Now and then it’s a really good idea to brace yourself for some Hemingway and read things like “Hills Like White Elephants” or “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.”
The latter story was so much on my mind for the last few days that I just re-read it. It only takes about fifteen minutes of cat-stroking time for a slow reader like me. James Joyce said it might be the best short story every written.
Hemingway belongs to that blessed batch of early 20th-century American writers for whom the short story is as packed as the novel and frequently very much better as an aesthetic object: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner, Ralph Ellison, Eudora Welty.
Hemingway had a remarkable clarity of mind, until he clarified his mind by blowing his own brains out with a shotgun in a clean, well-lighted place.
I find his pre-suicide clarity enviable, especially in stories like this one, which discovers the relationship between sanity and the clarity of the spaces we inhabit. To say it a little too simply, we come to resemble the places we create around us.
If Christian worship or the Rotarian Club or the corner bar or The Cracker Barrel have one important thing in common, it’s probably this central truth that Hemingway presents: places shape us.
It’s about our minds and their environments: just as any child will grow spiritually stunted in a hostile, chaotic household, so our minds require cultivation if they’re to apprehend anything, and a mind preoccupied with disorder cannot settle into learning very well. (Incidentally, this is why love always seeks a ritual, whether it’s a shared morning cup of coffee or sex on Thursdays or meeting once a week for eucharist. We naturally crave a habit that permits us some order.)
George Orwell made a great deal of clarity. He famously wrote, in a brilliant essay called “Politics and the English Language,”
Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.
If I as the pot may call the kettle black, the sheer number of writers writing badly on the Internet aggravates this problem. The Internet is the opposite of a clean well-lighted place, and it’s important for me anyway to skim it off with regularity, to walk the dog or bird-watch or to notice the neighbor’s habit of riding around outside in his wheelchair at precisely 10:30, just to take the air and to inhabit a clean well-lighted neighborhood.
Lack of precision feeds on itself. I notice for instance that in the last 24 hours, the President of the United States has mistakenly said that his uncle taught the Unabomber, that somebody besides himself appointed the Fed chair, and that Barack Obama wrote the Epstein files. Nobody in the press so far has bothered to correct this, nobody in the room has challenged it, and I suspect it’s because Orwell is right. Ten years or more of cloudy untruths, couched in outraged, primitive language unfits the mind for clarity. Even if we know these utterances to be untrue (and they demonstrably are), it has become far more difficult to call forth the clarity simply to say, “Excuse me, that’s not so. Let’s begin again.”
This morning I re-read the posts that I wrote last night; embarrassed by the typos and infelicities of language, I corrected them, as I frequently do, but of course many of you read this Substack in emails where the corrections do not appear; more often than I like I do the real proofreading after you’ve read it.
So I beg my readers’ pardon for being part of the problem, and not what I should hope we all want to be:
Clean.
Full of light.
A good space.
A church with sacred stones, or a white bungalow by the sea.
Places, not coincidentally, with a holy quiet.
