January 24, 2011:
Last night I tried to watch Shangri-La on TCM and the picture froze a third of the way through. The dialogue continued with a hysterical young woman ordering the leader of the Himalayan monastery in the film out of her room. She has a disease that's going to kill her in a few months, he offers to help her heal, but she wants none of it. It's all a fraud, she says, by which I think she means that the offer of healing powers, plus the religious background that presumably goes with it, is nothing but false promises designed to make you feel better. She, clearly, has done with religion and its powers. As I remember, the movie went on to picture a perfect little utopian community filled with spiritual grace and calm, and the question for Ronald Colman, playing the lead, is, should I leave and go back to the world, or stay here and live for a couple of hundred years amidst these enlightened people? And I think he decides to go back, to fulfill his responsibilities as a British foreign minister. Anyway, I had to bail out. I wanted to watch things moving on the screen, so I found a nature show. Nature, red in tooth and claw. More like real life, no?
But the movie reminded me of a debate I had in high school with another student in our senior English class about the nature of heaven. He--he died young, by the way--believed that heaven, when you reached it, would be more of the same, things to do, activities to keep you busy, sort of like a good retirement home, I suppose, where they take you on trips to museums and historic houses and neat little historic villages like Sag Harbor, where Lorraine and I live, or maybe even to bowling alleys. My own view was more complicated. I had read enough in religion by that time to doubt that eternity could be at all like life lived in time, which is essentially what he was arguing for, a life lived in time, only an extremely long time. Eternity, I said, could not in fact resemble the life we were familiar with at all. I did not believe that human consciousness could endure an eternity of familiar activities, or an eternity of singing in choirs in praise of God, or any sort of eternity you could describe. Eternity, I said, was beyond the ability of human consciousness to comprehend or to experience. We literally cannot imagine it, and if we cannot imagine it we cannot live it. If something of us survives death, I said, what it would experience in heaven most probably was a moment of bliss, an explosion into bliss, in fact, that would dissolve us into some larger whole, a drop of rain in the ocean.
This is not an argument, of course, you can win or lose. Nobody knows the answers except the dead, and they're not talking. He was arguing for a heaven very much like Shangri-La, which, in the last scene I was able to watch, had really good fruit on the table all the time; and I was arguing that a heaven resembling a physical paradise, a palace of pleasure, represented a failure of imagination, and, ultimately, an unwillingness to face the fact of death and get beyond the limitations of being human: being embodied. And in the years since I've never seen an image or description of heaven I could believe in. Even the Sistine Chapel, for all of Michelangelo's muscular spirituality, failed to persuade me of anything except the glory of art and the mass mindedness of tourism. The truth is, embodiment is the source of all meaning. It is our fate to have evolved into a consciousness of our own deaths, and therefore to live and die with that fundamental question: what then? Is that the end? The best thing we can do, the noblest thing, is to face up to it and to develop what John Keats called "negative capability"--the ability not to have to know. To live, calmly, without any kind of certainty. Because certainty is the real killer. This is especially true of certainty in religion, but it's also true of certainty in anti-religion, i.e. in atheism. They both lead to dogmatism, and dogmatism leads again and again to cold murderous rage.
I take my father as a model. We went home, we being my first wife and I and our two children, for Christmas in 1974 and my father called me into the basement to show me something, some chairs he was working on--he recaned old chairs in his retirement--but really to tell me that this would be his last Christmas. He was very calm about it, matter-of-fact, and he didn't elaborate. I remember looking at him non-plussed, not knowing what to say. He then went on to tell me that his wife, my mother, was developing Alzheimer's, but she would be very sweet, he said. It all came to pass. He died a month later, my mother did develop Alzheimer's and eventually spent seven and a half years in a nursing home, slowly and painfully becoming less and less herself until she disappeared entirely from the frail body that just went on living, no ghost, any more, in that machine. So here were two models of how to die, and then my brother, dying of brain tumors, and all the friends who have died, my old buddy Carter Jones worst of all, in a way, dying in a plane crash just as he was achieving real success as a photographer; or maybe it was the three children who died in a fire. Friends of my kids. I will never forget telling my daughter, who was eight, that one of her best friends had died when their house burnt to the ground. You never forget any of these things. But it was my father, so calm, so matter-of-fact, facing his death, that stays with me best. He was not a religious man, never went to church, never took an interest in it. Clearly he had decided a long time before that it was not for him. So he had no supports in any kind of belief at his end; he was left with only himself, staring uncertainty in the face, and he didn't flinch. That's courage. If there actually is some sort of life after death, he's the one I would most like to say something to. To honor. But who knows if we get such a chance?
Speaking of Keats, he died in Rome, at 25, of tuberculosis, thinking he had failed as a poet, and he asked his friend Severn to have this epitaph engraved on his tomb, with nothing else, not even the words John Keats: "Here lies one whose name was writt in Water." The headstone with its epitaph, and Keats's name, stands in the Protestant cemetary in Rome, just outside the city walls, and it is impossible to keep flowers on it to this day because the devotees come and pick them, wanting a piece of him. When the Italian doctors did an autopsy after his death they discovered that something like 80 percent of his lungs had been eaten up by tuberculosis, which he contracted by nursing first his mother and then his brother, both of whom died of the disease. Knowing how to live is also knowing how to die, and the best of us do it without having a clue, either way, what is to come; and thereby they display what is the best in us as human beings, courage, always courage. And that may be the whole point of living. If you have enough courage, and have it at the right time, it no longer matters what heaven is, or what it might be for.
