First there was the Old Man and the Sea, a book that had already quietly rearranged some furniture in my thinking, and then arrived, Islands in the Stream. That’s the spirit I’d like to carry into what I’m sharing here today. Pull up a chair. Bring your coffee. There’s a particular kind of conversation Hemingway invites you into, one that doesn’t resolve neatly, doesn’t tell you what to think, and somehow keeps you at the table anyway.
I want to center this around a single moment in the novel, not some dramatic climax, just a quiet morning-after exchange. Eddy, a crew member who got swept up in a series of fights the night before because others wouldn’t believe the story of an extraordinary fishing trip, is recounting the whole mess. Another character gently tells him to let it go, “It doesn’t do any good.” And Eddy, with the kind of weary honesty that tends to land like a stone, agrees: “I kept waiting for truth and right to win and then somebody new would knock truth and right right on its ass.”
I’ve sat with that line more times than I can count.
What makes this moment in Islands in the Stream so resonant is its context. The fight wasn’t over politics or religion or anything grand. It started over a fishing story, and yes one that happened to be completely true. A young boy had hooked a massive fish, and the experience onboard that boat had been genuinely extraordinary. Eddy had been there. He knew what he saw. And yet the more he insisted, the more the evening unraveled. The story itself was never the problem. The need to win the story was. Hemingway, with that quiet economy of his, lets the scene breathe just long enough for us to recognize ourselves in it somewhere.
There is something deeply human in Eddy’s confession. We’ve all done some version of this; held a position with complete confidence, waited for the moment the room would come around, and then watched something entirely new arrive and reshuffle the whole deck. It is exhausting, that kind of waiting. And what strikes me most tenderly about Eddy’s line isn’t the frustration in it, though that’s certainly there. It’s the hope that preceded it. He was waiting for truth to win. That’s not cynicism, that’s someone who believed in something and kept showing up for it. I find that worth honoring, even when the outcome stings.
Here is where I find myself most curious, and where I’d genuinely invite you to sit. If Eddy’s experience tells us anything, it might be this: the goal of a good conversation was never really about winning. It was about reaching. Reaching for something shared, something honest, something that leaves both people a little more whole than when they sat down. In scripture, Paul’s words to Timothy come back to me here, “I have fought the good fight”, and I keep noticing that Paul never describes that fight as one waged against another person. It was internal. It was about faithfulness. It was about love, which is, after all, the commandment Jesus returned to most insistently. Love one another. Not just the people already in your corner.
None of this is a prescription. I have no interest in telling anyone how to feel about the conversations happening around them right now. I’ve simply been sitting with this Hemingway passage and with my own history of conversations where I arrived a little too ready to win, and wondering what changes when we walk in curious instead of certain. What becomes possible when we’re no longer waiting for truth to be declared and are instead just… present with another person?
That question is the one I’m living with. I’d be glad if you sat with it too, even just for the length of a cup of coffee.
The Curious Table 