Gotham Diary:
Turn It Off
May 2016 (IV)
23, 24, 26, 27; Vacation Alert
Monday 23rd
Said I to the psychiatrist, “I should like my life to be a work of art.” This was a long time ago.
The psychiatrist did not prescribe institutionalization, so I never learned what he made of my statement. Or of me. The only other conversation that I recall from my time with that doctor concerned my willingness to pay for my sessions, instead of my parents. I was horrified, extremely unwilling, and said so. This was all their idea.
Of the five psychiatrists and one psychologist whom I was to consult in my life, I liked the first — this one — the least. He lingers in my memory looking something like Nelson Rockefeller, but thinner and, if possible, more suave. He said almost nothing, ever, but it must have been very difficult to sit through my blabber. I’d say that I was a self-absorbed suburban adolescent gifted with some intelligence and a borderline narcissistic disorder. Self-esteem being what it is, I like to think that his diagnosis wouldn’t have been severely worse.
I liked the last psychiatrist best. When was he? A little more than ten years ago; it was during my time with him that I published my first site. He oversaw a painless withdrawal from Percocet, which had been prescribed when the ankylosing spondylitis was discovered. He persuaded me that my personality did not belong on the Asperger’s spectrum. (More narcissism?) We had great conversations. Finding more and more satisfaction online, however, I came to the conclusion that I was too old and too functional to fix, and I stopped going. I did pay off my bill. I always meant to write him a thank-you note, and I still think of doing so, every now and then.
I was wrong about being too old to fix. A few years later, I drank too many martinis and passed out on my feet. When I awoke, I could hardly move. For a week, I walked around with a strange pain in my neck. The surgeon who looked at the X-rays sent me straight to the hospital, and operated the next day. There were two further lessons, after-dinner slips in the bathtub, from which I was rescued by doormen. Nevertheless, I’m not quite sure what a psychiatrist’s interventions would have prevented.
These dangerous slips and falls were caused by my pursuit not of art but of fun. I don’t mean to evade responsibility for my misdeeds, but simply to be intelligible I feel required to point out that I grew up in a culture that inextricably bound up the prospect of fun with the presence of booze. It has taken a very long time to develop a better idea of fun, and to make that idea prevail.
The desire to make a work of art out of my life was, of course, ridiculous. The only excuse for such fatuity is that I didn’t understand art very well. But instead of laughing at my preposterous pretentiousness (or vice versa) — as I have been doing for forty years or more — it has now occurred to me that it might be worthwhile to find out what I was trying to say. This would not entail developing a better idea of art. Nor would it involve delving into old notebooks. It’s a matter merely of acknowledging that in a foolish statement can be found the seed of a life to come.
Here are the aspects of art that are not very hard to detect in my ambitions: an overall meaning, a high degree of internal consistency, and a positive claim about the goodness of humanity. In this pursuit, I was saddled with several drawbacks. In addition to my ideas about fun, I was cursed with a short temper and a shaming anxiousness. I ought also to mention an inordinate fondness for sitting in comfortable chairs.
It is at this point that a professional writer, as distinct from a would-be work of art, would insert a very funny, astonishingly illustrative story. I’ll keep my eyes out.
***
Meaning. I wanted my life to possess meaningfulness. This is not at all the same thing as wanting to lead a life that other people will hail as “meaningful.” To lead a “meaningful life,” one does meaningful things. I’ll leave the list to you. A sacrifice of the self is almost essential: the meaningful job comes first. That’s part of what makes life meaningful to observers. A life of “doing without,” a humble life of quiet service (but not so quiet that nobody notices — and I don’t mean that cynically), a total commitment to a highly demanding career of service. There are no absolute anchors that will guarantee that a life lived thus-and-so will be judged to have been meaningful. You can go to medical school and join Doctors Without Borders, and most people will admire you, but there will always be those who wonder what you were running away from. This is not to suggest that the meaningful life is not worth pursuing. But everything about the ambition to lead one is tricky.
The meaningfulness within my life is no great secret. It is a matter of reading and writing. Of reading and writing as I wish. During my radio days, I had a little gig with one of our advertisers, a neighborhood bookstore that I patronised when I could afford to. The owner (who was not the manager, but a sharp little woman who was good with figures) would hand me three books a month, and I would write reviews that, as I recall, would take up half a page in the radio station’s program guide. I got to keep the books, but of course they were books that I should never have read on my own, and for which my regard was nothing like what the reviews suggested. Because it was such a tiny job, it didn’t do any harm, beyond the small contribution to journalistic dishonesty, but it taught me that I could not make a career out of writing to order. We all have to make a living, and I would prefer to make it from remuneration by readers than from my wife’s kind support, but our economic outlook does not facilitate the creation of such institutional grants — and, no, I am not soliciting individual contributions. We have no way of providing the independent writer with credentials, save posthumously. Historians often achieve what publishers alone cannot.
