Recently, I went fly-fishing with a dear friend.  We’ve known each other for ages, and both of us are old enough to know that we can no longer deny the fact that we are old men.  Even though we didn’t catch anything, we assuaged our wounded egos by telling ourselves that we could still negotiate the river in waders without falling down, savor the beauty of the water cascading around us as yellow and red leaves swirled by, and that we had “nearly” netted one or two big ones.  My friend and I also share a fondness for Hemingway, especially the early Nick Adams stories of young Nick learning harsh lessons about of life.  In particular, we appreciate the exquisitely understated prose of “Big Two-Hearted River.”  For those who haven’t read it, it’s about a young man recently returned from war, and he’s out fishing a favorite river of his youth, hoping to heal from his war wounds. But that river and its surrounding forest (having suffered a fire) have changed considerably, as he has, and he’s forced to adjust to it and to his new post-war life.  He thinks about fishing the swamp but he considers it “tragic” and that “there were plenty of days coming when he could fish” it.  Nick is still young and figures he has his whole life stretching out ahead of him.

That night, after a wonderful dinner, my friend and I went back to his cabin in the woods.  Exhausted from a hard day of fishing, we said our good nights and both retired to our bedrooms.  I know he has trouble sleeping, brought on by several aged-related problems.  I, too, have difficulty going to sleep, and at night my mind, strong enough in daylight, is prone to depression.  So after tossing and turning for a long while, I finally sat up and turned on the light.  One of two books on the nightstand next to the bed was a collection of short stories.  I picked it up and riffled through it.  One, ironically, happened to be Hemingway’s “A Clean, Well-lighted Place.”  I’ve probably read it a dozen times and had taught it at least as many to my freshmen lit classes.  Those nineteen-year-olds usually sat silently and bored, as I—an old man to them at 35 and more so as the years piled up—went over the theme of a lonely old man who liked to come to a café and slowly get drunk and keep his loneliness at bay.  Also, recently the old man had tried to commit suicide.  The young waiter couldn’t empathize with the man’s plight (as my students couldn’t), and wanted to get home and into bed with his wife (as my students wanted me to shut up so they could get on with their insatiable lives). The older waiter, however, tried to open his colleague’s eyes and mind.  Get him to understand that one day he, too, would grow old and become lonely, and need a clean, well-lighted place in a world surrounded by darkness and nada.

I know Hemingway is unfashionable to many now.  He often even strikes me as dated, out of touch.  When I first read the story in my mid-twenties (about Hemingway’s own age when he wrote it), as a writer I recall thinking how lovely the prose was, so simple and taut and understated.  When I reread it again before teaching it in my mid-forties, I wanted my students to understand Hemingway’s “iceberg theory” of writing, where most of the real meaning took place beneath the seemingly quiet surface.  My students looked at me as if I had just dropped in from another planet.  Yet when I reread it again at my friend’s house, tired but sleepless, the darkness of the night encroaching just outside my window, I thought I’d finally come not only to understand that loneliness of the old man and the older waiter, but to feel it, feel it deep down in my bones, feel my own vulnerability and frailty, my own loneliness, as all human beings must finally accept.  Having finished the story, I lay quietly for a a long time, almost coming to tears at its simple beauty as well as its terrifying truth.  But Hemingway characters don’t cry.  They suffer and endure.  And I realized, too, I was lucky still, that unlike the old man I still had my own clean, well-lighted place waiting for me when I got home to my wife and dogs.  At least for now.  It got me to thinking though about how each of us, if we’re very lucky, have for a moment or two, such a place.  What is yours?

Photo of Hemingway fishing courtesy of Wikipedia Commons.