Making Masculinity

This week examines stoicism, endurance, and longing through modern masculinity—alongside contemporary data on male loneliness and despair.

Hemingway’s Nick Adams returns from war and finds healing in ritual: making camp, fishing, cooking. The prose is spare. What’s unsaid matters most. “Big Two-Hearted River” is about fishing the way Moby-Dick is about whaling—which is to say, not really. “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” offers two waiters debating nothingness over an old man’s brandy.

Fitzgerald’s Dexter Green chases Judy Jones, a dream girl who represents everything he wants to become. He gets her, loses her, and discovers that loss isn’t the worst thing—the worst thing is when the capacity for loss itself disappears.

What heals heartbreak here—nature, routine, silence, longing? What remains unsaid?