However clear my gifts as a reader and a writer may have been when I was young, it took until just about the day before yesterday for me to have a coherent idea of what I ought to be reading and writing. Like everyone else, I was seduced by literary buzz, and I read a great many novels that have long since been given away. Like everybody else, I believed that I must try to write a novel. I also wrote three plays. I don’t think that it was particularly dim of me not to see, sooner than I did, that humanism was my theme, because humanism, as I have mentioned elsewhere, has come in modern times to be fought over by warring camps of cranks. This is not the time to dilate upon what humanism means to me, but I’d like to point out that the sustainable social generosity that is its principle object has also shaped my personal behavior. My private life takes place on a very small scale. I know few people well, and no more than ten percent of what I say (in person) is aimed at ears other than Kathleen’s. So I view my personal behavior as primarily a matter of dealing with strangers.
Is there much to say about internal consistency? I think that I have achieved a good measure of this. I am not confused by competing or contradictory aims. But it seems to me that internal consistency ought to make me an easy fellow to understand, and that is not the case. I suspect that I should be much easier to grasp if my internal consistency did not depend so heavily on a thoroughgoing rejection of television and the advertising business model upon which it rests. Just the other night, some old friends made an untiring attempt to convince me that, with the installation of a little box, I should have all the convenience of Netflix — or was it the Internet as a whole — at my fingertips. I tried to point out that Kathleen and I endeavor, but often fail, to see one movie a week. Sometimes there are binges, but it is more common for us not to see anything. This weekend, for example, we meant to see Flirting With Disaster. But we didn’t, because by the time dinner was done, it was too late for movies. (Just as I have learned that I can no longer drink unlimited cocktails, so has it been made clear that I need about two hours to wind down from a movie, thus risking the postponement of bedtime into the small hours.) No matter how easy it is to watch this or that great show, Kathleen and I don’t have the time, because it is more important to do other things. I don’t have to say what I’m too busy with; Kathleen settles the stress of her career with the tonic of playing Diana at eBay. (Or is it Sisyphus? She so rarely finds anything to capture.) The organizing principle of not watching television is simply too bizarre for even our closest friends to imagine.
Manhattan can be very noisy. Sirens alone are a constant nuisance, and helicopters can be unbelievably annoying. The backup of cars entering the garage directly below our windows prompts a great deal of exasperated but useless horn-honking. But the apartment is often silent as a tomb. Music is increasingly special, meant to be listened to, not merely to provide an aural backwash. (Certainly not when we are reading.) I have come to treasure silence. And I know that most of my friends would treasure it, too. But first they would have to wean themselves from the racket of television. Which in turn would mean forswearing the notion that television spouts the authorized version of reality.
Reading and writing may look like solitary activities, but that is only because they require solitude. They are in fact social, intensely social, though at a remove in time and space. By this I mean, among other things, that the dead can speak to us in living voices, and that we can speak in living voices to future generations. It is customary, in this connection, to rattle off something about timeless truths, but I don’t believe in timeless truths. I believe in evolution. Change may be imperceptibly gradual, but it is change just the same. There is a constant danger that changes will render language incomprehensible. Can you read Chaucer “in the original”? For that matter, how fluent is your Shakespeare? Sir Thomas Browne? Ivy Compton-Burnett? Language actually changes very quickly, in evolutionary terms. The generally well-educated reader cannot be expected to read, unaided, writing more than three hundred years old. Three hundred years! We’ve been jotting things down for more than five thousand. Almost all of it has to be translated into one “modern language” or another. And yet the truth, as we know from poetry, can never be translated. That is why reading in another language, whether foreign or an earlier version of one’s own, is enlightening.
***
Tidying up on Saturday, I straightened up a pile of art books in a low étagère, exchanging a few with books in the tall case on the other side of the foyer. This bookcase has not been organized since we moved in, and it wasn’t really organized even then, as I unpacked boxes of art books and stuffed them in as best they would fit. There are exhibition catalogues — Fragonard, Degas, Turner and so on. There are also children’s books, which are often as tall as art books and which are, in their way, art books themselves. Then there are the shorter texts (shorter in height): Arnheim, Panofksy. Haskell somewhere in between. There are also a few outsize ringers, such as a Shakespeare encyclopedia and a Geography of the World. In the dead center there is a disgrace, a book with a spine torn so badly that the discolored binding is what you see instead of the title. The book has been in this condition for a very long time, and, eyeing the bookcase prior to giving it a once-over, I thought that I really ought to get rid of it. I knew what it was: Michael Levey’s Rococo to Revolution, a Praeger Art Book from 1966. I pulled it down, and, next thing you know, I read half of it. Also, the cover completely broke down, front and back no longer attached to the book nor to one another. I shall not be getting rid of the book. I had somehow lost sight of the fact that most of my favorite painters worked in the Eighteenth Century, from Watteau to Fragonard. Boucher, Tiepolo, Gainsborough, Chardin, Canaletto and Francesco Guardi. Even Longhi, sometimes. Levey does not discuss all of these, because some of them — Canaletto, obviously — do not fit on a line from rococo to revolution. But they all share an Apollonian devotion to clarifying daylight.
