The Truth/The Stream - A metaphor gleaned from Hemingway

[Brocke]

I came across this amazing passage today and it reminded me of how it can be a struggle sometimes trying to wake people up and spread the truth.

Enjoy!


That something I cannot yet define completely but the feeling comes when you write well and truly of something and know impersonally that you have written in that way and those who are paid to read it and report on it do not like the subject so they say it is all a fake, yet you know it's value absolutely or when you do something which people do not consider a serious occupation and yet you know, truly, that it is as important and has always been as important as all the things that are in fashion and when on the sea you are alone with it and know this Gulf Stream you are living with, knowing, learning about and loving has moved as it moves since before man and that it has gone by the shoreline of that long beautiful unhappy island since before Columbus sighted it and that the things you find out about it are permanent and of value because that stream will flow as it has flowed after the Indians, after the Spaniards, after the British, after the Americans and after all the Cubans and all the systems of governments, the richness, the poverty, the martyrdom, the sacrifice and the venality and the cruelty are all gone as the high piled scow of garbage, bright colored, white flecked, ill smelling, now tilted on its side spills off its load into the blue water turning it a pale green to a depth of four or five fathoms as the load spreads across the surface the sinkable part going down in the flotsam of palm fronds, corks, bottles, unused electric light globes, seasoned with an occasional condom or a deep floating corset, the torn leaves of a students exercise book, a well inflated dog, the occasional rat, the no longer distinguished cat, all this well shepherded by the boats of the garbage pickers who pluck their prizes with long poles as interested, as intelligent, as accurate as historians they have the viewpoint, the stream with no visible flow takes five loads of this a day when things are going well in La Habana and in ten miles along the coast it is as clear and blue and unimpressed as it was ever before the tug hauled out the scow and the palm fronds of our victories, the worn light bulbs of our discoveries and the empty condoms of our great loves float with no significance against one single lasting thing, the stream.

Ernest Hemingway
from The Green Hills of Africa (1935)