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Papa's Problem.
(4 minute read.)
The Old Man and the Cursor.
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The goddamn machine writes better than me.
There. I said it. The thing you're not supposed to say. The thing that gets you laughed out of the Key West bars and the Paris cafés and every goddamn place where men still pretend that writing is a blood sport.
I've been staring at this screen for three hours. Three hours. The sun is high and getting higher and the marlin are running and the rum is sweating in the glass beside me and I'm staring at a goddamn cursor blinking like it's mocking me.
Bill said try the machine. Bill with his new glasses and his Stanford degree and his soft hands that never held a reel or a rifle. Bill said it's the future. Bill said even Faulkner would use it. Bill said a lot of things Bill says.
So I tried it.
I typed: 'Story about a man who loves the sea but the sea doesn't love him back. Make it clean. Make it true. No fancy words. No tricks.'
And the machine wrote something.
And it was good.
It was goddamn good.
It had the weight. It had the silence between the words. It had the thing you can't name but know when you see it. The thing I've spent forty years learning to put on paper.
The machine did it in four seconds.
Four seconds.
I sat there. I watched the cursor stop blinking. I watched the words sit on the screen like they'd always been there. Like they were waiting. Like they didn't need me at all.
I thought about Spain. About the bulls and the blood and the sun burning through the dust. I thought about writing those sentences one at a time, each one a fight, each one a small death. I thought about Hemingway who wrote and Hemingway who bled and Hemingway who finally couldn't do it anymore.
And I thought: maybe this is the answer.
Not the answer to writing. The answer to living.
Because here's the truth they don't tell you: writing takes everything. It takes the fish and the rum and the women and the war. It takes the raw stuff of life and grinds it into sentences. And at the end, when the sentences are done, there's nothing left. Just an old man with a gun and a headache and a million unwritten pages he's too tired to face.
But if the machine can do some of it—if the machine can take the weight, carry the load, do the heavy lifting while I'm out on the water—
Maybe I'd still be alive.
Maybe I'd still be Hemingway.
I typed another line: 'Write something about a man who learns to let go. Make it brave. Make it clean. Make it so I can read it and not feel ashamed.'
The machine wrote.
I read.
And then I stood up. I walked away from the desk. I picked up the rod and the reel and the half-empty bottle.
The cursor is still blinking. The machine is still waiting for the next task. It'll be there when I get back.
The fish won't.
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