Rococo to Revolution, loaded with illustrations, some of them in color, was an expensive paperback in 1966: $5.95.
***
Tuesday 24th
Last night, I got through a second reading of Edward Crankshaw’s The Shadow of the Winter Palace. One of my gloomy books, the others being The Idiot, Jonathan Sperber’s life of Karl Marx, and T G Otte’s The July Crisis. Crankshaw blunders in his final chapter: he writes that the Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated “in the middle of July.” The mistake makes me wonder if other assured-sounding details are also wrong. The book is tendentious around the edges — writing in the Seventies, the author clearly believed that the Soviet régime in Russia was simply illegitimate, But his sorrow seems to justify it. If the book is a prolonged lamentation, it is brisk and buttoned-up, martially tragic. Crankshaw doesn’t think much of any of the four Tsars who acted the autocrat during his period, but he is especially contemptuous of Nicholas II.
His shrinking from personal violence, one may believe, meant no more than his shrinking from telling the truth to his ministers and advisers. It is desirable to be clear about this. Nicholas was not fit to rule, and by 1903 he had finally demonstrated that his conduct after Khodynka Field was a fair example of what was to come. That he was a dear and loving father of his family is not in question. And very soon now he was to be faced with the tragic and desperately painful burden laid upon his shoulders by the discovery that the infant Tsarevich was a haemophiliac. For after ten years of married life, after bearing four daughters in succession, Alexandra Feodorovna, amid scenes of almost hysterical emotion, had given birth to a son and heir in July 1904. But although the stresses of the Tsar’s private life contributed much to what appeared to be the collapse of his authority and the delivery of Russia into the hands of the Tsaritsa’s favourites, venal or vile, towards the close of his reign, that authority in fact never existed. He had nothing to stand on but his inherited majesty. (337)
What made me decide to hold on to the book was this extremely felicitous passage a few pages later:
Our story may seem to have run ahead of itself again. But in fact it is the subject that is disintegrating, vanishing into thin air, leaving nothing but the terrible memory of the blood-stained cellar in Ekaterinburg and the haunting image of the last Tsar, deposted, and staring pas the camera into nothingness as he sits under guard on the tree stump. (389)
At one point, Crankshaw expresses surprise that nobody thought to shoot the Tsaritsa while the dynasty was still in power; she was certainly the worst single thing that happened to it. I have often wondered why Nicholas II himself was not removed in this way, as his great-great-grandfather Paul over a century earlier. But if I’ve stopped feeling sorry for Nicholas, my only feeling for his wife is one of execration.
At several points in his chapters about Nicholas II, Crankshaw faults the Tsar and his intimates for failing to realize that times had changed, that, for example, the peasantry no longer worshiped their “Little Father” with blind devotion. But even if you can sense that times have changed — so far, 2016 has been a year in which I can sense little else — it is difficult to assess the change, or to grasp its direction. What is changing into what? Only historians will know the half of it. I know that I ought to rustle up a go-bag, so that I’m prepared for that apparently inevitable emergency, but I can’t imagine enduring the physical stress of escaping an endangered Manhattan. My very sincere hope is to have died before the bad things happen. That has always been my hope. When I was younger, though, the bad things that might happen seemed remote and speculative. Now (if I may be allowed to mix ancient mythological catastrophes), the sacrifice of American government by a coven of male Lucretias puts me in mind of burning Troy. I also sense something deadly in the smartphone. Would it be correct, or even intelligent, to put any weight on these intimations of misfortune? I should prefer not to be a cranky bore.
Every time I step out of the building onto the street, I feel irrelevant. This is a new sensation. It’s not that I used to feel relevant: I didn’t feel anything one way or the other. But now I feel that I am no longer in the swim. It is a positive, oppressive thing. Kathleen often claims that she has become invisible: a little old lady. I’m not invisible, certainly, but I feel like a natural obstacle, not a human being, as I make my way among the other pedestrians. This isn’t because nobody looks at me. I can’t tell if anybody’s looking at me. When I walk, I can only see the sidewalk. But everyone who passes by is on the phone. Nobody is present.
I used to read when I walked. Books! I was very good at it. I, too, was not present. But I was the only one. Now it is everyone, and I have completely outgrown the feeling that walking down the street is a waste of time, dead minutes that ought to be put to some use. What change am I really sensing here? Is it merely the change of becoming an old person?
For me, being an old person is going to be somewhat different. I have no life of accomplishment to look back on; the accomplishing is happening now. It could not have happened sooner.
