Gotham Diary:
Egotism
23 September 2014
It is undoubtedly owing to the weakness of convalescing from a serious blow, but my days are strewn with moments of remorse. Remorse is not the right word: these moments are thoughtful and reflective, not pained or shamed. But as with remorse, I find myself wishing I hadn’t done things when I was younger. More often, I find myself wishing that I hadn’t been the person I was — without knowing it. Nobody ever knew Pope’s line about self-knowledge, to less overall effect, than I. I thought that I was an introspective young thinker. That is what I wanted to be, and I knew that I had to do a lot of reading to improve the quality of the thinking. It was this particular aspect of my life that held my interest. The persona that I projected for other people to see was a nuisance. I knew that it was flawed, but I couldn’t be bothered to work on it. So far as social life went, I coasted.
That might sound unobtrusive and low-impact, but we get a better picture if we remember that I was a sturdy giant of six feet, four inches, and that I was coasting downhill. I honestly believed that, if I asked nicely, I could have almost anything I wanted. I didn’t want crazy things; I didn’t even want a lot of things. But when I wanted a small favor or a cup of tea or special access to which I wasn’t quite entitled, I expected a smile and a pleasant manner to get them for me. They almost invariably did. How would you deal with a big, flying object?
Every once in a while, a friend, or, more usually, a woman whom I admired, and wanted to know better, would take me aside and tell me what murder I was getting away with. I would be prostrated by guilt for a few days, until the shock wore off. Pretty soon, it was back to murder — and oblivion.
It was Anthony Trollope who first brought me to heel. In about 1975, I was reading his Autobiography on the Westheimer bus — Yes! I took the bus in Houston! I didn’t own a car! I was often the only white passenger on the bus! Wasn’t I admirable? — when something very unpleasant hit the pit of my stomach. I have never been able to find the passage, but I must have been ready for it. Trollope told me, in no uncertain terms, that I was a gentleman, and that I was not behaving like a gentleman. I knew instantly that he was right. This was mortification from within. It had nothing to do with being found out. Not long after, I set out on the tedious and somewhat humiliating path to law school. A similar vanity offense was (unwittingly) launched by Barbara Ehrenreich in 1983, when, in an essay on “The New Man,” she pointed out that the new man regarded smoking with disdain, as “blue collar.” I saw at once that I completely agreed. I stopped smoking almost immediately, and never slipped back.
Sadly, that sort of thing didn’t happen more often. By the time I was approaching forty, my little vices were all pretty sui generis. I even rationalized the bouts of heavy drinking as self-medication for a condition that was beyond the scope of modern medicine and psychotherapy. Common or rare, however, my problems were all matters of a pervasive egotism so deep-seated that I should have used every tool in my brain to argue against its presence. (Thanks to this experience, I can imagine how easy it is to settle into doubtful disregard for claims about global warming.)
That we are all egotists seems to be a proposition that many people (men mostly) are prepared to accept. But I am not, even with my own unattractive record. I don’t think I could bear it. That, I suppose, is why I’m experiencing these moments of regret. Not for crimes and misdemeanors punishment for which I might have ducked long ago, but little, “harmless” things, not even so wicked as stepping on toes. Many of these egotistical decisions didn’t involve other people at all. They simply filled my head with ideas about the sort of apartment, the sort of country house that I ought to have. (“Country house,” my foot. We had a typical New England lake house, slightly more substantial than a shack.) I spent a lot of the early Nineties dreaming about a better life instead of doing anything about it (beyond spending money), and it is difficult to resist telling you where I now think my head was.
In my defense, I can only say that I didn’t know what to do with myself. I can add that I lacked any sort of genuine purpose — one that originated truly from within — until the Internet began to take off, in 1996. Nearly twenty years later, those sketchy beginnings have developed into what, to myself, at least, I call my professional life.
***
One aspect of this professional life — far more integral than a mere side-effect — is my increasingly quiet life. Among many others, the quiet life has the advantage of curtailing opportunities for inadvertently egotistical behavior. It has also counseled a rather lawyerly habit of considering the discretion of what I want to say before I say it. The process works very quickly, and it has already transformed my social conduct. At dinner parties, I’ve gone from Mr Never Shuts Up to being someone you might almost mistake for shy. I have already thought through and dismissed to my satisfaction most of the points that other people make about issues of the day; sometimes they’re just wrong, but more often their perspective is too shallow. Instead of arguing, I listen for the odd thing that anybody might say, a possible clue to better understanding. I enjoy myself far more, and I drink far less. The next day, I suffer neither kind of hangover, the worse hangover being the one characterized by roaring disgust at having filled rooms with the sound of my own voice.
If you want to know what I mean by “shallow perspective,” let me just venture this word of advice. To the extent that the other day’s march about climate change was intended just to “heighten awareness” of the environmental crisis, it was, in my view, a pointless exercise. What every one of those marchers (two of them very dear friends) needs to do next is to proselytize among ordinary, lower-middle-class, not so-well educated Americans who by and large have dismissed “global warming” as a hobby for privileged collegians. What they saw in the media coverage was a carnival of well-fed, optimistic bohemians — kids who could afford to live in New York City, for the love of Mike! These people must be persuaded to think differently and to vote accordingly. Without their assent, nothing will come of climate reform, except, possibly, highly disruptive uprisings.