Gotham Diary:
Home Alone
11 February 2013
Kathleen is in Miami, as you’ll see in a minute. Well, Hollywood. LÃ -bas. It was sunny here when she left, and cloudy down there. It is still a bit cloudy down there, but here it is is so overcast that lamps must be turned on during the day. A perfect day for appreciating the sadness, totally American in tone but darkly Russian in depth, of George Saunders’s new book, The Tenth of December. I was going to write about it, and I shall.
But I came home from one errand and, before going out for the other, checked the computer — against my better judgment. I do have to go out again. But my eyes will have to dry first, after tears of surprise and joy and pride. Perfectly silly: nothing remarkable happened. But Kathleen forwarded a clip of today’s NYSE opening bell, which was sent in from a remote location — Hollywood (FL). That’s where Kathleen is attending the “6th Annual Inside ETFs” conference. And there she is, front and center — in pink; you can’t miss her. Words fail in the heat of admiration. More than most, I know how much work and uncertainty and sheer grit went into her being able to stand there — as any decent husband would. But instead of making her achievement familiar, knowing it makes her superb.
Now I have to run the other errand.
***
Lots of people find George Saunders funny. He claims to want to make people laugh. I used to laugh. You know, I used to think that The Carol Burnett Show was funny. But, watching some of the great shows, recently — whole shows, not just excerpted gems on the order of Went With the Wind — I found myself laughing less and less, and the shows blaring more and more caustically. What a bunch of very unhappy women Carol Burnett played! (Including the take-off on her own mother, “Eunice.”) Reading George Saunders now, a little more than ten years after reading the title story from Pastoralia the first time, almost brings me to tears. The parts that used to be funny are now terribly pathetic. Saunders is an even greater writer than I thought he was.
I’m working my way through Tenth of December, the new collection. One story at least, “Victory Lap,” I read in The New Yorker — it was one of the last stories that I read in that magazine’s fiction department, before deciding that the advance taste wasn’t worth the price of ruining the freshness of a book (especially a novel). That was in 2009, and I didn’t get the story (which appears to have been altered, at least slightly). And I’m not sure that I really get it now. It doesn’t speak to me as powerfully as “Escape From Spiderhead” or “Al Roosten” or the story that I’m still in the middle of, “The Semplica Girl Diaries.” The latter two are heartbreaking studies of the American dream — which turns out to be a pipe dream. “Puppy” has elements of the same pathology. A character who doesn’t amount to much, who is in fact being crushed by economic mishaps, resolves to do something self-improving. “Learn guitar? Make a point of noticing the beauty of the world?” These resolutions give way immediately to intense, curlicued daydreams of a rosy future that’s certain, it seems for the moment, to follow.
Why not take kids to Europe? Kids have never been. Have never, in Alps, had hot chocolate in mountain café, served by kindly white-haired innkeeper, who finds them so sophisticated/friendly relative to usual snotty/rich American kids (who always ignore his pretty but crippled daughter w/ braids) that he shows them secret hiking path to incredible glade, kids frolic in glade, sit with crippled pretty girl on grass, later say it was the most beautiful day of their lives, keep in touch with crippled girl via email, we arrange surgery here for her, surgeon so touched that he agrees to do surgery for free, she is on front page of our paper, we are on front page of their paper in Alps?
The question mark at the end is simply priceless. It’s as though the narrator were on the drip in “Escape From Spiderhead,” gorging on some reveriferous intravenous cocktail.
***
At lunch, I read Adam Gopnik’s piece about Galileo, in the current New Yorker. He says something terribly good about Aristotle, calling him
one of those complete thinkers, of the Heidegger or Ayn Rand kind, whose every thought must be true even if you can’t show why it is in this particular instance: it explains everything except anything.
So far as hard, physical science goes, I couldn’t agree more. On the humanities, Aristotle exhibited a sane and sound psychology that has the virtue, for us now, of highlighting continuities in human nature over an abyss of technological change. (We respond to tragedy pretty much as Aristotle says we do, whether or not that’s how Sophocles’s audiences did.) I can only hope that nobody (save scholars) will be reading Heidegger or Rand in fifty years, much less two thousand.