The Opposite of Nothingness

What is despair, and how can art be a solution? Thoughts on depression, Hemingway, Edward Hopper, and Chicago.

A man is sitting alone at a café at night, nursing a drink. Two waiters, eager to close the shop, watch the customer drinking alone out on the terrace swaddled in darkness. The younger one is anxious for the old man to leave. Just show him a bit of patience, the other seems to say. After all, only just recently, the old man attempted to end everything. His life? Yes, his life. The waiter turns and replies,

"Why?"

"He was in despair."

"What about?"

"Nothing."

So begins Ernest Hemingway’s A Clean, Well-Lighted Place. It’s a scene I think about often, from a story and a writer that I think about often, centered around a word that is perhaps my greatest little obsession: ‘nothing’. Nothing, nada, an almost filler word that slips in when we are not thinking. What are you doing? Oh, nothing. What’s new with you? Nothing much, really. Thank you for saving my life, for pulling me down from the edge. De nada.

If there is a painter who is uniquely adept at pinpointing a specific type of American emptiness and nada, I’d argue that it’s Edward Hopper. His paintings are perfect little scenes of absence: gas stations without their cars, theater seats without moviegoers, restaurants without patrons. Let’s imagine that we are going to see one of my favorites of his, together. We are in Chicago, standing at the edge of a canyon of skyscrapers, in front of a pair of stone lions that lead up to the museum. Straight through we go. To the right is priceless Chinese pottery, Japanese calligraphy, Aztec gold, a Cheyenne war bonnet hung on empty space. Straight ahead is our pathway through a long gallery full of treasures from India, Thailand, Cambodia, and many other countries, the whole room full of priceless relics and statues detached from their holy places, left to stand alone on white pedestals. Finally, we get to a staircase, take a right, and as we walk into the gallery, we can see it on the far wall: Nighthawks.

‘Nighthawks’, Edward Hopper, 1942, The Art Institute of Chicago — wikiart.org

The scene is not all that different than the Hemingway story. A man is sitting by himself at a café, yet here in the Hopper painting he is not entirely alone. In front of him a couple sits, wrapped up in their own world. Behind the counter is a waiter, cleaning and polishing, perhaps seeing if the man wants another drink. But even surrounded by these other people, the man in focus appears deeply alone. Outside the street is dark, cold looking. The closed-up storefronts loom over the painting. The only place giving off light is the diner, with its scene of late evening loneliness. Even though he is one of the most famous characters in American painting, we never see the man’s face. His back is to us, hunched over, bearing a fatigue and weariness that is universal. All his energy, it seems, is going into gripping the drink he has in his hand. How rare it is to find a warm place of light amid the nothingness, the painting seems to argue. How hard it is, sometimes, just to keep holding on.

⁂ ⁂ ⁂

In October I returned to Chicago and the Hopper painting with what I can only describe as gleeful arrogance. The scene that played in my head was of a triumphal victory march, but instead of centurions returning to Rome with the heads of their enemies it was me dragging my depression by the rope and proclaiming ‘aha, I have finally conquered you’. My quiet desperation, I had decided, was finally over. October and November would be full of seeing old friends, drinking, dancing, and serious writing, before I left the city again. I would banish the blues during my two-month stint. I was on a mission to permanently melt all of the ice in my heart.

It felt like everything was conspiring to make this work, too. When I got to the city the weather was so warm that I could walk, barefoot, on my neighborhood beach for weeks. The trees carried their yellows and oranges all the way through November. I had also somehow become permanently resistant to the effects of a hangover, I believed. I could toss back beers and shot after shot of malört without feeling the adverse effects. Even the people seemed happy, ecstatic, and bumbling with energy, desperately moving about at a frenetic pace as if to avoid something unspeakable.

What is there to say to people you haven’t seen possibly since the disease that killed millions of people? ‘So what’s new with you, oh nothing much, but how about you, oh nothing much too’. All our catchups stuck to the traditional topics. Like work. Drink. Our love lives and the emptiness that is online dating. Drink. The immortal troubles of being a young adult in the time of this-and-that, plagued by the awareness that this life isn’t enough yet still unsure of how to change it at all. Drink. So many conversations with fellow former activists and organizers who had abandoned the cause and instead decided that living deliciously was praxis. Salute, comrade, I am right there with you. Drink.

