[Edited from a conversation with Hemingway in 2010]
you might ask yourself, what is important about whether Hemingway’s life went off in the wrong direction? Why should you care what happened so long ago?
Well, the impression I had was that it concerned the interaction between this side and your side.
You could look at it more like this: Your lives are not divorced from this side. Not now, not ever. That may be easy enough for you to accept, but the converse is equally true: When you get onto this side, you are still not divorced from the other side, which at that point is the physical.
It’s a dicho, one of your reversible statements.
It isn’t even that. Wherever you are, you are intimately connected to the other side. Always were, always are, always will be, like it or not, believe it or not. Suppose you don’t believe in the air, since you can’t see it or taste it or feel it. Doesn’t matter, you’re still living in it and can’t help living in it, because there isn’t any other place to live. It’s the same here. We talk about the physical and nonphysical as though they were separate, but that’s just the effect of language. The two sides are like two sides of a coin. Can you have a coin with only one side?
Posted for May 22, 2025