Gotham Diary:
Membership
28 January 2015
Notes are piling up in one of my inboxes as prep school classmates mourn, or at least regret, the death of one of our number — although Fossil Darling wasn’t quite sure that the fellow was actually in our class. I remember him quite well, but I did not know him at all; I doubt that we exchanged ten words. I am assuming that the email writers are sincerely sorry to hear of his death (not as of yet explained), and, while I feel that I ought to join in, I can’t quite bring myself to do it.
For one thing, I rarely join these circular correspondences. Within a year or so of graduation, it was pretty clear to me that I had made two lasting friends at Blair, and one of them, who grew up to be a not untroubled man, dropped out of sight a few years ago. His brother, also an alumnus, would presumably notify our class secretary, or at least the school, if my friend had died — although perhaps not in a case of suicide. My own belief is that he is either lost in a deep depression or leading a new life, bridges burnt. (It would not be like me to speculate on which was more likely.) A few years after his disappearance, the class tom-toms took up his disappearance, and a division promptly opened up between the majority that wanted to locate him, by whatever legal means were available, and the minority that respected a privacy from which no plea for help had issued. I sadly joined the minority. As someone who had kept up with him over the years — Kathleen and I got together with him several times in his adopted hometown — I wanted rather badly to know how my friend was doing, an all-too-human mix of curiosity, concern, and self-centered anxiety. But the idea of hunting him down was repulsive. That, in any case, was the last time I spoke up.
Now, as I struggle to do the right thing with respect to this more recent news, it so happens that I am thinking generally about something that, I quickly see, is the crux of my problem. This is the idea — and the practice — of “community.” Community is a much-abused notion in our times. When I was growing up, it referred almost exclusively to the quality of cohesion in a small town. Not every small town was a community; to be a community, the small town had to have a sense of common identity and purpose that was reflected in positive events such as charity drives and annual fairs. In a community, the leaders of local sub-groups, such as, say, the pastors of Protestant churches or the chairman of the chamber of commerce, would share a vision for the future of the town, however modest, and they would use their influence to realize this vision, however humble.
Then the word began to be used to describe the membership in those sub-groups. The congregation of a church became a community as well. After that, it was not long before the country sprouted innumerable communities of interest groups. The passionate element in the idea of community has increased with the self-consciousness of communities. Obedience is exchanged for security and a sense of meaning. Loyalty — the determination to stand behind the other members of the community in cases of all but the most egregious lapses — is the primary expression of belonging to a community. It will be seen that, with regard to sincerity, community is the opposite of convention.
As someone constitutionally insistent upon thinking for myself and acting accordingly — I don’t mean to trumpet that as a virtue; I know all too well how selfish and obstructive it can be — I have never been drawn to communities. I find them somewhat suffocating. And I also find that they make strangers of my friends, at least to the extent that community purpose overrides personal predilection. I find loyalty troubling — seriously overpriced. It is a natural human impulse, and, to that extent I indulge it; but never as “a matter of principle.” While I can imagine being loyal to a friend — I have been loyal to friends — I can’t see being loyal to a group, especially one in which the distinctive personalities of my friends are suppressed.
I have never had much school spirit. I always regarded school as something of a prison. It wasn’t the work that I disliked — perhaps I should say that I often liked the work very much — but everything else: the games, the meals, the clubs, the assemblies, the truly awful gossip about teachers. I was not a joiner. My memories of campuses all involve walking, either alone or in deep conversation with someone else. I no longer remember, without some sort of prompting, my nickname, which was “Bougie,” short for “Bourgeois Buffoon.” Perhaps because I am precisely that, a bourgeois buffoon, I never had the sense that a nickname was necessarily a token of membership.
My class is coming up on its fiftieth reunion. Fossil and I have sworn that, this time, we will go. We will put in an appearance. I’m curious to see all the buildings that have been put up since 1965. I’m not particularly curious, though, to see my classmates. Every now and then, a few of them get together, and then there is a Facebook photo of the group, and what dismays me is that they all look the same. Not the same as they did when we were schoolboys, but the same as each other, now. I look just like them, too, only taller and fatter. Anyone would think I fit right in.
***
Nonetheless, it is always a sorry thing to hear that anybody has died — even, no matter what people say to the contrary, after a long illness — and there can’t, therefore, be anything wrong with a brief expression of one’s quickly passing but entirely natural sorrow. Can there?