***
Reading Jonathan Sperber’s obscenely long — sixty-one pages! — chapter about Marx in the 1860s (“The Activist”), and feeling my eyes glaze over as yet another squabble is aired, it occurred to me that there were simply too many issues in the Nineteenth Century. Well, and no wonder. The ancien régime had been pulled down in France, but it flourished almost everywhere else in Europe right through to World War I. This was also the age of unimaginable industrial expansion, first in the form of large mills and other factories, then as railroads, and finally as a shower of domestic innovations that transformed intimate life. The economic consequences of this surge accelerated at their own velocity; it was madness to pretend that they could be made to stand still long enough for even summary analysis. Marx was very naive, I think, to believe that the deft use of traditional (if late-model) philosophical and rhetorical tools would enable him to predict what he thought to be inevitable, inherently necessary. He had this thing about “workers” — did it ever cross his mind that rising levels of prosperity would, without any help from revolutions, transform workers into his detested petits bourgeois? He blinded himself to the possibility not just of Archie Bunker, but of generations of Archie Bunkers.
Marx also had a strange faith in solidarity. Despite his own prickly narcissism as to small differences, he believed that these workers of his would band together, would unite, and would not only take the reins of power but govern themselves in peace. But people do not band together unless they have to, except when nothing is at stake except personal satisfaction. What makes it possible for people to cooperate in folk-dancing groups or battle re-enactments is precisely the fact that these activities are pointless, recreational. People do not band together to form banks, to be run as a cooperative enterprise of which no single person is in charge. Marx himself was never a worker. He was a journalist and a political organizer. What did he know about workers? What did workers know?
What bewilders me about Marx, and the Nineteenth Century behind him, is the eager confidence with which brainy people rushed about with explanations of immense changes which they could only partially see and with answers to the terrible problems that these changes engendered. A veritable chaos of confidence! There had never been so many steam engines, powering mills and railroads; there had never been telegraphy; there had never been mass-produced newspapers. And yet everyone seemed to be sure of the consequences of these novelties. There had never been universal franchise. There had never been an overt, political struggle for women’s rights. There had never been an acknowledged connection between language and patriotism. There had never been slavery, not as there was slavery in the South once the steam-powered mills of England developed their appetite for cotton. Democracy had never been attempted on anything like the scale of the United States. And yet everybody knew that it was all going to work out grandly. Everyone was going to be free and prosperous and literate and happy.
There were just a few little kinks to be worked out. As we all know, if you have a number of problems to solve, you must prioritize them, and work down your list. But what if the list is collective? Who decides which problem must be solved first? It turns out that the person who decides is the person supported by the most power. There is no guarantee that this person is right. For many passionate thinkers in the Nineteenth Century, nationalism was the most important problem. Looking back, we can see that these thinkers shared a weakness: they minimized the size and importance of groups within any area in which a language was generally spoken. They were willing to write off the clusters of Germans, for example, who could be found almost everywhere in Central Europe. Nationalist thinkers were inspired, and then deluded, by the idea that everyone in the nation spoke the national language. Later, nationalism developed its ugly racist force. You might speak the language perfectly but still not belong.
If we look at the invention of nationalism, there is good reason to view the concept with alarm. Nationalism was invented by French Revolutionaries. In 1789, France was still very much a patchwork of different languages and customs, held together by recognition of the monarchy. When the monarchy was removed, something called “the nation” was inserted in its place — but what did this mean? What was the nation? Saying that it was French didn’t get you very far, not until Napoleon, that savior of the Revolution, imposed standards of universal education. This highly coercive nationalism traveled with his conquering armies and was implemented more or less throughout Europe. It became a terrible problem for the Austrians, a minority in their own empire. Hungary fought for national independence in 1848. It lost, but subsequently accepted the institution of the Dual Monarchy, in 1867 (the year after Austria’s defeat by Prussia), as a substitute. The main thing now was that there were no Slavic nations, just Russia. Hungary could accept its partnership with Austria because there were no other partners. But then, as the Ottomans receded, the Balkans south of Hungary became dotted with Slavic states — Serbia, Bulgaria, Rumania. Oh, dear. Nationalism is still, to this day, a terrible idea. Nevertheless, everyone but a few old reactionaries was certain, as long as two hundred years ago, that only great things could come of it. Why? Because it was the new idea, and dynastic allegiance was the old idea. In fact, nationalism’s destructive powers were not fully revealed until the dynasties were swept away, one hundred years ago.
My point is not to critique the idea of nationalism, but to suggest that people are overly confident about dealing with new problems. There is now a great deal of certainty about environmental degradation. It is either catastrophic or non-existent, and if you believe that it is catastrophic, then there are certain steps that must be taken right now. That is to say that there is a list of actions that must be taken in a certain order, and it is imperative to recognize this list right now. The problem is that not everyone’s list is the same.
