Gotham Diary:
Boy Scout Handbook
20 March 2014
To be sure, I blame the cold. Nothing makes staying in bed more appealing than the chance to stay toasty. But even in summer, I find, I like to loiter in bed every now and then, at least once a week. It has to be age. But I don’t take it as a sign of decrepitude. The pleasure is too rich and positive; it feels, really, as if I have simply outgrown the restlessness of youth. Lying perfectly still beneath my blanket in the quiet room becomes nothing less than luxurious. I think of decadent spas, of orgies even — and I’m so much happier to be lying perfectly still. I drift off. When I wake up, I wonder what time it is, but I can’t be bothered to move, so I never know what time it is until I finally do get up. But I never do get up until the sensation of immense luxury has receded.
Environmental factors that kept me in bed this morning included a call from the cleaner, who said that tomorrow morning would be more convenient for her. Delighted, I burrowed in. Also, Kathleen’s pre-dawn departure for Washington. What gets me up most mornings is my conscience: I like to give Kathleen her tea and toast. But not in the dark. I barely woke up to say goodbye. (Kathleen would have gone to Washington last night, but she had an institutionary dinner to attend here in New York. She was presented a Lifetime Achievement Award, the first of many I hope.) Also: Hannah Arendt. My brain is working harder than it has since Torts and Civil Pro. “No other human performance requires speech to the same extent as action.” What does that mean? I think I know, but it would take hours to tell you. It is, as Mary McCarthy said, “both amazing and obvious.”
Sorting through the mail yesterday, I came across this week’s New Yorker, folded among some catalogues, and after Kathleen went to sleep I opened it up. There I read Louis Menand’s review of Evelyn Barish’s book about Paul de Man. I sent up a silent cry of regret: what a magnificent companion to Eichmann in Jerusalem would have been Hannah Arendt’s book on Paul de Man! Because Mary McCarthy was one of de Man’s earliest sponsors in New York, I wondered if she had ever discussed him with Arendt, but if she did, it wasn’t in a letter — I checked the index to Between Friends. Arendt would have cracked the de Man case in two. First, there would have been the man himself, his shady youth, his anti-Semitic essays and his financial peculations, his bigamy, and his re-invention in New York after the War.
Second, and far more important, Arendt would have applied her formidably ethical learning to the matter of “Theory,” the intercontinental school of meditation on literature of which de Man was an exponent, and which began to be discredited, quite irrelevantly, when the sordid details of de Man’s youth were revealed in 1987, three years after his death. I am not by any means sure that Arendt would have disapproved of Theory, once she was through with her analysis of it. But that analysis would be priceless, not least for being informed by her intimate connection to Martin Heidegger, one of de Man’s sources of inspiration. The little that I’ve read of and about “deconstruction” — even the astute Menand is reduced to likening it to “digging a hole in the middle of the ocean with a shovel made of water” — seems both obvious and obscure. Arendt might have been the one to fix that.
***
While I was writing the last couple of paragraphs, just above, I received a troubling phone call from a doctor. Troubling — nothing worse than that. I resumed writing after the call, but when I came to the last sentence, I could think of nothing further to say. I was, simply, too troubled. At lunch, I considered writing about what “troubling” means, as one gets older and such news becomes perceptibly more common from season to season. While I was mulling that over, however, I saw how I could say something very clear about Hannah Arendt, about whom I was, after all, already talking, and I decided to reserve “trouble” for another time.
Why read Hannah Arendt? For the intellectual exercise? Hardly — bracing as that is, and even though that’s precisely how she describes several of the essays in Between Past and Future. I don’t know why anyone else would read Hannah Arendt, but I’m reading her because, ever since Eichmann in Jerusalem late last year, I’ve been convinced that, more than any other writer I know, Arendt is concerned with the determination of importance.
Allow me to propose something: you have just seen the archaic torso of Apollo that Rilke writes about, or some other thing that has had the same effect, flooding you with the conviction that you must change your life. Now you are faced with a very practical problem: how do you change your life? In what direction do you proceed? Because the question is clearly important, possibly the most important question that might be asked — it is implied, I think, that you must change your life for the better — you want your answer to take importance into account.
You might prefer to substitute another term for “important”: “meaningful.” At the moment, I can’t argue against that; I simply feel, after too many decades (one of them the Sixties), that “meaning” is a chimera, if only because it means too many things to different people. “Importance” is much simpler. What do you do in case of fire? Bleeding? How do you avoid fires and wounds? These things are important. I might go so far as to concede the paramount importance of developing a world in which people might live lives that, to each of them, in all the plurality of human life, would be meaningful.
Arendt passionately believed that we must live important lives. This was conceived by her study of the thought of Greece and Rome. But she recognized that the ancient model for the important life was no longer viable; it depended on slavery and it generated instability. Nevertheless, the ancient model was the first to seek the realization of all human possibilities. Is that a definition of “importance’? It might be: the important is whatever conduces to the realization of distinctly human possibilities, where the degree of importance increases with both the number of possibilities that might be realized and the number of people who might be free to realize them. It is clear that no one can realize all of them; it may be that no one can realize more than a few. But it is also clear that “importance” is not a personal matter. We can’t individually determine importance and then pursue it, because we might then all wind up pursuing the same thing. Which would be bad for plumbing. No, the categorical imperative must be rejected and repudiated when considering worldly importance.
That use of “worldly” is something that I’ve learned from Arendt. The world, in her thinking, is the human creation that some people call “society,” others “civilization” — Arendt doesn’t seem to like either of these words, but they convey an idea of what “the world” means to her. It comprises “nature” to the extent that nature conditions human life. Everyone is born into the world, and the world is always being changed by the people who have been born into it. As Arendt also says, everyone is born a beginner: everyone has to learn how to live in the world. (The utterly private life, lived in complete detachment from the company of men, is, for Arendt, definitively unimportant.) Right here, in this relatively brief paragraph, I have captured what is important to everybody, everybody together and everybody singly: living in the world to the fullest extent possible.
In her discussion of important matters, Arendt consults the philosophers, a line of Western writers beginning with Plato and ending (more or less) with Marx. Why philosophers? Because philosophers, whatever their school or system, invariably seek to identify the important things. It is the important stuff, not the schools or the systems, that Arendt culls from her reading of the philosophers. She herself is the arbiter of what’s important, because she herself is conducting the inquiry. You are free to disagree. But I find that disagreements will have to be very well thought out if they are to escape mere petulance. Anyway, right now, I am not interested in disagreeing with Hannah Arendt. I’ll save that for later. Right now, I’m trying to pick up her knack for seizing on what’s important.
Another way of putting it would be that I’m learning how to think like Hannah Arendt — because, frankly, she strikes me as the most comprehensive thinker in the world. (It’s not all strange to me that the most comprehensive thinker in the world would be a woman.) And I’m finding that together, The Human Condition and Between Past and Future comprise a sort of Boy Scout Handbook for thinking about the world. Which I’m still learning to live in.