The Place of No Place

You all know Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks: dark street, diner window, counterman, couple, loner. It is the 20th century’s empty American sublime, the Yosemite of no place. Here is this century’s equivalent. A road near an interchange, leading to an executive-suite hotel. At the reception desk a stack of that morning’s USA Today. In the hall a table with four thermoses, and a sign: “We Brew Starbuck’s Coffee.” In the room, the Cyclops eye of the television. In the drawer of the nightstand, the Bible and the Book of Mormon.

Business has recently made me stay in that hotel, in several states. Anyone who stays in such places must miss something, by comparison with where he comes from, for they have so little to offer in replacement. (Unless, and perhaps this was Hopper’s thought, we live nowhere all the time.) What do I miss?

About the Author

Richard Brookhiser

Historian Richard Brookhiser is a senior editor of National Review and a senior fellow at the National Review Institute.

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You all know Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks: dark street, diner window, counterman, couple, loner. It is the 20th century’s empty American sublime, the Yosemite of no place. Here is this century’s equivalent. A road near an interchange, leading to an executive-suite hotel. At the reception desk a stack of that morning’s USA Today. In the hall a table with four thermoses, and a sign: “We Brew Starbuck’s Coffee.” In the room, the Cyclops eye of the television. In the drawer of the nightstand, the Bible and the Book of Mormon.

Business has recently made me stay in that hotel, in several states. Anyone who stays in such places must miss something, by comparison with where he comes from, for they have so little to offer in replacement. (Unless, and perhaps this was Hopper’s thought, we live nowhere all the time.) What do I miss?