I am a great believer in deliberation. The ability to deliberate is a gift, like any other, that few people are given. Most of us are too impatient, too dominating, or both. I beg your indulgence; until quite recently, our common ideas about universal franchise were either unknown or abhorred. Then people began to dream of them. I dream of a deliberative body, one that, like the Académie Française, elects new members upon the death of old ones. The members, whatever their training, are not experts — except at deliberation. When faced with a cosmological problem — asteroid alert! — they consult astronomers. For more complex problems, they consult a wider range of experts. Then they deliberate. They argue; they write position papers. Eventually, they agree, or they agree to disagree. But they explain their judgment as lucidly as possible to the world at large. They cannot make anything happen; they can only persuade. Here my dream stops, with plenty of important details still to be worked out. Perhaps you can help.
***
Thursday 26th
My intention was to write about Nathan Heller’s Oberlin piece in The New Yorker, but this morning’s Times brought the breathtaking news that Daphne Guinness has released an album, which will come out this week. You know, songs — although Guinness’s vocals are described as sprechstimme, which basically means not singing. The problem for me, should I buy the album, which is called Optimist in Black, is to decide which collection it belongs to. Do I put it with the unlistenable CDs by Jane Birkin and Charlotte Rampling, or do I slip in among the Mitford books?
Where are those CDs? Birkin and Rampling are both English actresses who are domiciled in France. Their French is adorable. Since Birkin was married to the great Serge Gainsbourg, it’s not hard to see why she might have been tempted to sing. I don’t know the explanation behind Charlotte Rampling’s ventures, but it doesn’t really matter, given the particular aesthetic that her singing embodies. It is an anti-Wagnerian aesthetic. Singing is suggested by coy, hushed breaths. At least, that is what I recall of the thirty seconds in which I exposed myself to Rampling’s CD. I adore Charlotte Rampling, which is why I bought the CD, but the shame does burn. I bought the Birkin album (there are several) because Jane Birkin was going to appear in a New York venue, and I was thinking about buying a ticket. The CD was an inexpensive hedge: I did not buy a ticket. It was all I could do to suppress the imagination of disaster: how Kathleen would glare at me if she were to accompany me to such an event. I do not adore Jane Birkin, but I am very fond of her, which is perhaps even nicer. I think that she makes Merci, Docteur Rey, my most favorite train-wreck of a movie.
I have Jessica Mitford’s CD — Decca and the Dectones. To be fair, it was made as a fundraiser, and one can only hope that it was a success at that. The elderly writer and union activist tries very hard to sing “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer.” There are passages of genuine song, if rarely in tune. I’m listening to it as I write. The CD is dated 1995; Mitford died the following year. If you can imagine Margaret Rutherford singing a Beatles song, you’re halfway there. Mitford’s accent is about ten times plummier, and curiously most pronounced when she “sings” that “oh – oh, oh, oh.” I can’t believe that I found it so quickly, in a CD case, about three feet tall, that stands just beneath my work table. The case is full of other curiosities – Karl Zéro and Bea Lillie, just to name two — that I really ought to listen to more than I do. That’s where Optimist in Black ought to go, if I take the plunge. The Birkin and Rampling albums, too, if and when I find them.
And Florence Foster Jenkins, to name another. (Who’d ‘a’ thunk that Meryl Streep would make a movie about her? Although the role really belongs to Broadway star Judy Kaye, who claimed to have wrecked her voice learning to sing like Jenkins, for that wonderful but short-lived show, Souvenir.)
And Mrs Miller. Don’t forget Mrs Miller! These boots are made for walkin’!
***
Nathan Heller’s Oberlin piece, “The Big Uneasy,” is clearly written by a young man. Someone more my age would have been less appalled by the evidence of illiberalism in today’s student bodies. I was there when the latest wave of it started, and it doesn’t seem to have changed much in fifty years. The personnel are different: almost all of the students interviewed by Heller are “of color.” In my day, the activists were just smart-ass white guys who had discovered an alternative to athletic prowess. Alternative excellence, however, still does seem to be the point.
I am very conservative about education, in case you hadn’t noticed. This does not mean that I espouse a “conservative” curriculum, although a list of books that I believe undergraduates ought to read would probably suggest that I do. I am certainly not a conservative in this regard: higher education is the duty that civilization owes to the future. If its élite is to function properly (and, repeat after me, there will always be an élite), then it must understand the world. It must be taught what civilization amounts to — how it rises and how it falls. In right-thinking countries, education is provided at no cost to qualified students, and nobody dreams of calling the student a “consumer.”
In exchange for this free education, students agree to learn what is taught. They accept on principle the assumption that, going in, they know nothing. Higher education makes no sense at all if you believe that students learn what’s academically important from some other source. Students who believe that colleges and universities do not know what’s important are wasting everybody’s time. They are not ready for/do not belong in college. That is really the end of it. Even though the activism of the Sixties made very small waves at Notre Dame, I saw enough to be terrified of the idea that students and teachers ought to switch roles. And I, as I have written elsewhere, was a terrible student myself.
