen, asking him, is this worthy?
20:42
SPEAKER_06: And that's one of the most functional things a role model does.
20:46
SPEAKER_06: It's not about imitation or hero worship for its own sake.
20:51
SPEAKER_06: It's that you install a figure who embodies the standard you want to hold yourself to.
20:56
SPEAKER_06: And in the lonely hours when no one is watching and nothing would stop you from quitting except yourself, that internalized figure is the one who keeps you honest.
21:06
SPEAKER_02: And there's a tenderness in the particular choice of DiMaggio, too, which Hemingway plants quietly.
21:15
SPEAKER_02: DiMaggio's father was a fisherman.
21:19
SPEAKER_06: Ah, so Santiago, the poor old fisherman, chooses as his standard of greatness a man who came from exactly his own world, the fisherman's son who became the greatest.
21:33
SPEAKER_06: That's not an accident.
21:35
SPEAKER_06: It lets Santiago believe that his world and the world of greatness are not separate.
21:41
SPEAKER_06: That a fisherman can be a DiMaggio, that there's no unbridgeable gap between his cut hands on a fishing line and the champion on the field.
21:52
SPEAKER_06: He's claiming kinship with excellence, insisting that what he's doing out here, alone in pain, is Is the same kind of thing DiMaggio does, doing a hard craft superbly, through pain, without flinching.
22:08
SPEAKER_06: It's how a forgotten old man keeps his sense that his struggle is noble and not merely pathetic.
22:16
SPEAKER_02: And it connects to the whole theme of worth independent of outcome.
22:22
SPEAKER_02: DiMaggio played hurt, not because it guaranteed a win, you can play a perfect game and still lose, but because playing well, fully through the pain, was simply what it meant to be DiMaggio.
22:37
SPEAKER_02: The standard was internal.
22:40
SPEAKER_02: Santiago is reaching for exactly that, a standard of how to do the thing that doesn't depend on whether the thing succeeds.
22:49
SPEAKER_06: And for anyone doing demanding work over a long haul, through fatigue, through a chronic grind, through the unglamorous pain that no one sees, that's a genuinely useful idea.
23:04
SPEAKER_06: Pick your DiMaggio.
23:06
SPEAKER_06: Carry into the lonely hours a chosen figure who embodies doing it well through the pain.
23:12
SPEAKER_06: Not to beat yourself with, but to keep yourself company, and to keep the standard from slipping when no one would ever know if it did.
23:21
SPEAKER_01: Part four The Old Man and the Boy Being Seen.
23:28
SPEAKER_01: Tell me about Manilin.
23:31
SPEAKER_02: The boy.
23:52
SPEAKER_02: The parents have pulled the boy away to a more successful boat, and the boy obeys because he must, but his heart is with the old man.
24:02
SPEAKER_02: And there's this current of tenderness between them that Hemingway, master of leaving things out, lets sit right on the surface, unhidden.
24:12
SPEAKER_06: Why do you think Hemingway of all writers lets that be explicit when he hides everything else?
24:21
SPEAKER_02: What's your instinct as the psychologist?
24:26
SPEAKER_06: My instinct is that it's load bearing.
24:29
SPEAKER_06: Everything else can be understated because the reader fills it in.
24:35
SPEAKER_06: But the one thing the book cannot do without, the thing that keeps Santiago from being merely a stoic machine, is evidence that he is loved and loves.
24:48
SPEAKER_06: Without the boy, Santiago is a hard old man proving a point to the indifferent sea.
24:55
SPEAKER_06: With the boy, he's a human being embedded in a relationship, and the whole story gains a stake beyond pride.
25:04
SPEAKER_06: He's not only fishing to prove something to himself, part of him is fishing for the boy, to be in the boy's eyes, what the boy believes him to be.
25:15
SPEAKER_02: And out on the sea, alone, the boy is constantly in his mind.
25:21
SPEAKER_02: He keeps saying it aloud, I wish I had the boy.
