"I come from 7 suicides, perhaps more."

Said Mariel Hemingway, who's in a new documentary called "Running From Crazy," the trailer for which I've embedded below:

The granddaughter of Ernest Hemingway, Mariel has had to contend with a lot during her life. While millions celebrate her father as one of the all-time greatest writers, Mariel has struggled with the history of mental illness in her family.

Note the headslappingly bad error in that passage, which is in USA Today, where they seem to be running from editing.



There's some New Age-y spirituality in that, but it seems to be mostly about a wholesome experience in the mountains and earnest* physical exercise. What would you do if substance abuse, depression, and suicide seemed to "curse" your family? Just to call it a "curse," which MH does, is to give it a spiritual quality, as if one — like Scalia — believed in the Devil. If you think something is engrained in your genetic structure, it might be preferable to conceive of that thing as a separate entity that you could fight.

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That Scalia business got me to download "The Screwtape Letters," and searching for "suicide," I came up with this, as the devil Screwtape talks about how to use love to turn "an emotional, gullible man" away from God:

[F]eed him on minor poets and fifth-rate novelists of the old school until you have made him believe that ‘Love’ is both irresistible and somehow intrinsically meritorious. This belief is not much help, I grant you, in producing casual unchastity; but it is an incomparable recipe for prolonged, ‘noble’, romantic, tragic adulteries, ending, if all goes well, in murders and suicides. Failing that, it can be used to steer the patient into a useful marriage....

I love the happenstance of "novelist" appearing in that passage, but no one would put Hemingway at the 5th rate level. Even Hemingway haters. Here's a Hemingway quote:

Dying was nothing and he had no picture of it nor fear of it in his mind. But living was a field of grain blowing in the wind on the side of a hill. Living was a hawk in the sky. Living was an earthen jar of water in the dust of the threshing with the grain flailed out and the chaff blowing. Living was a horse between your legs and a carbine under one leg and a hill and a valley and a stream with trees along it and the far side of the valley and the hills beyond.

That chimes with Mariel's less-well-put thoughts on walking the hills.

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*  No pun intended. Noticed only on proofreading.