Terrible as I might have been at following the curriculum, I never believed that nonsense about discovering myself. I was in school, very consciously, to learn the history of ideas: that is why I signed up for Great Books. (And I did read most of those that were prescribed.) I knew that I was young and unformed — I certainly hoped that I was unformed — but I did not expect school to turn me into an adult. I learned more about being an adult from the struggles of other students. It did not occur to me that what we were learning in class amounted to opportunities chosen or declined in the same way that our friendships and dating experiences closed some doors while opening others. There was nothing limiting about learning; only the time for learning was limited.
It also did not occur to me that I was being brainwashed. This is a delicate point, because brainwashing is very much the point of all education. In elementary school, kids are not encouraged to develop private writing systems or secret languages. No: they are taught to write as much like everyone else as possible and to add numbers in a way that arrives at the only correct answer. The coercive aspect of education diminishes as education progresses, but there is no denying that the debates about the correct way of thinking that flourish in universities take place on a settled platform of axioms and received ideas. Some students, in any time, are certain to suspect that this platform is creaky and in need of replacement; more than any other students, they need the guidance of gifted teachers to encourage them to postpone reformative projects until they have completed the course. Discourse occurs within agreed-upon parameters, without which there is no discourse but only shouting and babble.
Nathan Heller is concerned that a number of Oberlin students are pursuing parameter resetting rather than discourse. One student confesses that she no longer has much interest in hearing the thoughts of people who don’t think the way she does. That’s perfectly natural; it is the very inclination that, for the four years of undergraduate learning, a student is expected to submit to constant challenge. I have so far stressed learning as a matter of taking in information about the world, but the capstone of the undertaking is learning how to talk about it, and learning how to listen to others talk about it. The curriculum is a salient parameter of academic discourse. The reason for accepting it without argument is to foster the possibility that there will be a great deal of argument about what it all means. None of this has been brought home, on Heller’s evidence, to the Oberlin students he talks to.
Here are a few great lines from Heller’s piece.
At some point, it seemed, the American left on campus stopped being able to hear itself think.
“I’m actually still trying to reconcile how unhappy I’ve been here with how happy people were insisting I must be.” (Soon-to-be ex-student)
“Part of me feels that my leftist students are doing the right wing’s job for it.” (Teacher)
“This is the generation of kids that grew up being told that the nation was basically over race.” (Teacher)
“One of the hypocrisies of the call for a globalized curriculum is that the people calling for it don’t give a flying fuck if a subject is being taught properly.” (Teacher)
Carey, like Bautista, went to élite schools on scholarships; she says that, for her, the past few years have been about “unlearning” most of what she had been taught.
American universities have always been able to boast of large populations of students who are the first members of their families to receive higher education. The diversity of American universities does something to cushion the shock of entering university culture from a disadvantaged background. Many first-time students (so to speak) go to schools with strong religious affiliations, for example. Many choose to stay close to home. Heller’s Oberlin students, in contrast, seem like the victims of a malignant experiment, yanked from socioeconomic deprivation into a zone of shimmering sophistication, one of the principle aspects of which is their mere presence in it. Cyrus Eosphoros, the trans man and projected dropout who expresses his unreconcilable unhappiness in the quotes above, complains of being “proof of concept for other people.” It couldn’t be clearer that Eosphoros was not ready for Oberlin, and that Oberlin did nothing to compensate. Possibly because I was so happy to get away from home, I have always believed that it is important for boys (especially) to attend boarding schools, which were called “prep schools” because they prepared students for the rigors of college life. Surely some kind of orientation is crucial to students’ success. Oberlin is an unusual school from almost any perspective; I’m sure that a lot of kids from affluent white families are shaken up there. The academic atmosphere of disruption and play must strike some scholarship students as pointless and/or frivolous.
Heller writes, “The historic bracket that opened in the the sixties is starting to close; the boomers’ memoirs of becoming no longer lead up to the present.” I’m not sure what this means, but I know that the era in which leftist boomers grew up to run academia is ending. Academia is now run by people who were given tenure by boomers. These replacements may be even more expert at teaching the boomer curriculum, but the very fact that they were students of the boomers — those boomers themselves were never really students at all; they came to “liberate” — signifies a falling-off in passion. Meanwhile, it has finally been acknowledged that boomers indulged in a lot of wishful thinking where race was concerned. Quite aside from dreaming that the nation’s sociopolitical problems were solved or on the way to being solved by the civil-rights activism of the Sixties, boomers cherished the old American dream of opportunity. Heller’s students seem unilaterally to reject the opportunities provided by Oberlin; perhaps it would be better to say that they reject the very idea of academic opportunity. They don’t jump at the chance to take a place in the white man’s world. They wish that the white man and his world did not exist. And who can blame them? Why, though, are they having their noses rubbed in it?
