An English professor from Chicago has spent twenty years running directly at large, angry bulls in Spain, been gored at least twice, came within three inches of getting gored again just last Friday, and described the whole thing as beautiful. Bill Hillmann, who teaches at East-West University and probably assigns Hemingway to students who will never do anything this insane, is living proof that sometimes a book really does change your life, for better or considerably worse.
A 19-Year-Old Read Hemingway and Never Recovered
According to NPR, Hillmann was nineteen years old when he picked up Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises. Most people read that book, write a paper about it, and move on with their lives. Hillmann read the passage where Hemingway describes a bull's musculature, its horn movements, its "thought patterns," and decided the only reasonable response was to go to Spain and stand in front of one.
He has now done this hundreds of times. He is 44. He is a literature professor. He runs with the bulls every July during Pamplona's San Fermin festival, and last Friday he led a "beautiful black bull" up the street for about twenty yards before diving at a fence with roughly three inches to spare. This is, apparently, the goal.
What Three Inches Looks Like in Practice
NPR reports that Hillmann described Friday's run as "the best run I've had in maybe a decade." The bull charged him. He ran. He dove at the fence. The bull's horn passed close enough that you could have fit a deck of cards between them with room to spare, but not much more.
Hillmann told NPR this is "the epitome of what you're trying to do out there" which is a sentence that would make most people's insurance agents quietly retire. The man is not confused about the risk. He is enthusiastically, philosophically at peace with it. He has also been gored before. More than once. In 2014, NPR's Kelly McEvers caught him on a hospital bed after his first goring and asked, with some justified irony, how the author of a book called "Fiesta: How To Survive The Bulls Of Pamplona" was feeling about the situation. Hillmann's response was that he didn't see any irony at all, because he was alive. That's the bar. Alive equals winning.
The Philosophy of Getting Stabbed by a Bull
Here is where Hillmann stops being merely an extraordinary news story and starts being genuinely interesting. As NPR reports, he told host Don Gonyea that getting hurt is "not a big deal" for serious runners. "If it wasn't dangerous," he said, "what we do out here in the streets wouldn't be beautiful."
That is actually a coherent philosophical position. It is the same logic behind any extreme sport, any war memoir, any job that involves working at height. The danger is not incidental to the meaning. The danger is the meaning. Hillmann is not delusional about what he's doing. He has thought about it more carefully than most people think about anything, and he keeps showing up anyway. That is either wisdom or a very specific kind of madness, and the distance between those two things is about three inches.
He Also Teaches This in the Classroom
Hillmann is not just a thrill-seeker who happens to have a faculty ID. He teaches The Sun Also Rises at East-West University in Chicago, and NPR reports he uses the novel to talk about how entering a foreign culture with curiosity and respect can reshape how you understand being human. His reading of Jake Barnes, Hemingway's protagonist, is that the character's willingness to learn rather than judge is what makes him worth following.
This year is the novel's centennial, which gives Hillmann's annual pilgrimage an extra layer of meaning. The book that sent him to Pamplona at nineteen is now a hundred years old, and he is still going. Students who think of Hemingway as dusty required reading might want to consider that their professor has the scars to prove the man was writing about something real.
Hillmann also pushed back hard on critics who argue the run is cruel to animals or too dangerous to continue. His position, as told to NPR, is that outsiders who have no connection to the culture and no curiosity about it have no standing to judge it. Whether you agree or not, he is making an argument about cultural respect that he lives with his entire body, which is more than most critics can say.
The Tradition He Keeps Showing Up For
The San Fermin festival runs eight days each July in Pamplona, and NPR describes thousands of runners taking to the streets alongside the bulls each morning. Hemingway's 1926 novel made it famous to the English-speaking world, and it has drawn tourists, thrill-seekers, and serious devotees ever since.
Hillmann sits firmly in the last category. He is not doing this for Instagram. He is doing it because he read a book at nineteen, felt something crack open in his chest, and has been chasing that feeling across cobblestones at dawn for twenty-five years. The runs are short, intense, and occasionally end in a hospital. He keeps going back. At this point, that is less a hobby than a vocation.
The Dingo Take
Look, we cover a lot of stories at this outlet about people doing reckless things in the name of ideology or tribalism or pure stupidity. This is not that. Bill Hillmann has read the texts, learned the culture, taken the hits, and made a considered, philosophical choice to keep running. That is a completely different category of behavior from, say, a politician who votes against something they've never read or a pundit who attacks something they've never tried. Hillmann has done the homework. He just does it in front of a bull.
What is genuinely striking here, beyond the obvious spectacle of a Chicago lit professor diving at Spanish fences, is what he said about Hemingway's lesson for modern students. Entering someone else's culture with curiosity rather than judgment. Learning before criticizing. Earning the respect of locals by actually showing up and caring. In a political moment where we are watching leaders govern through contempt for anything unfamiliar, there is something almost radical about a guy who read a novel at nineteen and spent the next twenty-five years trying to understand it by living it.
The Sun Also Rises turns one hundred this year. Hillmann is 44 and still bleeding for it. The book made someone better, stranger, and more alive. That is the most you can ask of literature, and honestly, more than most people ask of anything.
