Hemingway said that only bullfighters lived their lives "all the way up." I'm not sure what he meant. Perhaps he meant that bullfighters lived their lives in the ring facing injury and death each and every day they went to work. In her story about Seabiscuit, the famous racehorse of the 30's, Laura Hillenbrand talks of jockeys of that era in the same vein. What kept them going was the transcendance they felt riding that horse around the track, perhaps the same transcendance from regular life that bullfighters felt.
"On the ground, the jockey was fettered and muted, moving in slow motion, the world a sensory vacuum, after the tenfold high of racing speed. In the saddle, emancipated from their bodies, Pollard, Woolf, and all other reinsmen sailed eight feet over the world, emphatically free, emphatically alive. They were Hemingway's bullfighters, living "all the way up."
Laura Hillenbrand, Seabiscuit, p. 80.
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