A Clean, Well-Lighted Place, Remembering Hemingway and Reflections

Today I’m at “Tiệm Cà Phê Sài Gòn Xưa” - an old cafe in Saigon. When in a new culture, I find it takes awhile to “find one’s footing” in a new place. You need to figure out not just where you are, but how to orient yourself.

Sometimes clean, well lighted cafes help you find your center - Amongst the chaos. The sterility is an oasis, the coffee helps you stay alert, the quiet helps you think and relax, like white noise that keeps you calm and soothes you.

At times I’m reminded of Hemingway’s short story, A Clean, Well-Lighted Place. If you know Hemingway, it almost reads like a suicide note and describes how he sees the world as an old man. But it’s only one man’s reflection on the meaning of orderly spaces.

This is the ending of the story:

Turning off the electric light he continued the conversation with himself. It is the light of course but it is necessary that the place be clean and pleasant. You do not want music. Certainly you do not want music. Nor can you stand before a bar with dignity although that is all that is provided for these hours. What did he fear? It was not fear or dread. It was a nothing that he knew too well. It was all a nothing and a man was 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…

A clean, well-lighted cafe was a very different thing. Now, without thinking further, he would go home to his room. He would lie in the bed and finally, with daylight, he would go to sleep. After all, he said to himself, it is probably only insomnia. Many must have it.

When I read this story, I imagine a shining, clean, espresso machine in a Spanish cafe bursting with steam as it creates another coffee. The light, the cafe, the orderliness, and the machine represent a ritual predictability and structure. The darkness is the silence of the universe that he fears, and the man find's clarity in manmade structure.

The lighted cafe becomings a clearing for the man's reflections on life and death, as he observes the machine churning on against the night, like a man rowing an oar beating against the waves on a small boat while he's at sea during a stormy night.

The man decides that there is nothing beyond death, and that's what he's afraid of. But we don't have to decide that, we can choose what we think when we look at any thing, and in fact we don't know what lies in the night beyond the light of the cafe. Only faith can actually decide that, and in fact we might make out the features of a face taking shape in the darkness if we squint a certain way, or hear a calling, like birds chirping in the trees in the night. The birds sing to us, "Be your authentic self."

Maybe what the cafe and the darkness are trying to tell is not what is or what isn't but what ought to be.