Sunrise With Schubert

Off to earn money today and time just fugited away, Here's a harmless little literary fancy designed to annoy a Dame Daphne du Maurier fan I know.

Last night I dreamed I went to see Ernest Hemingway again. We had drinks. He had a chilled Vermouth. I had a Four Roses. It came ice cold, with three large ice cubes bobbing in the amber liquid. We talked. Our conversation originated in an animation born of enthusiasm but calmed as the night grew silent. I nodded as I filled his glass. Next I freshened mine, placing the warm glass of the bottle against the still-chilled top of the glass and listening to the clink of two disparate elements like two minds meeting for the first time. I raised it and gave thanks for the time spent together.

An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with his fools,” he said.

“And,” I said.  “for your wisdom.”

“What wisdom?”

“The wisdom to sit with a stranger and talk.”

“I never had to choose a subject,” he said. “My subjects chose me.”

“It must involve trust.”

“The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.”

“Have you, from where you dwell now, heard of the strange state of our country?”

“America is no moveable feast.”

“It seems we trusted the wrong person, or people. There was no intent to destroy. Many people simply believed.

All things truly wicked start from innocence.”

“What do you think of courage?”

He raised a hand and examined it. He turned a finger so that he saw the nail first and then the print. He moved it to and fro, as if to concentrate his being on the most singular of places. “Courage is grace under pressure.”

“To move without talking about the movement?”

“Never mistake movement for action,” he said.

“No, of course not.”

He thought and added another to his first. “Hesitation increases in relation to risk in equal proportion to age.”

I thought, then said, “The man so many worship now claims courage.”

“Why should anybody be interested in some old man who was a failure?”

This stopped me and I stared at my glass as if were a cauldron of wisdom. “He says now, and his followers believe him, that he would brave if the chance arose, that he would, as an old warrior once said, ride to the sounds  of the cannons.”

“Isn’t it pretty to think so?”

Eeew.