"Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know." - Ernest Hemingway

Why would Ernest Hemingway say something like that? Was it based on his observations of human behaviour, or was it something that was pulled out of his own deeply unhappy psyche. I wonder if he even meant "intelligent" and maybe was thinking of something more along the lines of "aware."

I don't know, and obviously can't know now, so I'm not going to waste energy on conjecture, just stay with what's given. We know Hemingway took his own lifein 1961 by putting a shotgun in his mouth and blowing the roof of his head. That's not the action of a person awash in happiness, now is it?

You can't really blame him though; the last years of his life were damned miserable. He had been severely injured in a small plane crash in the fifties that left him near dead. In fact, some papers actually published his obituary at the time of the accident thinking he had died. He developed depression and was treated with electroshock treatments that he claimed stole his memory.

His depression increased, and this resulted in more shock treatments, which led to - well, you get the picture. It doesn't help that his family seems predisposed to committing suicide. His father, brother, and sister all took their own lives prior to him. Some claim there is an illness in his family line that lends a predisposition to deep depression, and when you consider his granddaughter also took her own life, you do have to wonder.

So was Hemingway simply looking in a mirror when he said, "Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know" or is there more to it then that? Remember that during his life Hemingway was surrounded for a great deal of the time by some of the most brilliant artistic and intellectual minds of the twentieth century. He counted among his friends James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Sherwood Anderson, Gertrude Stein, and Morley Callahan, to name just a few.

He lived in Paris during the 1920's period of artistic and intellectual upheaval, when ideas and creativity were on the menu of every outdoor café and bar in the city. He would have seen some of the finest minds of his generation in the throes of addiction, the high of creative exultation, and the depths of despair produced by the inability to create.

As a novelist he would have had to be able to attune himself to the workings of other people's minds so that he could create characters and portray emotions with accuracy. Even if it only meant that in his imagination he was able to create an image for himself of what was going on beneath the surface of the people around him, it still helped him gain an insight into the way the mind works. So he could have come to the conclusion that led to that sentence based on his observation alone easily enough.