Savage Journey

"That power of conviction is a hard thing for any writer to sustain, and especially so once he becomes conscious of it...It is not just a writer's crisis, but they are the most obvious victims because the function of art is supposedly to bring order out of chaos, a tall order even when the chaos is static, and a superhuman task in a time when chaos is multiplying."
--About Ernest Hemingway, from "What Lured Hemingway to Ketchum?"

"When I finish, the only fitting exit will be right straight off this fucking terrace and into The Fountain, 28 stories below ... but Jesus, it would be a wonderful way to go out ... and if I do you bastards are going to owe me a king-hell 44-gun salutr (that word is "salute," goddamnit- and I guess I can't work this elegant typewriter as well as I thought I could) ... But you know I could, if I had just a little more time. Right? Yes."
--From "Author's Note," The Great Shark Hunt, 1977.

I guess we probably should have seen it coming. But for those who admired Hunter Thompson, we loved to believe that he could survive on the humor he used to mask a deep outrage and sadness and passion that fueled his life. That would be the greatest shame of his suicide, if people trivialized him, somehow considered it "Gonzo Writer's Wild Story Ends," as AOL has labeled it. Or my co-worker, who sort of shrugged it off as one last act of macho bravado from a living joke. He's more than the cliche we turned him into, and you just have to read his thousands of pages of superb magazine work to realize that he's much more than the "fear and loathing" guy.

Hemingway said, "We do not have great writers ... something happens to our good writers at a certain age ... You see we make our writers into something very strange ... We destroy them in many ways." We made Thompson into a wild cartoon of himself (literally, if you're a Doonesbury or Transmetropolitan reader), and it's not like he didn't create that image. But it'd be too bad if he's not remembered as the writer of volume after volume in which he churned out the god's honest truth as he saw it, without fail. Or the journalist who annihilated the inverted pyramid for his very own structure and technique that is poorly imitated on a daily basis. Or the tender idealist who wrote this passage about the death of the 1960s:

"There was no point in fighting -- on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark -- the place where the wave finally broke and rolled back."

Or another favorite that used to decorate our basement college newsroom before it was turned to rubble:

"The press is a gang of cruel faggots. Journalism is not a profession or a trade. It is a cheap catch-all for fuckoffs and misfits - a false doorway to the backside of life, a filthy piss-ridden little hole nailed off by the building inspector but just deep enough for a wino to curl up from the sidewalk and masturbate like a chimp in a zoo-cage."

To cut to the chase, Hunter Thompson is my hero. It's very sad to see him go, and I'll always think of him as riding the crest of that beautiful wave, creating a high-water mark for all of us filthy swine who dare attempt to follow his example.

By the way, the best coverage I've seen so far is at the Guardian.