But really, they’d eventually ask, what has even happened to you over these last five years? At which point I’d tell the same story that I have told a hundred different times: So there was once a boy who moved to the big city for love in March 2020, who then quarantined with the girlfriend’s parents for over a year, and the boy then lost his job, lost his love, lost his mind, and now he is a pillar of salt. Oh wow, some would reply. Or: you seem well-adjusted, in spite of everything, isn’t it wild what everyone had to go through back then? Well-adjusted, yes, because I am like hydrophobic-sand that is completely incapable of letting anything soft or liquid in. And yes, oh what we have all been through, and are still going through even now. I smile, nod, and drink.

Rinse and repeat, in a dozen beautiful bars, on numerous couches crammed into apartments, on the stone terraces along the lakeshore. My mantra for the time was: no matter what you do, keep moving. I reasoned that as long as I was moving, it was forward momentum, which was good enough. What good, after all, was sitting alone in my room and banging my head against a writing project when I could instead be out and about drinking and enjoying this lovely city while I still could? I’d wake up in the mornings with the taste of ash on my tongue, my right nostril all flared up, and I would tell myself that yes, this is the sign of a well-lived life. Some sort of mental erosion was occurring, yes. On the great ledger of my life I was racking up spiritual deficits, sure. But how lovely it was to move around again, especially after being stuck inside for so long.

All movement, I wanted to believe, was progress. But at a certain point I had to swallow what I knew: that all I was doing was riding a carousel, spinning around in the same place with nowhere to go. Even my ex, who I had caught up with in the city on Halloween, probably sensed how dizzy I was. We had walked around one of the leafy neighborhoods on the northside. The stoops full of gourds, hay bales, inflatable skeletons in the yards, kids running around in their pink cowboy hats and superhero costumes. Are you dressing up for any parties, she asked, likely knowing the answer already. No, no, nothing in particular planned. Well, she said, you could always dress up as someone happy. We both laughed a sad little laugh. Funny, I thought; that’s what I wear every single day.

Spinning around and around, nothing going on and nowhere to go. The distinct feeling of being pulled like a rope, the center beginning to fray. It is the old curse of wanting to do everything and be everywhere: you are suddenly unable to do anything, let alone be anywhere at all. Wouldn’t it be so lovely to somehow break the great wheel that spins everything? To one moment be riding the carousel, and in the next find that the horse had somehow broken loose? Dozens and hundreds of merry-go-round horses trotting across a painted landscape, like that scene from Mary Poppins. Oh, what I’d give to leap into a chalk drawing on a rainy street in London, for just a brief glimpse of all the possible colors.

All this movement, all this spinning, and for what? For the rare but precious glimmers that I would get on some of those nights after hugging my friends goodbye, when I would ricochet off into the nighttime. Drunkenly stumbling from downtown all the way north, walking under the Schlitz globes carved into stone, past the yellowed old-style signs above bars and shuttered storefronts. Peering up at the little domestic scenes on the residential streets, of people standing in the windows decorating their Christmas trees, kids sitting on couches surrounded by the tv glow, a woman painting alone in her studio. Something like levitation occurring. My spirits lifting, feeling connected to these hundreds and thousands of people I will never meet and never know. Alone but somehow, for a millisecond, intricately tied to everything in the world, before the light was snuffed out and the nothingness returned.

⁂ ⁂ ⁂

It is late, and the young waiter refuses the old man another glass of brandy. After all the young man has a wife at home, and a life to lead. Reluctantly but with dignity the old man leaves, walking off into the night.

"Why didn't you let him stay and drink?" the unhurried waiter asked. They were putting up the shutters. "It is not half-past two."

"I want to go home to bed."

"What is an hour?"

"More to me than to him."

"An hour is the same."

"You talk like an old man yourself. He can buy a bottle and drink at home."

