A Brief Moment of Seriousness

I noticed that all of my favorite authors (Bukowski, Hemingway, Faulkner, Hunter S. Thompson) share certain characteristics. Very specific ones, in fact. And as much as I am drawn to their writing styles, their stories or the art of their words, I am drawn to them as people too. Maybe even more so than their prose.

I think anyone who has any basic knowledge of these authors will attest to the fact that they were all drunks and womanizers. These are traits any logical person would abhor in another. But somehow, I do not. It isn’t that I ‘like’ drunks or womanizers or that I even admire them. Quite the contrary. I find these qualities to be weaknesses. A person usually becomes a drunk because they do not believe they have the emotional capacity to deal with their sadness or their loss or their emptiness. So they pour whiskey on their pain, drown it in beer until it becomes a faint numbness, an echo of its original self. As for womanizing, this is almost always a tool used to fill in a void created by another woman (a lost lover, an ex-wife, a mother, the one who got away), a way to avoid intimacy.

Although these are not qualities I admire, I do understand them. A person has to fall into the abyss of themselves in order to want to bury what they see there. But isn’t it in that abyss that true art exists? You may not like it, they surely didn’t, but you can at least appreciate that they had the ability to both fall and create. These are not men who went to therapy, men who found women to heal them, men who turned to god. No, they drank, they had sex and they wrote. And their words had soul and truth and meaning.

Yet they were more than just alcoholic man-whores. These were men full of passion. Consumed by it even. They loved until they broke, they cried to Beethoven and Chopin, they read and re-read the classics, they wanted world peace, they fought with bare fists and they embraced their own madness. It seems that underneath each of their hard exteriors was a soft side reserved only for those worth being soft for. Now that is something worth admiring.

Why so serious, you ask? Because I can be. Because today is a serious day. And because sometimes it is important to remind myself that I am not perfect and the people I love are not perfect and even my heroes are not perfect. And that is really a very beautiful thing.