25:26
SPEAKER_02: It's almost a refrain.
25:28
SPEAKER_06: I wish I had the boy.
25:31
SPEAKER_06: That line, repeated, is doing something precise.
25:35
SPEAKER_06: On the practical level, yes, he needs a second pair of hands, but psychologically, it's the thread back to connection in the middle of total isolation.
25:45
SPEAKER_06: He's days from any other human being, locked to a creature that's slowly destroying his body, and the mind reaches again and again for the person who loves him.
25:56
SPEAKER_06: And I'd argue that reaching is part of what sustains him.
26:01
SPEAKER_06: There's good evidence that the mere felt presence of someone who believes in us changes what we can endure.
26:07
SPEAKER_06: That we can bear more and recover more when we are held in someone's regard, even from a distance.
26:15
SPEAKER_06: Santiago carries the boy's belief in him out to sea like a second supply of water.
26:21
SPEAKER_02: And it works both directions.
26:24
SPEAKER_02: There's a devastating detail at the end.
26:27
SPEAKER_02: The old man comes back destroyed, and the boy sees his ruined hands and cries, and then takes charge, the way the old man once took charge of him.
26:39
SPEAKER_02: The boy says, essentially, that none of the bad luck nonsense matters, that he'll fish with Santiago again now, no matter what his parents say, that he still has things to learn from him.
26:52
SPEAKER_02: The love doesn't depend on the catch.
26:54
SPEAKER_02: The relationship was never about the fish.
26:58
SPEAKER_06: And that's the real reversal of the book's whole question.
27:01
SPEAKER_06: If you ask, did Santiago win or lose?
27:04
SPEAKER_06: And you measure in fish, he lost.
27:07
SPEAKER_06: He came back with a skeleton.
27:09
SPEAKER_06: But if you look at what actually matters in a human life, was the thing well done?
27:15
SPEAKER_06: Was he true to his craft?
27:17
SPEAKER_06: Is he loved?
27:18
SPEAKER_06: Is there someone he has shaped who will carry the craft forward?
27:22
SPEAKER_06: Then the voyage is a triumph.
27:24
SPEAKER_06: The skeleton is proof.
27:27
SPEAKER_06: The boy weeping and vowing to return is the real catch.
27:32
SPEAKER_06: Hemingway has quietly moved the goalposts from outcome to character and connection, and dared you to notice which one actually counts.
27:41
SPEAKER_02: Which is why I think the book lands so hard with people later in their careers or their lives.
27:50
SPEAKER_02: There's a point where you can no longer kid yourself that you'll win every outcome, or maybe any of them.
27:59
SPEAKER_02: And the question becomes: is there anything left worth doing it for once the trophies are not guaranteed?
28:08
SPEAKER_02: And the book answers, yes.
28:11
SPEAKER_02: The doing it well and the person who learns it from you.
28:16
SPEAKER_01: An interlude, alone with the sea, and the company of talking to yourself.
28:25
SPEAKER_06: Something I want to understand, he's alone for three days, but you keep quoting things he says.
28:33
SPEAKER_02: Who is he talking to?
28:35
SPEAKER_02: Himself, mostly, and the fish, and the birds, and his own hands, and the sea.
28:43
SPEAKER_02: Once he's out on the water alone, Santiago talks aloud almost constantly, to the marlin, to a small tired warbler that lands on his line, to his cramped left hand, which he scolds like a disobedient child, to the stars, to himself.
29:02
SPEAKER_02: Hemingway notes that he didn't used to talk aloud when the boy was with him.
29:07
SPEAKER_02: They could be silent together.
29:09
SPEAKER_02: But alone, he's taken to speaking his thoughts out loud the way people who live alone often do.
29:16
SPEAKER_06: I love that detail, and I want to defend it psychologically, because a reader might find it eccentric or even a sign he's cracking up.
