Conversations with Hemingway (13)

Papa’s code 

Tuesday, May 11, 2010

7:45 AM. Papa, my friend Christel asks an interesting question. Did it occur to Jake (or to you) that a man might have ways to sexually satisfy a woman other than normal intercourse?

Think about it, and you will see that in this case he could satisfy her, but she couldn’t satisfy him, and over time it could only lead to humiliation and resentment, even though it was nobody’s fault. Jake wasn’t impotent, he was mutilated, and had no way to relieve the pressure — and so she couldn’t help him. If he had had his testicles removed or destroyed it would have made him less of a man sexually but it would have been easier to bear, in the way that a forgotten state of mind is easier to bear in memory from a different state of mind than from the same state of mind. In other words, he wouldn’t then have felt the urgency so much as remembered it, which is sort of abstract.

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