In the Age of Hemingway

I can often be found perusing a path of fact-finding on Google.  Much like finding oneself in the attic wearing a Sombrero and cracking a bullwhip at piles of old National Geographic Magazines.
   "Honey, I asked you to get a light bulb, what in heaven's name are you doing up there?"
  Shyly I defer to the greater calling.  I was reading an article sent to me by a friend where it referenced Jean-Paul Sarte.  He was a philosopher I respected and one of the key professors on Existentialism.  Sarte had written, "Hell is other people" I found that amusing on so many levels.  More amusing to me than that was finding out he died in 1980.  I was old enough to know about him during his living years.  It would be another twenty years after his death until I would discover his work.  I was out-and-about when he was still alive.  The same, I learned, was true for Martin Heidegger. He died in 1976.  I was actually stationed in Germany during that time as a young private in the Army; once more, it would be almost three decades later when I would be exposed to the unique insights within his landmark work of Time and Being. The idea that I was 'in the world' while these thought-changers were alive gave me reason to ponder.
   I checked and discovery that I was but a boy when Hemingway ended his life, but he and I shared the same sun.  As did Aldous Huxley, C.S.Lewis and just barely, Dylan Thomas. All authors who would affect my world view and who through their writings, had become part of me.  I had no idea.  I am somehow shocked as if I were told I were heir to a great family name, but whose fortunes were squandered before the title were bequeathed to me.  I am not chiding my ignorance; I was busy with those things that all of us fill our lives with.  A part of me feels this:  If I were ignorant to these giants on the same earth as I; who were breathing the same air as I, what remains unknown in the midst of today? Who will I learn to miss?  I am humbled by my small appetite, even when I know I have no control over how much I can stomach at one time.  I recall the very same feeling when as a boy I would walk into our local library and be overwhelmed almost to tears over the sea of opportunity in front of me. I could almost hear adventures of every kind whispering to me, urging me, almost pleading for me to come...to be part of a greater tapestry then what I though I was standing on.