about a search of my own

I look for places to live, and the places leave me disoriented. Empty places. People leaving spaces.

The setting sun's light slips over the trees across the river, and I wonder, Who will leave me a home?

something about "To Have and Have Not" by Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway's To Have and Have Not, published in 1937, plays out the story of the destruction of Harry Morgan, an everyman fishing boat captain out of Key West, Florida. Harry, after being stiffed on a much-needed payment for chartering a private fishing cruise, finds himself with little choice but to recoup money through the black market, trafficking people and contraband between Cuba and Florida as opportunities to support his family dry up in the Great Depression Era.

I enjoyed parts of To Have and Have Not, but, most of the time, I was bored. That is probably ignorance, I know.

I did, however, enjoy a movie adaptation, "The Breaking Point," starring John Garfield and Patricia Neal. Ms. Neal, as she always did, stole the show, and the dialog at times was brilliant.

My favorite passage in Hemingway's text comes after a supporting character, American writer and expatriate, Richard Gordon, finds out his wife is cheating on him. Richard goes drinking. Here he is at the bar:

The whiskey warmed his tongue and the back of his throat, but it did not change his ideas any, and suddenly, looking at himself in the mirror behind the bar, he knew that drinking was never going to do any good to him now. Whatever he had now he had, and it was from now on, and if he drank himself unconscious when he woke up it would be there.

Note: I have not seen the other movie adaptations.