We boomers might have been told too often that we were special, but what really marked us apart was the way in which the world was made special for us. Unlike all previous epochs, it was a world of endless opportunity. This is usually seen as a side-effect of postwar affluence, but I see it now, as I’m coming to see many different things, as having roots in Cold War strategy. We were to be healthy and strong and bright — but not just for our own sakes. We were to flourish as individual Americans, but there was an ulterior motive: we were to show up the collectivized Russians. Everything that they did over there, except playing chess and musical instruments, we were supposed to do in the opposite way. We collaborated as members of a team, not as bees in a hive. Sure, there was a massive intensification of science education after Sputnik, but the generosity with which liberal arts studies were funded did not begin to slow down until it became clear that the Soviets were not going to prevail. It just about ended along with the Cold War. I don’t think that I’m being cynical here, but only realistic. Which is why I don’t regard my education as some sort of trick designed to make me fall into step with the march of the brave and the free. I was lucky to grow up, not as a boomer, but in the Cold War, and to have benefited from my side’s extensive, if self-interested, generosity.
***
Friday 27th
Perhaps it is a character defect, but I find myself maddeningly incapable of deriving any satisfaction from the disgrace of Kenneth Starr, who has been “stripped” (Times) of his title as President of Baylor University. And why? Because some of the school’s football players have been getting away with sexual assault. Predictably, the interests of boosting a winning football team have taken priority over more ethical concerns. Irony corkscrews through the story: Starr will retain his position as chancellor, because that job is, how shall I paraphrase it, more of a religious thing. (Baylor is a Baptist school.) I ought to be smirking at least. I always sensed that Starr was a great humbug, and that his very participation in the persecution of Bill Clinton trivialized it. Now I know.
But the ironic part of the story is but a small wave, followed by a much larger one: once again, it has been demonstrated that college football is incompatible with college life. There is not much to say about this; I ought just to let the wave knock me down, and try to remember that for lots of other American’s, it’s all great fun. It must be something like the taste for blood. Very bright people are more than keen on their favorite schools’ football games, especially the ones that their favorite teams win. I went to Notre Dame (twice), so I ought to know what it’s like, but I don’t know what it’s like; it’s sports, dammit, and what the hell is it doing on campus? I have to remember that for many people, college is primarily a social institution. This is especially true for professionals, who go on to pursue advanced degrees in extremely rigorous institutions. College, in contrast, is a time for fun, punctuated by occasional nightmares of cramming and exams. These bright people are deaf, absolutely deaf, to the idea that lucrative, pre-professional sports programs may be toxic to the schools that foster them, that the mere proximity of gigantic stadiums to libraries may deform young minds, may normalize extremely questionable behavior, and may dim moral objection to a game that does ruin young minds, literally. You can say all of this, and these very bright people will respond just like other addicts. They will not listen until catastrophe strips them of that option.
And television. If I wanted to be prosecutorial, I might point out that college football was a sideshow, of interest to no one but alumni (Notre Dame an interesting exception), and that professional football was a great deal less popular than baseball, until television made it easy to follow games without leaving home, and eventually transformed games into television shows, so that, if you did take the trouble to attend, you were, potentially, part of the cast. (Since Friday entries are supposed to be relatively lighthearted, perhaps I ought to ease up on the scolding for a sec to remind readers that my old pal Fossil Darling was caught snoozing at the US Open by a lingering cameraman — during the women’s games, of course. He was spectacularly identifiable to many of his friends.) I might try to make something of the connection between two encroaching aspects of American life that I fear are threatening our future. But it’s no longer a case of threatening the future. The damage has been done. Now that Donald Trump is the “presumed Republican candidate,” my worst fears have been realized: American voters have confused politics with entertainment. And why not? What do they see of politics that isn’t filtered through a medium that converts everything into entertainment? And what have established politicians done but transform themselves into characters out of a telenovela, prone to fibbing?
Television is not really addictive, but it is extremely habit-forming, with the habit pertaining not to following certain TV shows but to simply having the the thing on. I’m intrigued by the blurriness of the language that surrounds this subject: what does it mean “to watch television”? What is television? As I think of it, television is a system that integrates a range of components. Watching Laura on TMC is watching television, but watching a DVD of Laura is not. The latter experience lacks many of the components of watching television, and the component that strikes me most at the moment is television’s endlessness. If you watch Laura on a DVD, the show will come to an end. At a certain point, you will have seen everything that the DVD has to offer. You must either insert another DVD or turn off your television equipment. At the end of Laura on TMC, there will be something next, and if the TMC people are doing their job, you will want to watch whatever is next. Meanwhile, you will be treated to a gentle barrage of anchoring symbols that locate you in the realm of TMC’s brand. TMC’s brand is a significant component of watching Laura “on television.” It is much more than a label. It is a dual outlook, a split vision. Half of it is a “philosophy” that viewers can relate to; at TMC, the reigning philosophy holds that they don’t make movies the way they used to. The other half is an outlook upon the viewers, an inquiry into the viewers’ likes and dislikes that will help TMC to make its philosophy even more attractive. If you are watching TMC on a computer, your click will be added to the total. Watching television can be interactive in a surprising and unsettling way.
