We don’t see it, but we feel it.

I like this piece. From Nighthawks by Henry Racette, referring to Edward Hopper's eponymous painting.

Click to enlarge.

Racette:

I’m a conservative man. I think, as every conservative man before me has thought, that the next generation is gleefully breaking things it won’t know how to put back together, and that their kids will be less happy for it. Per Buckley, I want to stand athwart history and tweet “@History, Stop!”

So, like most people here on Ricochet, that’s what I do. But sometimes I want to escape, and sometimes I escape into art. One of my favorite refuges, favorite pieces of escapist art, is Nighthawks, perhaps the most recognized work by the great American artist Edward Hopper.

I love everything about this picture: the simplicity of the scene, the men’s attire (fedoras passed out of fashion before my time, but I do own a trench coat), the coffee urns hinting that a double-low-fat-hazelnut-macchiato is not on the menu (sorry, Jon Gabriel) – the fact that it’s 1942 and these are adults sitting in an adult place during a very adult time, undoubtedly thinking adult thoughts.

And it was a serious time. The world was tearing itself apart: the US had declared war on Japan, Germany had declared war on America, and we were within a couple of years of becoming the most efficient engine of industrialized warfare the world has ever known.

It is a serious picture. No one is on his or her smart phone. No one is taking a selfie.

Above all, it seems to me a picture of confidence, of people firm in their convictions. I read that into it because that’s my sense of the time: it was a decade when the adults were still in charge, when the machinery of culture was still firmly in the hands of men in suits.

It was a time when we knew who we were, we liked ourselves, and we weren’t ashamed of that.

Jim Geraghty adds:

If this was a scene in a film, there wouldn’t be much movement: perhaps the server is reaching down for a glass, or one of the patrons will sip coffee. It’s quiet, perhaps just the hum of a dishwasher or water gurgling in a percolator. It’s late, well past the dinner hour. No one’s on the street, not even any parked cars.

Our James Lileks observes, “If you put the work alongside Hopper’s entire oeuvre, the loneliness compounds and accumulates. There’s an ache in the heart of his work, an unease he accentuated with the use of disparate vanishing points – nothing quite lines up. We don’t see it, but we feel it. What has happened on the other side of the street from the diner? All those empty rooms on the second floor. No one in those apartments drew their shades to keep out the blaring light of the diner, or the sun that would rise in a few hours?”

The diner is brightly lit, and yet everyone still seems to be in shadow; the shoulder of the man with his back to us blurs into the darkness of the night in the far window. No one’s making eye contact. The man and woman appear to be together, but there’s no visible affection there. Everyone seems lost in thought. Perhaps the day left them with something to contemplate, something ominous. As Racette observes, this was painted in 1942, and the country has just entered a war where victory is far from certain. It’s late, but our three customers haven’t gone home and don’t seem sleepy.

Great art can inspire joy, but life is more than joy. Sometimes circumstances leave us pensive, grappling with an amorphous, free-floating anxiety, worried about the future but unsure about how to prepare for a coming challenge. We can gather with others, escape the darkness, sit on a stool, lean forward, the aroma of coffee before us . . . but the simple creature comforts may not shake the sober ruminations.