![]() It makes me wonder if Hemingway longed to be there in that bar, or in a place like it, when his own insomnia struck sleeplessness, after all, seems less of a burden in a clean, well-lighted place. The light is very good and also, now, there are shadows of the leaves, he tells another waiter in the story. The waiter takes comfort in the brightness of the restaurant, even in the nighttime he doesn’t want to leave and head back to his empty house, where he knows he will lie awake until morning. In “A Clean Well Lighted Place,” an old waiter muses about insomnia: Many must have it, he says, to comfort himself. It threaded through the maudlin letters he wrote to other writers, and was entrenched in the characters of his stories. Hemingway struggled with insomnia his entire life. And I know, in the space where darkness lies heavy on my breast, that Hemingway and I are, in this weariest and most desperate way, alike. is when I begin my own frantic decline into semi-madness. is when I begin to wildly calculate the hours I have left until my children start stirring and I am forced, against my will, to begin my day. Lack of sleep does funny things to a person. Instead, when insomnia strikes, I consider how Hemingway unwillingly courted the ghosts of his daylight in the stillest hours of the night. When I cannot sleep, I do not go through Hemingway’s novels, one of which I loved enough to have the title tattooed on my forearm (how my mother wept!). But t here is something about the plaintiveness in Hemingway’s prose that drew me in. What I find absolute and masterful in Hemingway’s style, many others I know find stark, plain, even sexist. ![]() We are strange bedfellows, in a way: While other women in my literature courses preferred to discuss Virginia Woolf or Flannery O’Connor, I was often hiding in the back row, adrift in the pages of The Sun Also Rises. ![]() and I am wide-awake and agitated, I channel Ernest Hemingway. ![]()
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