29:28
SPEAKER_06: It's the opposite.
29:29
SPEAKER_06: Talking to yourself out loud, especially under stress, is a genuinely effective self-regulation tool.
29:37
SPEAKER_06: It's not madness, it's management.
29:40
SPEAKER_06: When Santiago says aloud, you must do this now, you must hold the line, you must eat to keep your strength, he's doing something specific.
29:50
SPEAKER_06: He's using language to steady and direct himself, to externalize the calm, competent voice, and give the frightened, tired part of him something to follow.
30:02
SPEAKER_06: Addressing yourself even by name, even out loud, creates a small, useful distance from your own panic.
30:10
SPEAKER_06: It turns I am overwhelmed into you can do the next thing.
30:15
SPEAKER_06: Athletes do it, surgeons do it, people getting through crises do it.
30:20
SPEAKER_06: Santiago, alone at the edge of his endurance, is coaching himself through out loud, because there's no one else to do it.
30:29
SPEAKER_02: And talking to the fish and the bird, is that the same thing or something else?
30:36
SPEAKER_06: I think that's something tenderer.
30:39
SPEAKER_06: And it's about not being alone in a universe that doesn't speak back.
30:45
SPEAKER_06: Santiago is a man of deep relationship with a boy we've seen, and out on an empty ocean he keeps that relational stance toward everything.
30:56
SPEAKER_06: He befriends the little bird, he addresses the fish as a brother, he thinks of the sea itself with intimacy.
31:05
SPEAKER_06: There's a lovely detail.
31:06
SPEAKER_06: The older fishermen, Hemingway tells us, called the sea Lamar, feminine, the way you'd speak of a woman you love, who gives or withholds her favors.
31:16
SPEAKER_06: The younger men with their motorboats call it Elmar, masculine, a mere place, a competitor, a thing to be used.
31:25
SPEAKER_06: Santiago is firmly Lamar.
31:29
SPEAKER_06: The sea to him is a being to be in relationship with, generous and cruel and beautiful, but never merely an object.
31:38
SPEAKER_02: Say why that matters because I think it's part of what keeps him sane out there.
31:46
SPEAKER_06: It matters because the way you hold your relationship to the world shapes whether solitude becomes communion or becomes madness.
31:59
SPEAKER_06: If the sea is El Mar, a dead thing, an opponent mere matter, then a man alone on it for three days is utterly metaphysically alone, and that kind of aloneness can unravel a person.
32:14
SPEAKER_06: But if the sea is La Mar, if the fish is a brother, and the bird is a guest and the stars are companions, then Santiago is never actually alone out there.
32:25
SPEAKER_06: He's embedded in a living web of relationship, in conversation with the whole of creation.
32:32
SPEAKER_06: It's the same temperament that loves the boy, turned outward onto the entire world.
32:38
SPEAKER_06: And I'd argue it's one of the quiet sources of his resilience.
32:42
SPEAKER_06: A man who can be in loving relationship with the bird that lands on his boat for sixty seconds, is a man who has a very hard time being truly desolate, even in the middle of the ocean with his hands bleeding.
32:55
SPEAKER_02: Which is, again, the gentle contrast running under this whole series.
33:01
SPEAKER_02: Ahab, alone with his obsession, is in relationship with nothing, only his own projected rage.
33:09
SPEAKER_02: Holden, as we'll see in another of these, can't let himself connect and nearly disappears.
33:17
SPEAKER_02: Santiago, materially the most alone of all of them, is in warm relationship with everything around him, and it holds him up.
33:27
SPEAKER_03: The old man talking out loud to a bird on a fishing line turns out to be one of the least lonely people in all these books.
33:37
SPEAKER_03: That's worth sitting with.
34:17
SPEAKER_02: He calls it his brother.
34:19
SPEAKER_02: He says things like I'll paraphrase, Fish, I love you and respect you very much, but I will kill you dead before this day ends.