"It's not the same."

"No, it is not," agreed the waiter with a wife.

It is true, like Hemingway’s waiters say: it is not the same to drink alone at home. At a bar there are people to ground you, noises and lights to keep you from straying too far into darkness. But when you’re at home, alone, you can start to believe that the glass in your hand is the source of light. Drink as medicine — drink as the thing that flows over you and fills in the empty spaces.

The feeling I have when I am really, truly drinking is that of a stale piece of bread being dipped in oil. All of my rough edges soften. I imagine, too, that I am more fun, and a tad more palatable. Dip me in enough, and I begin to disintegrate. There go little chunks of me, floating down into the oil bowl. But soft, finally, and chewable.

Jokingly I’ve told people over the years that I believe there is a goldilocks zone of drinking for me, where if I had just the right amount of liquor I could be bubbly and gregarious without losing my sharpness, while perhaps even heightening my cognitive abilities. I have these strange memories of being at parties and get-togethers and finding myself magically capable of explaining all my thoughts in a precise and eloquent manner. But unfortunately, these glimpses of brilliance have been wasted on things such as recounting the full lineup cards of baseball teams from thirty years ago or describing, in painstaking detail, the full lineage of the Targaryen family from Game of Thrones.

If only I could determine the formula. Just imagine that; a brain in full working-order, where the things you have always wanted to say tumble out, where the words flow out of your brain and march across the page in precisely their right places. It was a dream that I harbored occasionally in college, during the only significant time in my life where I had a habit of drinking alone.

Whenever I had a long paper for college approaching, I’d inevitably wait until the night before it was due and buy myself the absolute worst bottle of whiskey that I could afford. I’d sit my butt in the chair, pour myself glass after glass of the disgusting gasoline-flavored garbage, and just write. And it always worked. The papers would turn out fine, sometimes even well. Occasionally I’d even enter that state of transcendence where time would fall away, as if I were floating away from my body and across the ceiling. It is a perfect state, I think. It is beautiful and divine to have all the noise flip into empty space and for the only thing in the world to temporarily be the thing that you are meant to be doing.

Something about my brain came to believe that these moments, these little peeks at heaven, were things that I couldn’t achieve on my own. I was too clogged like a dam: I needed something soft but torrential to break the walls. If only I had this drink, then I would be able to do the thing I was meant to do. I would then be able to read, and write, and be a serious person once again. It is not even that ‘everything’ would be fixed: it would only be about taking the first step into something better, something like self-healing. A very slippery step, mind you. But what is the harm in a bit of controlled self-annihilation before redemption?

The formula. I tried to find it, but only for one night — a Tuesday night. It was full of sitting on the couch, scrolling on my phone, watching the map of the country turn to red, one bottle down, and then a second bottle down, drinking at 4:00am in a darkened room where the only lights were the wine and the tv. How terrible it is to see the waves coming in, swiftly eroding all of the beautiful sandcastles people have built, yet barely able to feel any of it.

⁂ ⁂ ⁂

Why keep the place open? What does the little café on the dark street mean for the old customer, or for the man in the Hopper painting? It is just another storefront to walk past for so many of us. But for others it is a refuge, a Hail Mary for a person who wants to be in the company of others yet can’t fully escape their loneliness. It is like what the older waiter says to the younger one in the Hemingway story; “Each night I am reluctant to close up because there may be some one who needs the café." He is one of those who likes to stay late, "With all those who do not want to go to bed. With all those who need a light for the night."

Sometimes a person needs a good chair in a warm place, where they can think, watch, slowly build themselves up, and solely exist as an individual in a place that is accommodating and comfortable. What matters is choosing to go somewhere surrounded by light. It’s not that there is anything wrong with suffering alone and out of view. But there is something beautiful about proudly wearing one’s misery out in the world. Sometimes the world needs to remember that we can and should sit alongside the darkness and the nothingness. How does anything meaningful exist without the tension between life and the nothingness? How, especially, could art exist without it?

