Bill's Notes

Lileks (via Instapundit — who else?) does a good summing up.

Wow. My initial thought was, "Yeah, I suppose Hunter S. Thompson has to die, too." If Johnny Carson, certainly the good doctor. Perhaps in the back of mind I imagined the drugs and alcohol would preserve him.

But suicide? I wrote here about Thompson. As for suicide, I quoted Thompson himself on Hemingway at Ketchum. I'll reproduce the quote here:

Ketchum was Hemingway's Big Two Hearted River, and he wrote his own epitaph in the story of the same name, just as Scott Fitzgerald had written his epitaph in a book called The Great Gatsby. Neither man understood the vibrations of a world that had shaken them off their thrones, but of the two, Fitzgerald showed more resilience. His half-finished Last Tycoon was a sincere effort to catch up and come to grips with reality, no matter how distasteful it might have seemed to him.

Hemingway never made such an effort. The strength of his youth became rigidity as he grew older, and his last book was about Paris in the Twenties.

Standing on a corner in the middle of Ketchum it is easy to see the connection Hemingway must have made between this place and those he had known in the good years....

Perhaps he found what he came here for, but the odds are huge that he didn't. He was an old, sick, and very troubled man, and the illusion of peace and contentment was not enough for him--not even when his friend came up from Cuba and played bullfight with him in the Tram. So, finally, and for what he must have thought the best of reasons, he ended it with a shotgun.

Thompson used a pistol.



UPDATE: Lots of good links here.
ZombyBoy has some good thoughts here.