"What did he fear? It was not a fear or dread. It was a nothing that he knew too well. It was all nothing and a man was a nothing too. It was only that and light was all it needed and a certain cleanliness 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."
Maybe it's not entirely professional of me to start off with a general opinion, but I love this piece as a whole. It's does a realistic job of showing the world's perspective by juxtaposing one person who understands the existentialism/depression/insomnia-ridden lifestyle of the old man with one who does not.
The quote I included above is said by the older waiter, the one who understands the lifestyle of an old man who comes to the café every night, after his younger, less empathetic coworker has gone home for the night. He is talking to himself as he closes up the café. In his thoughts spoken aloud, he explains the way he perceives the old man to view life -- full of "nada." From this perspective, the world is full of and made of nothing, which can be very hard for a person to handle. As such, the old man simply needs a place to sit at night, a place that is well-lit with a calm atmosphere.
Beyond simply explaining the perceived perspective of the old man, this passage does a nice job of explaining the character's general feeling of an existential take on the world. The concept of nothingness, of there potentially being no greater being or overarching meaning to life, is one often viewed with a fairly rational amount of fear. But, as the waiter says, "it was not a fear or dread." Someone who has accepted the concept of nothingness into their life doesn't fear the nothingness. They understand the idea and are not afraid of it; they don't push it away to the back of their minds like others might. For someone who openly accepts the idea of nothingness, "...light was all it needed, and a certain cleanliness and order."
On a personal level, I like that Hemingway chose to have the waiter exemplify the feeling of nothingness by replacing the words to prayers, because religion is a common area of disagreement for people who do and do not sympathize with the existential mindset. Religion, to those who believe in it, is a source of hope. Religion to people who do not believe in it, on the other hand, is a source of false hope. This is shown nicely by the sheer number of "nada"s thrown into the waiter's phrases. Hemingway turns a prominent piece of common ground for religious believers into a very empty group of sentences.
Another favorite bit of mine is the end of the passage; I love the way the text switches directly from the waiter's monologue about nothingness to the waiter smiling in front of "a bar with a shining steam pressure coffee maker." The specificity in the description of the coffee maker feels so hollow and irrelevant after this thick paragraph about how everything is nothing, yet it's there and remains part of the story, because life goes on. And the old waiter smiles on. While earlier on in the piece, the younger waiter had repeatedly said that if the old man feels the way he does, he should have just killed himself, the older waiter is able to through the same type of thought process and come out of it smiling. It feels like a lesson in resilience, an example of how a person can see the world in such an empty way and still go on living life.
No comments:
Post a Comment