So by now you’ve already noticed that I have an erratic schedule. Well, that might be institutionalizing it too much . . . I just tend to be bad at following patterns. I picked up and went home to western Pennsylvania last weekend, much to the chagrin of the pile of homework that awaited me here in Virginia. I was driving through lovely Appalachia all last Monday, tuning in to every brand of country ever created by the people of God and local news that included such fascinating tidbits as the destruction of a local farmer’s fence. Yes, I finished my trip feeling much more enlightened.
I could start small, build up with a little fluff and cream, like maybe Charlotte Bronte or Betty Smith or something, but I like to haul out the big guns almost right away. Now I understand he might not be that popular in certain circles, being a male chauvinist, an alcoholic, a brutal realist, and – worst of all worsts – famous. He wrote a book about an old guy sitting in a boat talking to a fish that most of us had to drag our heels through in high school. His name has the perchance to stir up negative emotions.
But Ernest Hemingway is a devastating genius, and I’ll tell you why. He is unflinching and unadorned and he looks at the world without blinking. His idea of courage being “grace under pressure” might be an unattainable ideal, but it is refreshingly simplistic. Almost existentialist, in his own way . . . He doesn’t seek to cure the world or even to make it a better place, but simply to bear it. While this might not be the most hopeful of all epistemologies (he did end up shooting himself in the head), it is so honest it breaks the heart.
A Farewell to Arms and For Whom the Bell Tolls are monumental works, the likes of which had never quite been seen before. But my absolute favorites are the short stories, where we get to know Hemingway in the brutally straightforward way he so valued. The best collection, in my opinion, is The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories. Granted, my copy probably saw the launch of man into outerspace . . . it’s pretty beaten up and old, but I’ve read it more than almost any other book I have. And in this narrow volume is the best short story I’ve ever read, A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.
It’s short, less than 1500 words. Violent, rapid-fire dialogue and no adornments. Read it here: http://www.mrbauld.com/hemclean.html
“What did he fear? It was not a fear or dread. It was a nothing that he knew too well. It was all a nothing and a man was a nothing too. It was only that and light was all it needed and a certain cleanness and order. Some lived in it and never felt it but he knew it all was nada y pues nada y nada y pues nada. Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada in nada as it is in nada. Give us this nada our daily nada and nada us our nada as we nada our nadas and nada us not into nada but deliver us from nada; pues nada. Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee. He smiled and stood before a bar with a shining steam pressure coffee machine.”
It is difficult to convey what this short paragraph means to me. There are some of us who will always sense this struggle for dignity in a world without it, and some of us who won’t. I’m not even sure which one I am. I only recognize the division itself. Who is the better off? “The worst condition of despair is this,” Soren Kierkegaard, Danish philosopher, once wrote. “It is unaware of being despair.”
We see these two waiters discussing the old man, one unable to understand, one a fellow traveler of the old man who goes and sits in cafes himself after his own closes.
"Last week he tried to commit suicide," one waiter said.
"Why?"
"He was in despair."
"What about?"
"Nothing."
"How do you know it was nothing?"
"He has plenty of money."
There is a gulf here which cannot be bridged, a fundamental disconnect between one who has everything and one who understands how that is no different than nothing, how the only object you can truly claim as your own is dignity. The old man is careful, he does not spill his drink no matter how drunk he is. Likewise, the waiter knows the importance of a clean, well-lighted café to face the darkness of night and the possibility of never waking up.
"We are of two different kinds," the older waiter said. He was now dressed to go home. "It is not only a question of youth and confidence although those things are very beautiful. Each night I am reluctant to close up because there may be some one who needs the café.”
We struggle for a third option between ignorance and despair. Is there one? Hemingway didn’t seem to think so. Love him or hate him, he sat unflinchingly under the glare of this revelation. Do I agree with him? Partially, but that’s not what appreciating literature is about. We cultivate different worldviews to make our own minds a little more open, to help us understand the people around us and away from us, and I think this is more important than any formal education could ever be. We judge it on our own, but we’ve been inside someone else’s head, and their imprint never completely leaves us. It gives us more space to work with when we encounter the world. Understanding, after all, is the only way things really change.
“Some lived in it and never felt it but he knew it all was nada y pues nada y nada y pues nada.”
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