Ever since I woke up to the malignity of television, in the mid-Eighties, I have asked for only one thing of the medium: no news programs, no serious interviews, nothing but fluff. Seriousness is compromised by television because the medium cannot bear the hesitations of doubt. To shrug your shoulders on television is to annoy and terrify viewers, because they have become habituated to regarding the screen as the source of authority — its altar, as it were. If you are going to shrug, you must smile dopily, sending a message that viewers will read to mean, not that you are in fact a dope, but that whatever it is that you don’t know isn’t worth knowing.
I have also asked very bright people, the people who run things, not to watch television, and especially not to have it running in the background.
***
Last night, I began reading the fourth part of The Idiot, and I was immediately beguiled by Dostoevsky’s discussion of what Marx would call the petit bourgeois character. He begins by pretending that it is difficult to write about perfectly ordinary people in a way that makes them interesting. What does “ordinary” mean, if not “not interesting”? Then he shifts from the writer’s vantage to that of ordinary people, whom he immediately divides into two groups. The first is untroubled in its “impudence of naïvety,”
this stupid man’s unquestioningness of himself and his talent…
The second group, “more clever,” is not so sure. The urge to be singular, the belief that one is capable of doing great things but prevented from doing great things by the static interruptions of a nonsensical world, burns just as passionately in the breasts of both groups, but the “more clever” are at least sometimes aware that their capacity for greatness is imaginary. Dostoevsky pulls in to focus on the Ivolgin siblings, Ganya and Varya, who are both “more clever” ordinary people, as if to demonstrate his thesis that the “more clever” are the less happy. What he does instead is to show that ordinary people can be written about in a way that is very interesting indeed.
I’m still not sure what Ganya and Varya are talking about when they allude to something about their scapegrace father that they would prefer to keep secret — I haven’t got that far — but the dread and regret in their conversation made the mystery almost as hair-raising as the one that opens Act II of Lohengrin.
There is a great deal in The Idiot that I find it hard to grasp — impossible to grasp, really, as fully as I grasp whatever Jane Austen has to say. Aglaya Ivanovna is evidently the child of cultural forces that have gone with the wind. I don’t know quite what it means to call Prince Myshkin an “idiot,” although sometimes it seems almost clearly to mean that he is some kind of holy fool. At others, he appears to be a troubled Candide. The minor characters are often so surprising that they’re almost implausible — I’m thinking of the boxer, Keller, who is not altogether the brute that he appears to be at first. (But who — in life — is altogether the person he appears to be at first?) Almost everyone appears to be slightly insane — suffering from false consciousness, no doubt. Lizaveta Prokofyevna’s relation to respectability is wildly unsteady, not because she does anything at all improper but because she admits to doubts that her English counterparts would suppress. On top of everything, there is a wild-west character that suggests a society coming into being, a patina of manners that is not very thick, but yet thick enough to interfere with everyone’s sense of what it means to be Russian.
I am not trying to understand this world. I am trying to understand the story, yes, but instead of treating The Idiot as, how shall I put it, a window on the Russian soul, I’m seeing it as a gallery of strange people. Strange, but not exotic: I’m not romanticizing the differences. When I read Dostoevsky in college, I thought that my failure to understand his characters signaled my own lack of sophistication; when I grew up, I thought, I would know better. Actually, I know less, because there is more to see when you stop awarding yourself a high handicap and stop permitting inexplicable behavior to pass unconsidered. I consider it, but I do not press to decipher it.
***
The clock ticks, as it were; the minutes pass. I want to get back to The Idiot, but I have to decide what to make for lunch first. I’m stuck in the apartment, waiting for handymen to come and fiddle with the valve at the back of the stove. I don’t really mind being stuck at home today; I was out a lot this week, and there is no reason to be out in the warm weather, no errands that need doing today. There is plenty to do here, although waiting is always enervating. At the same time, it woke me up well before eight o’clock. I had heard grumbling on the elevator about waiting for handymen who didn’t show up, so I didn’t hasten to make an appointment.
I went for an annual physical checkup the other day. The doctor, who is very conscientious, asked me how I was doing, and he listened to me for a reasonable amount of time before cutting me off to quiz me on medications. I hadn’t quite got to the point of what I was trying to say, which is that how I am doing is elderly and out of it. A lot of the “out of it” owes to not watching television. I know that I am not missing anything important (the sound of Kardashians?), but I also know that I am missing more and more of what people are talking about. In other words, I have lived too long. Please do not misunderstand that for a suicide note. Living too long is a condition like any other — like my fused spine, for example. You live with it; you adjust.
During the next two weeks, I shall be taking a vacation break. I won’t say more about it, because I’ve found that things that I look forward to have a way of not happening if I mention them here. I shall return on Tuesday, 14 June — assuming, of course, that I survive the vacation, which, given that air travel will be involved, is by no means certain to me.
Bon week-end à tous!