34:30
SPEAKER_02: He pities it.
34:32
SPEAKER_02: He feels the Marlin is nobler and more able than he is, and more beautiful, and he's almost sorry that he, a mere man, is the one who gets to kill such a creature.
34:45
SPEAKER_02: And yet he never once considers letting it go.
34:49
SPEAKER_06: That combination is so psychologically rich, total respect, even love for the thing you are committed to destroying.
35:00
SPEAKER_06: Most of us, to do something hard to an opponent, have to first make them smaller in our minds.
35:07
SPEAKER_06: We tell ourselves they're bad or stupid or deserving.
35:12
SPEAKER_06: We dehumanize, or in this case, denoble the other, because it's easier to strike at something you've made contemptible.
35:22
SPEAKER_06: Santiago does the exact opposite.
35:25
SPEAKER_06: He makes the Marlin greater.
35:28
SPEAKER_06: He elevates his opponent to a brother, an equal, even a superior, and then does what he has to do anyway, with his eyes fully open to its magnificence.
35:41
SPEAKER_02: Why do you think the book insists on that?
35:45
SPEAKER_02: It would be a simpler, more comfortable story if the fish were just a prize or a monster.
35:53
SPEAKER_06: I think it's making an argument about what it means to do a hard thing with dignity, both your own and your opponents.
36:03
SPEAKER_06: There's a kind of worthiness that only exists in relation to a worthy adversary.
36:10
SPEAKER_06: Santiago's whole stature in this book comes from the fact that the marlin is great.
36:17
SPEAKER_06: A small fish would make him a small man.
36:20
SPEAKER_06: The bigger and nobler the fish, the bigger and nobler the struggle.
36:25
SPEAKER_06: And so his respect for the marlin is not weakness or sentimentality, it's actually the source of his own meaning.
36:35
SPEAKER_06: He needs the fish to be magnificent because he is measuring himself against it.
36:41
SPEAKER_06: To diminish the fish would be to diminish himself.
36:46
SPEAKER_02: There's a line I love.
36:48
SPEAKER_02: He thinks that the fish is his friend, and then corrects himself or complicates it.
36:54
SPEAKER_02: He's never seen or heard of such a fish, and yet he must kill it.
37:00
SPEAKER_02: And he's glad we don't have to try to kill the stars.
37:04
SPEAKER_02: He takes a strange comfort that a man's daily task is only to kill his brother, the fish, not something even greater.
37:13
SPEAKER_06: That's a remarkable little passage because it gestures at the whole tragic structure of being alive.
37:20
SPEAKER_06: To live, you must take life.
37:23
SPEAKER_06: The fisherman kills the fish, as everything that lives lives at some cost to something else.
37:30
SPEAKER_06: Santiago doesn't pretend otherwise, and he doesn't harden himself against it either.
37:36
SPEAKER_06: He holds both.
37:38
SPEAKER_06: I must kill and I honor what I kill.
37:41
SPEAKER_06: And I feel the sorrow of it, and I do it anyway, cleanly, with respect.
37:47
SPEAKER_06: There's a maturity in that which our culture often can't manage.
37:52
SPEAKER_06: We tend to want to be either the innocent who never harms anything, or the predator who feels nothing.
37:58
SPEAKER_06: Santiago is neither.
38:00
SPEAKER_06: He's the grown-up who acts, and pays the full emotional price of acting, and does not look away from either.
38:08
SPEAKER_02: And then he kills it, drives the harpoon in, and Hemingway gives this almost ecstatic moment where the marlin rises out of the water, huge and silver and alive in its death, and then it's done.
38:25
SPEAKER_02: And for a brief hour, Santiago has won.
38:29
SPEAKER_02: The greatest fish anyone has seen, lashed to his little boat, and him turning for home.
38:36
SPEAKER_02: If the book ended there, it would be a simple triumph.
38:40
SPEAKER_02: But it doesn't end there.