I have gathered a collection of clean, well-lighted places over the years. When I am adrift, I look for their glow as if they were lighthouses. In November I needed my fair share of these places, perhaps like many other people. My old reliable is the Art Institute of Chicago, where I have a twelve-year tried-and-tested salve for my misery. I go to the café, sit by the windows, drink as much of the free coffee as I can, journal a little, lazily look around, and watch the people gathered there. Slowly I start to get interested. I listen to conversations, watch people’s mannerisms, try to fill in theories over who they are, what they like to eat, what kind of painting they would be in the museum. This woman over there in her shawl is a Gustav Klimt. The man with a very long face is a Modigliani. Finally I am entering a place of being interested, and aware. I am approaching the precipice of one of the big driving tensions behind art: the innately human desire to be intimately close with others while still at a distance.

And just like that, I’m ready to spin off into the museum. I put the critical part of my brain aside. This isn’t about learning about art movements, or contextualizing yada-yada-yada; it is about seeing if any of the wonderful things in these rooms can stick to me. So I try. It is usually slow at first. But then, finally, a stirring of feeling, followed by a flood. How beautiful it is that Monet meticulously painted a wheat-stack from so many different angles and in so many different seasons, how wonderful it is that Georgia O’Keefe was able to find the curves of a woman’s thighs in the mesas of New Mexico, how seemingly simple but jaw-dropping are those blocks of colors from Mark Rothko, how strangely bittersweet are those Lautrec paintings of figures on the periphery of gay Paris, how incredible is Seurat’s massive ‘A Sunday on La Grande Jatte’, along with the wonderful Stephen Sondheim music that sprung from this lone painting.

So many of these artists are long dead, consigned to the darkness and whatever is beyond this life, represented only by their scattering of works. All of these lives dedicated to building things, playing with colors, leaving the finished works behind. Hundreds and thousands of flickering lights amid the white empty spaces of gallery walls. Devotion candles, the museum as a kind of cathedral to something bigger than ourselves. “Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada in nada as it is in nada,” so prays the waiter in the story. Deliver us from nada. Show us the way to the light.

⁂ ⁂ ⁂

Late November comes and Chicago turns into Chicago. Long nights, grey days, snow flurries and wind gusts off the lakeshore. People walk quickly and beeline for the bars and the cafes. The empty stools and hooks become mounded with winter coats and long scarves. It is the perfect weather, many think, for bottomless despair. What better weather is there for a clean, well-lighted place. What a terrifying and cold time to be alive, precisely when people need the warmth of a thousand clean and well-lighted places.

A slow evening where the night is swaddled over everything far too early. The rain is torrential and almost vicious, so I can’t walk along the lake or near the beach. What else is there but to stay alone at home? I sit in the living room, sleepily. A few shelves of books are along the wall, and I pick one out. Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights. The moors, the moors. Rain pelts against the window. Words, I suddenly remember, can be quite revelatory. To think that I share the same Earth as this assortment of words. I take out my journal and jot a little down. Somehow I had forgotten this fun little secret: that writing is fun, and it should be fun. I want to play again. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to try and write something just for yourself, just for fun? When was the last time I did that? I pour myself a warm drink, light a candle on the table, put the phone far-far away, and point the electric heater directly at my feet.

What are the building blocks of this craft but one good word after the other. Like Hemingway said, ‘write one true sentence’. Eventually you will have a paragraph, and then a page, and before you know it the empty spaces will be filled, word by word. That’s how it goes for life, too. One small, good thing after the next. The rain keeps coming down. Oh, what a thrill it is to create something again, to not just buy and sell and consume and react but to create a distinctive footprint of a life that was lived. I could have been doing this all the time, I remember, despairing quietly. I could have been doing this all the time, I think to myself, smiling contentedly. The nothingness slowly filling, discipline returning, words once again flowing and babbling. The feeling of being a child again on the carpet in front of the fireplace, nothing ahead but a good book and time to read it. Nothing, I think, smiling. Nothing better to do. Sitting at the table, body hunched over the paper, wearing the contented face that I know requires nothing else, every part of me held by the awareness that I am precisely where I belong, living a life that is right for me, doing the thing I am meant to do.