Many years have passed since America novelist Ernst Hemingway took his life in Ketchum, Idaho (where, a few years ago, I was privileged to visit his grave).  But his literary legacy remains, potent and enticing, asking us, in the most straightforward way, to consider why life must have meaning.  It also asks us to consider truth.

     
     In the final pages of Hemingway's Farewell to Arms, the protagonist has seen his wife die giving birth to his child, then saw the child die, too.  He doesn't seem to be sad, much less weep.  Instead, he "put on his hat and walked into the rain."

     In other words, unless life has meaning, we will be ever walking into the rain, too.  Surely, reality, what we see directly and what we intuit and feel, is more than our life and death.

     If not, we have missed the point.