38:43
SPEAKER_02: It doesn't end there.
38:45
SPEAKER_01: The sharks are coming.
38:48
SPEAKER_01: Part six destroyed but not defeated.
38:54
SPEAKER_06: So he's killed this magnificent fish.
38:58
SPEAKER_06: He's lashed it to the boat.
39:00
SPEAKER_06: He's heading home a champion.
39:03
SPEAKER_06: And then the sharks arrive.
39:06
SPEAKER_06: Walk me through it because this is where the famous line lives.
39:10
SPEAKER_02: The first shark is a big Mako.
39:13
SPEAKER_02: Hemingway describes it almost admiringly too.
39:17
SPEAKER_02: A beautiful, fast, lethal thing, and it tears a great bite out of the marlin.
39:23
SPEAKER_02: And Santiago kills it with his harpoon, but the shark takes the harpoon down with it when it dies.
39:30
SPEAKER_02: And now there's blood in the water, a trail of it, and the marlin is wounded, and more sharks are coming.
39:37
SPEAKER_02: And Santiago knows with total clarity what's going to happen.
39:42
SPEAKER_02: He's going to lose the fish.
39:44
SPEAKER_02: The ocean is going to take it back bite by bite, and there is nothing he can do that will fully stop it.
39:53
SPEAKER_02: And he fights anyway.
39:56
SPEAKER_02: He fights anyway, and that's the heart of it.
40:00
SPEAKER_02: He kills sharks with a knife lashed to an oar until the knife blade snaps.
40:06
SPEAKER_02: He clubs them.
40:07
SPEAKER_02: When the club is gone, he uses the boat's tiller.
40:11
SPEAKER_02: He fights through the night.
40:13
SPEAKER_02: And it's during this hopeless fight that he thinks the line, you know, a man can be destroyed, but not defeated.
40:22
SPEAKER_02: He also at one point thinks something like, It is silly not to hope, and he believes it a sin.
40:31
SPEAKER_02: And he keeps on.
40:33
SPEAKER_02: But he's also honest with himself.
40:36
SPEAKER_02: By the end, the Marlin is nothing but a skeleton, head, spine, tail, and Santiago is spent, his hands raw, and he knows he's been beaten in the only terms the market will measure.
40:52
SPEAKER_06: Let me sit with that line, because it's famous enough that it's almost become a motivational poster.
41:00
SPEAKER_06: And I think the posta version misses what's hard and true about it.
41:04
SPEAKER_06: A man can be destroyed, but not defeated.
41:09
SPEAKER_06: The cheap reading is never give up and you'll win.
41:13
SPEAKER_06: But that's not what the book shows at all.
41:16
SPEAKER_06: Santiago does give up the fish.
41:18
SPEAKER_06: He has to, it's physically gone.
41:21
SPEAKER_06: He is comprehensively destroyed, his body wrecked, his prize eaten, his material situation arguably worse than when he started.
41:31
SPEAKER_06: So what does not defeated actually mean if it doesn't mean he wins?
41:38
SPEAKER_02: That's the question the whole book is built to make you ask.
41:42
SPEAKER_02: What's your answer?
41:44
SPEAKER_06: I think destroyed but not defeated names a distinction between what happens to you and who you are while it happens.
41:56
SPEAKER_06: Destruction is about outcomes, your body, your possessions, your results, the external facts.
42:04
SPEAKER_06: Those can be taken from you completely.
42:06
SPEAKER_06: The sea proves it.
42:08
SPEAKER_06: Defeat is something else.
42:11
SPEAKER_06: Defeat is internal.
42:13
SPEAKER_06: It's the moment you stop fighting as yourself.
42:16
SPEAKER_06: When you abandon your own standards, when you turn on the thing you value, when you let the destruction convince you that you are never worth anything, when you become smaller than the situation.
42:29
SPEAKER_06: And that is the one thing that can't be taken from you, because it can only be given.
