I Wish

Started reading "The Garden of Eden" by Hemingway this morning.

Novels like these create a deep longing in me for more leisure in my life. A soul-deep longing.

In the 1920's a segment of the American population was referred to as the Lost Generation. These were people who had come of age during World War I and felt disillusioned in the post-war world.

In the literary world the Lost Generation was represented by a group of writers who travelled to Europe and wrote there up until around the Great Depression. They adopted a bohemian lifestyle of travel and leisure in reaction to an America they felt had been broken.

The two biggest names in this group were Ernest Hemingway and F.Scott Fitzgerald.

Fitzgerald's books, at least the ones I have read, evoke this lifestyle of wealth, leisure and experimentation. "The Garden of Eden" does the same.

Creative people travelling around Europe, people with no financial worries, moving from country to country, spending their time on beaches and in cafes, doing whatever their moods dictate on a whim.

Rising for breakfast, then down to the beach for sun and swimming, back for lunch, then biking or walking, back for dinner, then socializing. On to the next country as the mood dictates.

When I read these stories my soul rises up in hunger to demand just a taste of that feeling.

I will never be rich. I will never enjoy that lifestyle.

Our vacations feel like desperate things. A couple of weeks or days or weekends when we escape work for a short while knowing full well the job awaits with its meaninglessness and frustrations and path to nowhere.

It is human nature to want to enjoy life. To really taste it, to slow it down and examine it and improve upon it in ways that tailor it to our own unique needs.

The vast majority of us never get that chance.

A middle ground would be nice. Many foreign countries offer their employees six weeks of vacation. A slower pace, some breathing room during the day.

This falls under the heading of treating employees like human beings.

Not so in America. In this country we are human resources. Resources to be exploited, used up and discarded.

When I read these magnificent novels the stories tap into that part of me that is forced into hiding in reaction to the ridiculous lifestyle of America.

They tap into the purely human part of me that longs for some sort of freedom, some sort of reprieve from the burdens imposed by life.

I can never figure out if these feelings are good for me or bad for me.

I only know that on this February 1, 2015 with a temperature of 13 degrees and a wind chill more evil than that, I wish I did not have to get up to go to work tomorrow to do something so meaningless to me that it claws blood from my eyes.

I wish I could take Carol to a warm place surrounded by beauty and spend money on simple pleasures without looking over our shoulders at the suffocating budget.

I wish.

I will continue to wish.