Gotham Diary:
Aliveness
3 June 2014
Whenever I have to re-read something in order to try to make sense of it, and the re-reading doesn’t help, I set the proposition aside. I can’t actually dismiss it, because it remains lodged in my mind as an irritant — for a while, anyway. Its persistence as an irritant makes me more sensitive to claims that either refute or support it.
A passage of this type came before me this morning, in David Brooks’s column — an unusual venue. I almost always understand what Brooks is trying to say, and I understand why I agree or disagree. The same goes for most of the writers whom he quotes. Reading David Brooks is an agreeable mental exercise: it keeps me aware of the frontiers of my natural conservatism, which is something quite different from that of the American political right. Today’s column, however, left me in a muddle, and I was not surprised to find that the culprit was psychologist Adam Phillips. I picked up one of Phillips’s books not long ago, got twenty pages in, and had to put the book down because it felt so unhealthy. Much worse than “wrong.”
The point of Brooks’s column today was to suggest a method by which we might recapture the focus and ability to concentrate that the Internet has undermined. I don’t happen to have experienced any such loss myself, and I recall hearing plenty of complaints about distractions long before the appearance of home computers. (If anything is new, it is the nakedly antisocial rudeness that mobile devices have somehow made possible — not that I blame the devices!) But I read the piece anyway, just to assess the viability of Brooks’s conclusions.
The conclusions turned out to be Adam Phillips’s. Phillips believes (if Brooks doesn’t misrepresent him) that we can learn how to focus from children, who focus naturally. Point one, be in a safe place. Check. Point three, don’t be so self-conscious. Check. It was the second point that bewildered me.
Second, before they can throw themselves into their obsessions, children are propelled by desires so powerful that they can be frightening. “One of the things that is interesting about children is how much appetite they have,” Phillips observes. “How much appetite they have — but also how conflicted they can be about their appetites. Anybody who’s got young children … will remember that children are incredibly picky about their food. …
“One of the things it means is there’s something very frightening about one’s appetite. So that one is trying to contain a voraciousness in a very specific, limited, narrowed way. … .An appetite is fearful because it connects you with the world in very unpredictable ways. … Everybody is dealing with how much of their own alivenesss they can bear and how much they need to anesthetize themselves.”
If the first paragraph seems incorrect to me, the last one strikes me as almost crazy. I try to imagine what “dealing with how much of my own aliveness I could bear” might be like. I get nowhere. My appetite for Hannah Arendt has aroused some impatience among the near & dear, but, fool that I am, perhaps, I’m not at all frightened by it. On the contrary, I worry about whether my aliveness levels might be too low; and loss of appetite I associate with depression. It has never crossed my mind to fear that my appetites connect me with the world, unpredictably or otherwise.
As for the pickiness of children, this has always seemed to me to be an expression of their huge appetite for rules and regulations. Everything on a plate must be just right; it must fit with the other things on the plate; and — no touching. In addition to which it must comport with the Platonic ideas that children develop in the womb.
There’s really nothing to argue: either Phillips is out of his mind or I am.
But I do agree about points one and three. Increasingly, I see them as aspects of the same point. Self-consciousness is, at bottom, a feeling of vulnerability, of being in the wrong place or of being in the wrong. It is a mark of fear, and we are wise to heed its warning and to seek a safer place.
Nothing is worse than the feeling of self-consciousness in isolation — there is nowhere to go! And the whole universe appears to be watching!
***
I went to a garden party at the Cloisters yesterday. It was oddly comfortable. I felt none of the excitement or elation of doing “something special,” which nibbling on snacks and sipping wine in the Cuxa Cloister is by definition. You had to set down your glass and crumpled napkins in order to leave the cloister for the other parts of the museum, but that was not too much to ask, especially as there was more food and wine in the two cloisters downstairs. We went to look at the Merode Altarpiece — not my idea, either, although I was delighted to see it again. We agreed that the proper term for its kind of painting ought to be “Burgundian,” referring to the territory of the four Valois dukes of Burgundy, much of which was not in France, much less Burgundy proper. (And not — clotty word — “Netherlandish.”)
The Merode Altarpiece embodies more than almost any other painting of the Fifteenth Century the handsome domesticity that was a hallmark of Burgundian prosperity. The room in which Mary receives the Angel’s annunciation is adorned with a richness that stops short of opulence; neither too plain nor too fancy, it is just right. The symbolism that Erwin Panofsky so loved to unpack has the strange effect of making the scene even more homey. It is not a sacred place at all, the proceedings notwithstanding, but a room in which, given a couple of centuries, one might enjoy a cup of tea in an upholstered chair. The painting is a promise of ordered comfort, and I feel not so much that it is a part of me as that I am a part of it.
We took one of the special buses back to the Museum. The route was very simple, almost all of it along Broadway. It would have been more agreeable had the lights been timed progressively (as they are on First and Third Avenues). Instead, we stopped for a red light every five or six blocks, and more than that at the start of the trip. It was a bit wearisome, because Broadway is not much to look at above Columbia University, and it was getting dark by the time we got that far.
We had dinner at a favorite old place that may actually have lost that status, owing to serious changes in the menu. The food is still vaguely Northern Italian, but as our friend remarked last night, it’s from the wrong side of the Adriatic. The entrées are too heavy, too copious, or both. There is too much reliance upon tomato sauce. The tiramisù, however, is still perfect. They haven’t changed that.
***
Almost as unpleasant as the feeling of self-consciousness is waiting for something that might happen right now or maybe not for a few hours. Such as the arrival of a handyman to unclog my bathtub drain for the umpteen-thousandth time.
Ah! Enfin!
Daily Blague news update: Retire to Coach.