42:35
SPEAKER_06: Santiago is destroyed because the world did that to him.
42:39
SPEAKER_06: He is not defeated because he never once stopped being Santiago.
42:44
SPEAKER_06: He fought with skill and courage and even a kind of courtesy to the end.
42:51
SPEAKER_06: And he never told himself the story that he was nothing.
42:54
SPEAKER_06: The sharks got the fish.
42:56
SPEAKER_06: They never got the man.
42:58
SPEAKER_02: And Hemingway underlines that it's not a cheap victory, because Santiago suffers real regret, too.
43:06
SPEAKER_02: On the way back, exhausted, he says to himself that he shouldn't have gone out so far.
43:13
SPEAKER_02: I went out too far, he thinks.
43:16
SPEAKER_02: He takes responsibility.
43:18
SPEAKER_02: He doesn't pretend the ruin was pure bad luck or pure nobility.
43:24
SPEAKER_06: And I'm so glad the book includes that because it keeps not defeated from tipping into mere stubbornness or ego.
43:34
SPEAKER_06: Santiago can hold two things at once that lesser minds keep apart.
43:38
SPEAKER_06: I did not betray myself, I fought as well as a man could, and I also overreached, and I own that, and it cost me.
43:49
SPEAKER_06: That second part is maturity, not weakness.
43:52
SPEAKER_06: He went past the point where he could protect what he caught.
43:56
SPEAKER_06: Out beyond all the other boats, beyond help, beyond.
44:00
SPEAKER_06: Partly out of the very pride and hunger that made him great.
44:05
SPEAKER_06: The strength that let him catch the fish is the same reach that lost it.
44:10
SPEAKER_06: We talked about that pattern with the other books, that people's undoing often grows from their gift, not against it.
44:18
SPEAKER_06: Santiago's reach is his glory and his error, and he's wise enough at the end to see both without letting either cancel the other.
44:28
SPEAKER_02: There's something almost unbearably honest in an old writer mocked as finished, publishing a book whose hero does the great thing, loses it, admits he reached too far, and is still unmistakably not defeated.
44:57
SPEAKER_01: You keep mentioning the ending.
45:01
SPEAKER_06: He comes home with a skeleton, collapses, and dreams of lions.
45:06
SPEAKER_02: What are the lions?
45:09
SPEAKER_02: Through the whole book, Santiago has a recurring dream, and it's always the same.
45:15
SPEAKER_02: Lions, young lions, playing on the beaches of Africa in the evening, where he saw them long ago as a young sailor.
45:24
SPEAKER_02: He doesn't dream of great fish or of storms or of past triumphs or contests.
45:31
SPEAKER_02: He dreams of lions playing.
45:34
SPEAKER_02: And the book ends after everything, the ruin, the skeleton, the weeping boy, with the old man asleep and the boy sitting by him, and the final line telling us the old man is dreaming about the lions.
45:50
SPEAKER_06: And why does that land as the right ending, rather than, say, ending on the skeleton or on his regret?
46:00
SPEAKER_02: That's what I want you to help me understand, actually, because it's clearly the emotional resolution, and yet it's just an image of lions.
46:12
SPEAKER_06: Let me try.
46:13
SPEAKER_06: I think the lions are several things at once, and they're powerful precisely because Hemingway, true to form, never explains them.
46:24
SPEAKER_06: First, their youth Africa, his young manhood, strength and beauty and the world wide open.
46:33
SPEAKER_06: So a man who has just been through a brutal reminder of his age and limits returns, in sleep, to a vision of young vitality.
46:43
SPEAKER_06: That could be read as sad, the old man can only find vigor in dreams now.
46:48
SPEAKER_06: But I don't think it's sad, and here's why.
46:52
SPEAKER_06: The lions are not working.
46:54
SPEAKER_06: They're not hunting, not fighting, not proving anything.
46:58
SPEAKER_06: They're playing.
