A Clean Well Lighted Place

Originally published in Scribner's Magazine in 1933, ‘A Clean Well Lighted Place’ is a short story by American author Ernest Hemingway. Late in the night, inside a Spanish cafe, an old man drinks brandy. A young waiter is angry; he wishes that the old man would leave so that he and an older waiter could close the cafe and go home. He insults the deaf old man and is painfully indifferent to the older waiter's feelings when he states that "an old man is a nasty thing." The older waiter, however, realizes that the old man drinking brandy after brandy is not nasty; he is only lonely. No doubt, that's the reason why the old man tried to hang himself last week. When the old man leaves, the waiters close the cafe. The young waiter leaves for home, and the older waiter walks to an all-night cafe where, thinking about the terrible emptiness of the old man's life which he keenly identifies with, he orders a cup of nada from the waiter. A cup of nothing. The man who takes the order thinks that the old waiter is just another crazy old man; he brings him coffee. The story is a powerful pragmatic statement about the inadequacy of religion as a source of comfort, and it contains an often referred to a version of the Lord’s Prayer that substitutes the Spanish word nada (“nothing”) for most of the prayers nouns.