More than a year back, I had been to Key West on the tip of Florida. I got the opportunity to visit Ernest Hemingway’s home there. He is supposed to have stayed there in the 1930s with his wife (who got the house as a wedding gift from a wealthy uncle).
Key West is a beautiful island, a beach town and most people spend time enjoying the watersports, the culture, the sunshine and chilling out near the ocean. But the best part of my trip that I cherished was this visit to Hemingway’s House.
The Snows of Kilimanjaro and some of his other popular works were written when he was here. After his death, it was auctioned and converted into a museum. It is a popular tourist spot, and the funny thing is, apart from his books, photographs and other memories, it is full of cats.
All the rooms are open to visitors which I walked through, except Hemingway’s writing room, which visitors could see through a screen. I saw his room where there were two typewriters on a table and a chair. The house used to be quite an isolated one at that time. Hemingway might have appreciated the solitude in a remote house on such a far off island, I thought.
And as I walked around, reading the stories neatly displayed outside every room, I wondered what a bygone era that was. No writer uses the typewriter anymore. Most type on their laptop. Or tablet. Or even the phone at times. Some dictate on a Dictaphone. Some purists write with a pen on paper. But most authors definitely don’t use the typewriter.
I imagined how much longer it might have taken to write out a story or a script using a typewriter. And what would happen if Hemingway made a mistake or wanted to change something in a story?
Now we have the backspace or delete buttons. Nothing of that sort existed then. And then, if you add the editing and the finishing of the manuscript, how much more time it would have taken? Those were my first thoughts.
But as I stepped outside the main house to go to the rooms behind, I saw a crowd of people taking selfies and pictures on their phone. Many of them took multiple photos in different poses.
I could see some posing in a manner which suggested that they were definitely pics for social media. Some recorded videos that, I was certain, were going to be reels to be posted online. There were some vloggers recording videos. It was quite a veritable crowd.
That is when my first thought about the difficulty of finishing something due to typewriters changed. On second thought, I realized that with a laptop, or a phone or a tablet, always on and always connected, writers of today have a hidden, distracting enemy that Hemingway’s era never faced.
That enemy was the entangling mire of temptations that pull in anyone, especially writers, without the slightest of their realizing it. It is so easy to waste an hour aimlessly wandering in the plethora of digital clicks that exist all around you.
For a writer, it could mean a simple search for a thesaurus or a synonym – which, on the surface, is related to his work. Or it could be a legitimate break after an hour of writing to read the news or check on email. I am not even mentioning social media or messengers. They are the most slippery types of digital quicksand. One step, and you are going to find it tough to stand up.
This was something that Hemingway and the writers of that era didn’t face. Not to take anything away from them, but I left Hemingway’s home and museum in Key West, Florida, inspired but also cognizant that it was a different era, close to a hundred years back.
The tools that writers have and the temptations they face keep changing from era to era, time to time. As long as the writing itself is timeless, it doesn’t matter.
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