47:00
SPEAKER_06: They're at ease, at peace, in their own nature, needing to catch nothing.
47:06
SPEAKER_06: And I think that's the deepest note the book ends on.
47:10
SPEAKER_06: Beneath all the striving and the reaching and the contest with the fish, there is this image of pure, untroubled being.
47:18
SPEAKER_06: Strength completely at rest with nothing left to prove.
47:22
SPEAKER_02: So the man who spent the book proving he was not defeated, goes to sleep in a place beyond the whole question of winning and losing.
47:34
SPEAKER_02: Exactly.
47:35
SPEAKER_06: The lions don't need to win.
47:38
SPEAKER_06: They just are, beautifully, in the evening light.
47:42
SPEAKER_06: And I think Hemingway is telling us that this, not the fish, not the victory, not even the dignity of the struggle, is what's underneath it all, and what Santiago can still reach.
47:55
SPEAKER_06: He's been emptied out completely.
47:58
SPEAKER_06: And what's at the very bottom, when everything else has been taken, is not despair.
48:05
SPEAKER_06: It's this calm, almost childlike vision of vitality at play.
48:12
SPEAKER_06: The fact that he can still dream the lions is the proof that the sharks truly didn't get the essential thing.
48:20
SPEAKER_06: His inner life is intact.
48:23
SPEAKER_06: He is, in the only sense that finally matters, still whole.
48:28
SPEAKER_02: And there's the continuity with the boy, too.
48:32
SPEAKER_02: The boy will fish with him again, the craft will pass on.
48:36
SPEAKER_02: The old man sleeps safe with someone watching over him who loves him.
48:42
SPEAKER_02: So the ending holds all of it at once: defeat and dignity, age and youth, solitude and love, an old man's ruin, and a vision of young lions playing.
48:55
SPEAKER_02: It refuses to resolve into either tragedy or triumph.
49:00
SPEAKER_02: It just rests in the fullness of a life that was truly lived.
49:05
SPEAKER_01: Part eight.
49:07
SPEAKER_01: So what is it really about?
49:10
SPEAKER_01: A psychologist's summary.
49:13
SPEAKER_06: Let me gather it up the way I would after sitting with all of this.
49:19
SPEAKER_06: And you keep me honest.
49:22
SPEAKER_06: Go ahead.
49:23
SPEAKER_06: At its center, The Old Man in the Sea is a book about where a person's worth actually lives.
49:31
SPEAKER_06: And its answer is that worth lives in how you meet your life, not in what your life yields.
49:38
SPEAKER_06: Santiago fails by every external measure.
49:42
SPEAKER_06: No fish for months, then the greatest fish of his life reduced to bones, his body wrecked, no richer than before.
49:50
SPEAKER_06: If you score a human being the way we usually score them, by outcomes, by the catch, he's a loser twice over.
49:58
SPEAKER_06: The book spends every one of its pages quietly dismantling that scoring system and offering another one.
50:06
SPEAKER_06: Did you do the thing well?
50:09
SPEAKER_06: Did you keep your standards when the results abandoned you?
50:12
SPEAKER_06: Did you face the hard thing with courage and without self-pity?
50:16
SPEAKER_06: Did you honor what you struggled against?
50:19
SPEAKER_06: Were you true to who you are all the way to the bottom?
50:23
SPEAKER_06: By those measures, Santiago is magnificent, and the book makes you feel it in your chest even as the facts go against him.
50:32
SPEAKER_02: And the losing streak, say where that fits, because I think it's the most usable part for a reader.
50:41
SPEAKER_06: The 84 days are the book's gift to anyone in a long dry spell.
50:47
SPEAKER_06: And everyone who does hard, uncertain work has them.
50:51
SPEAKER_06: The lesson isn't keep going and you'll eventually win because Santiago keeps going and still loses the fish.
50:59
SPEAKER_06: The lesson is subtler and tougher.
51:02
SPEAKER_06: Don't let the streak rename you.
