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THE NARRATIVE ARC
When Darkness Returns, Art Persists
My personal journey through art and culture
In the summer of 2023, I stood alone in a room at Madrid’s Reina Sofia Museum, face to face with Picasso’s Guernica. The massive canvas filled my vision — the screaming horse, the fallen warrior, the mother with her dead child, all in stark black, white, and gray. Years before, I had visited the Basque town of Guernica itself, seeing the ancient oak tree that survived the bombing, a silent witness to both horror and survival.
I left the Spanish capital the following day and took the train to the Basque Country to begin my month-long walk along the Camino de Santiago. The landscape outside my window reminded me of Hemingway’s Spain. Ten years ago, his writing had first drawn me to Pamplona, where I sat in his favorite Café Iruña and visited the cathedral where Jake Barnes, his alter ego in “The Sun Also Rises,” struggled to find peace in prayer. It was there I first encountered pilgrims heading to Santiago, not knowing then that I would later join their ranks.
Hemingway’s connection to Spain runs deep through both art and darkness. He witnessed the Spanish Civil War that gave birth to Guernica and transformed that darkness into “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” writing with the same spare beauty he used to…
