Not home, looking for the Third Place

By Carl Heintze

One of the great short stories in modern literature, to my mind at least, is "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place," by Ernest Hemingway.

It is deceptively simple. Two waiters--one old, the other younger--are standing in a café, presumably somewhere in Europe, probably in Spain, watching an old man, their last customer, drinking.

The younger waiter wants the old man to stop drinking and leave so he can go home too. The older one doesn't care that much. He knows as long as the old customer stays, that he'll stay, too, that he'll have someone to talk to, to worry over, to be human with.

When he leaves, he will have to go back to his room where he lives alone and try to go to sleep. There will be no one to talk to, to caress or to care for. He's presumably a widower.

Before the younger waiter finally gets rid of the last customer, the older one says sadly, "You have youth, confidence, and a job ... you have everything."

And the younger waiter asks, "And what do you lack?"

"Everything but work..." And he adds, "I am one of those who like to stay late at the café. With all those who do not want to go to bed. With all those who need a light for the night."

And in the end the young waiter goes home to his wife and the old waiter wanders into an all-night café for spiritual sustenance, but doesn't find it.

He thinks about this--about being barren of hope--and concludes, "A clean, well-lighted café 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's probably only insomnia. Many must have it."

The story which has been likened to a prose poem, is short, even for Hemingway, and it fits together in that mysterious way that the best of Hemingway's prose works do.

I was thinking of it the other day because I am getting old and I felt I was becoming one of those who do not want to go to bed, yet who are forced to by age.

But I was also thinking of the story because it also illustrates what some have called the Third Place, a place that is different than home or work, yet a place where some people go to find "a light for the night."

This place, not well defined, could be a bar, as it is in the story, but it also could be many other places, too: the senior center, the benches in the park where old men go to sit in the sun to warm their bones, the playgrounds where children congregate after school, libraries and day rooms--the list is very long.

What are these places and what draws people to them? It's hard to say. Obviously, however, man is a social animal, and men and women are not creatures who usually do well alone. Just as obviously, society and age work against communion. Modern life is organized not to bring people together, but to separate them.

I don't mean that we are not physically close together. That's all too obvious, and as the population grows it's getting worse. But spiritually we are separated from one another. In the modern American city, which has replaced the old-time American small town, there is little spiritual unity.

And by spiritual unity I don't mean religious belief, which I'm afraid is separating rather than uniting us, but rather I mean the communion that is at once of the spirit and of the physical--the knowledge that there are others like myself who know and appreciate who I am.

There's not much of that left in modern life.

And in modern America, with its diverse ethnic origins, there are even more divisions tearing at our social and political fabric. The sudden blossoming of American flags after 9/11 is a symptom of this spiritual desert. We'd like to be one, we'd like to know that our fellow citizens feel as we do, we'd like to live with common purpose. We just find it enormously difficult to do so.

I'm not sure if a clean, well-lighted place substitutes for the communities we once had but have now lost. Certainly, however, many of us are like the old waiter.

We would like a clean, well-lighted place where we could go and sit in spiritual comfort, knowing that there are others like us there, that we are really all of the same persuasion, of the same kinship.

It's not insomnia. What is it?

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Carl Heintze is a frequent contributor to The Willow Glen Resident. He can be reached at feodorh@juno.com.

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