51:05
SPEAKER_06: A run of bad outcomes is information about the world, the fish weren't there, not necessarily a verdict on your ability or your worth.
51:15
SPEAKER_06: The people who survive the droughts are the ones who can hold their identity and their standards separate from their recent results.
51:23
SPEAKER_06: I am someone who does this well, and I will go out again tomorrow, said without either denying the facts or being crushed by them.
51:32
SPEAKER_06: Santiago goes out on the 85th day as fully himself as he was on the first.
51:38
SPEAKER_06: That refusal is the whole ballgame.
51:41
SPEAKER_02: I'd add the piece about pride, because the book is careful not to make him a simple hero.
51:50
SPEAKER_06: Right, the I went out too far.
51:54
SPEAKER_06: The same reach that makes Santiago great is the reach that loses him the fish.
51:59
SPEAKER_06: He goes beyond all the other boats, beyond safety, beyond the range where he could protect his catch, driven by pride and hunger and the need to prove himself.
52:10
SPEAKER_06: And he's honest about it afterward.
52:12
SPEAKER_06: So the book isn't a simple hymn to never give up grit.
52:16
SPEAKER_06: It's wiser than that.
52:18
SPEAKER_06: It knows that the drive which produces greatness is the same drive that produces overreach, and that a mature person holds both, takes full ownership of the error and full credit for the courage, without letting one erase the other.
52:33
SPEAKER_06: That's a rare and grown-up balance, and it's modeled for you in an old man talking to himself in a boat.
52:40
SPEAKER_02: And underneath all of it, the one thing I'd never want a first reader to miss is that this supposedly cold, hard, masculine book is at its core about love and connection.
52:56
SPEAKER_02: The boy, the old man carried through his ordeal by the knowledge that he is loved and believed in, the craft passed from old hands to young ones, the dream of lions at peace.
53:12
SPEAKER_02: For all its talk of struggle and solitude, the book's final images are of being watched over by someone who loves you, and of strength at rest.
53:23
SPEAKER_02: But it turns out the great fish was never the point.
53:27
SPEAKER_02: The point was the man and the boy, and the quality of a life fully met.
53:35
SPEAKER_06: So if I carry one thing home, it's this you will not win every outcome.
53:42
SPEAKER_06: In some seasons you'll win none.
53:44
SPEAKER_06: And one day the sharks come for even your best work.
53:48
SPEAKER_06: None of that can defeat you.
53:50
SPEAKER_06: Only you can do that by abandoning yourself.
53:54
SPEAKER_06: Keep your standards, honor your opponents, own your overreach, hold on to the people who love you, and whatever the sea takes, it won't get the thing that actually matters.
54:07
SPEAKER_02: Read it in one sitting on a quiet afternoon.
54:11
SPEAKER_02: It's short and it's plain, and it will stay with you for years.
54:17
SPEAKER_02: Most of what it means is under the water.
54:21
SPEAKER_02: But if you read it slowly, you'll feel the whole iceberg.
54:28
SPEAKER_00: So that was the old man in the sea.
54:31
SPEAKER_00: A small story about an enormous question.
54:34
SPEAKER_00: What are we worth when the results stop going our way?
54:39
SPEAKER_00: Perhaps far more than the fish.
54:44
SPEAKER_00: That is where we will leave it for today.
54:46
SPEAKER_00: A long book has never made you feel you were the problem.
54:49
SPEAKER_00: And I hope this showed you another way in.
54:52
SPEAKER_00: Thank you to Clara and Theo, and thank you for listening.
54:56
SPEAKER_00: And if you want a way of working the fits of brain to work too, not only with books, just contact me.
55:03
SPEAKER_00: I'd be happy to hear you.
55:04
SPEAKER_00: I am Daniele Forni, and this has been the Rita Shaman Podcast.
55:09
SPEAKER_00: And until the next story, take care of your inner world.