Gotham Diary:
Shifts
6 May 2013
Where to begin? How about this, from Ian Rankin’s new John Rebus mystery?
“I did a bit of digging on the internet,” Clarke said. “You couldn’t really send a picture from one phone to another until 2005 or 2006.”
“Really?” Page’s brow furrowed. “As recently as that?”
There was a time when new technologies took some getting used to, and people remembered the pain and fuss of it all. Now, new developments are introduced as if on cue, or slightly in retard of that, so that everybody is ready for them, and presently no one can remember being without them. Well, so it goes in the world of phones and tablets — so it goes at the moment.
In Cooking, Michael Pollan plumps for his subject matter as the thing that distinguishes mankind from other animals. We cook. He cites evidence that we are who we are because we cook, that one or two million years of fiddling over fires shrank our teeth, shortened our gut and expanded our brain. (Other animals spend a lot more time eating less-digestible raw food, which eats up a lot more calories.) Our brain amounts to about 2.5% of our total weight, but it consumes 20% of available energy when we are resting. For the past twenty years or so, getting used to Internet-related technology has consumed the lion’s share of discretionary neuronal firing, wouldn’t you say? “As recently as that.”
On Saturday, I piled my journal on the dining table and organized them. In a Word document, I listed the title of each notebook and the dates of the first and last entries. There are eight Sketch books, twenty-three Journals, a second series of five Journals, and a handful of differently-titled volumes, a few of which take up the series of entries in the journals. The ninth Journal appears to be missing. As a whole, the notebooks run from 1967 to 1979. If I didn’t believe that I’ve long grown out of that closed feedback loop, I’d be too ashamed of what I read there to draw another breath. But it’s embarrassing nonetheless to realize that I spent the decade of my twenties dogpaddling in this sea of twaddle. I seem to have grasped that the only way out of it was to stop writing in journals, to stop writing to myself about myself.
I didn’t read very much, on Saturday, but every now and then the odd paragraph would catch my eye. Once the notebooks were stacked and piled neatly out of the way, I was left with a pathetic image: the writer of these entries is like a plane that endlessly taxis around an airfield without ever taking off. Sometimes, the plane is on this side of the field (“I’ve happy lately”) and, sometimes, on the other (“I’m so miserable”). But nothing beyond this alternation of moods ever happens. The explanations for both happiness and misery are often puzzling, not to say weird, but both relate to the persistence of solitude/loneliness. (I was rather shocked, in an old-fashioned, stuffed-shirt way, to find myself moaning about loneliness on the eve of my first marriage.) It is sentimental stuff, the writing in these notebooks, ungrounded, as I’ve said, in the larger world, and intensely, deliberately solipsistic. The entries can be read as a kind of amateur therapy, in which I sought to get to the bottom of what was wrong with me. If little progress was made, that’s because I quite obviously didn’t know which way was up.
That something was wrong with me was never in doubt. I’d started seeing psychotherapists in sixth grade! I can’t say that I got much out of my hours on the couch, but as philosopher Albert O Hirschman would point out, that might have been because I failed to do my part of the work. The problem for me was this: where did my unusualness cross the line into pathology? When I began blogging, at the age of fifty-six, it occurred to me that whatever the pathology might be, I’d learned to live with it, and it probably wasn’t going to kill me or wreck my life. Not long afterward, I read a book about the mothers of adopted babies (The Girls Who Went Away), and my old interest in what was wrong with me shifted into a curiosity about how, as an adopted baby, I came to be someone who felt that there was something wrong with him.
I am absolutely convinced that, had that, had I been forty years younger in 2004, I’d have become who I am thirty years sooner. Ditto, had I been able to read that book and, coincidentally, to start blogging, in 1974. I’m not talking about a might-have-been here. The might-have-been has actually happened. (If it hadn’t, those journals would still be heaped up in storage.) But my timing, or the world’s, might have been better.
***
Albert O Hirschman: better late than never. Hirschman, long a member of the faculty at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, died late last year. in his nineties. A new biography of Hirschman, by Jeremy Adelman, was reviewed in the current issue of the New York Review of Books by Cass Sunstein. I read the review when I had read almost everything else; I’m not interested in philosophers or economists. A pox on both! But, too lazy to find something else to read, I drifted into Sunstein’s opening paragraph and was soon sitting up.
Albert Hirschman, who died late last year, was one of the most interesting and unusual thinkers of the last century. An anti-utopian reformer with a keen eye for detail, Hirschman insisted on the complexity of social life and human nature. He opposed intransigence in all its forms. He believed that political and economic possibilities could be found in the most surprising places.
It was soon clear that Hirschman had given clear voice to a number of my own half-baked thoughts, and that he was a thinker with whom I ought to be better acquainted. Sunstein claimed that Hirschman is a readable writer, but I decided to hedge my investment by purchasing the one book of his so available, Shifting Involvements, in a Kindle edition. That way, if I didn’t like it, I wouldn’t have a book to get rid of. And of course I could begin to read it right away, which I did. Readable? I couldn’t put it down. I read it straight through, most of it yesterday.
The italics in the following excerpt are the author’s.
The trouble with such studies [of consumer happiness] is that they are still too close to the original assumption of the economist that the consumer carries within himself a universe of wants of known intensity that he matches against prices. Both the economist and the happiness-researching sociologist think in terms of individual pursuing an array of fixed goals or operating in terms of a set of values known to them. Now this seems to me a mistaken view of the way men and women behave. The world I am trying to understand in this essay is one in which men think they want one thing and then upon getting it, find out to their dismay that they don’t want it nearly as much as they thought or don’t want it at all and that something else, of which they were hardly aware, is what they really want.
Something about Shifting Involvements made me take a kindlier (if not less critical) view of my attempt to understand existential solitude. What makes my notebooks boring to read is the entries’ dogged, implicit belief that sooner or later a “universe of wants” would be uncovered within me. I didn’t know that I was hewing to received wisdom! Not so unusual after all.