Monday, January 24, 2011
Thursday, January 6, 2011
Marco Polo
January 6, 2010:
We are in the Pamirs, which lie at the western end of the Himalayas, north of the Karakoram range, and among their residents are the Keiaz tribe, who "live in caves on the highest peaks, subsist by hunting, keep no flocks, said to be anthropophagous (i.e., cannibalistic), but have handsome women; eat their flesh raw." So, at least, says a Mr. Gardiner, writing in the Journal of the Asian Society of Bengal for 1853. Among the other residents of the Pamirs are great sheep, the Ovis poli, whose curved horns run up to five feet long or longer, measured along the curve, and are so large in circumference at the base that it's said foxes use them as dens to raise their kits in. "Wood says that these horns supply shoes for the Khirgiz horses, and also a good substitute for stirrup-irons" as well. Who knew horns could be so useful? The French, it turns out. According to a Paris newspaper report dated November 24, 1894, French horse owners in Lyons regularly shod their horses with sheep horns (though not the horns of the large sheep of the Pamirs) because they didn't slip on the cobblestones. "Horses thus shod can be driven, it is said, at the most rapid pace over the worst pavement without slipping."
I am reading Marco Polo, there are two ways to do this, and I'm using both. The first is to take a modern edition and just plow through the book; in my case it's Marco Polo in the Everyman's Library edition, translated by Marsden, revised by Wright, and newly revised and edited by Peter Harris, with a short introduction by the great English travel writer Colin Thubron. It's a handsome edition, easy to hold, beautifully printed. But the notes are minimal, and nothing demands notes more than Marco Polo. Just the names alone are daunting. Cities have their old names and their new; towns the same; peoples likewise. The maps are inadequate and nobody demands maps more than Marco, with his complicated itinerary, his many years on the road. It's not a long book, you could read it in a couple of days; but you'd come away from it thinking, well, that was interesting, but how much of it is true? And what is one to make of the amazing tales?
So I'm also reading the Yule-Cordier edition, in two volumes, published by that indispensable company Dover Books, which took upon themselves the noble task of republishing in its entirety the extravagantly annotated Yule-Cordier edition of the nineteenth century, and it is from the above, in all its Victorian splendor, that the news above about the horned sheep of the Pamirs, and the Keiaz people, comes; and I have to tell you, I haven't had this much fun since I ran down Mt. Rainier. (Actually, I boot-skied down Mt. Rainier.) The books themselves are more or less the same: same text, in other words, with some slight variations; because the texts of Marco Polo exist in any number of manuscript versions from the 14th century, and there are definitely variations. But the notes: was anybody ever more indefatigable than Sir Henry Yule and Henri Cordier? One of the things that has fascinated me for a long time is the enormous Iron Gate that Alexander the Great is supposed to have constructed somewhere in the Caucasus Mountains to keep the giant Biblical wild men Gog and Magog, who may or may not have been associated with the ten lost tribes of Israel, locked up in their mountain fastnesses, so that they could not erupt into the civilized world. Marco Polo mentions this gate in his book and it is all the prompting Yule needs to take us to Derbend, where the remains of this fabled gate and its attendant wall run along ridge lines in the mountains for a distance of eighteen or twenty miles, and there are pictures even of the remains, and the town of Derbend, washed by the Caspian Sea, and reports from people who have been there. And there it is, the legends of Alexander's life mixed with Biblical legends about Gog and Magog, and travelers' tales, and it just takes your breath away. We live in an endlessly fascinating world; we emerge from an endlessly fascinating past. The Spanish conquistadors who conquered Mexico and Peru saw themselves as following in Alexander's footsteps, and what is the legend of El Dorado but an echo of the ants as big as foxes who dug gold out of the ground in India (which Polo mentions later in his book) and piled it beside their burrows? Because the Americas were the new Asia.
I read through the modern edition of Marco and then turn to the Yule-Cordier when I run into something I want to know more about. This is what it means to have a large library, and to dig into it. I acquired the Yule-Cordier years ago, and it has sat on my shelves unread for maybe twenty years. The Everyman's Library edition I've had for maybe eight years. Now I'm reading them both, and I don't want it to end. This is my gold, gold of the mind, and it is why I've wound up with 7,000 books.
We are in the Pamirs, which lie at the western end of the Himalayas, north of the Karakoram range, and among their residents are the Keiaz tribe, who "live in caves on the highest peaks, subsist by hunting, keep no flocks, said to be anthropophagous (i.e., cannibalistic), but have handsome women; eat their flesh raw." So, at least, says a Mr. Gardiner, writing in the Journal of the Asian Society of Bengal for 1853. Among the other residents of the Pamirs are great sheep, the Ovis poli, whose curved horns run up to five feet long or longer, measured along the curve, and are so large in circumference at the base that it's said foxes use them as dens to raise their kits in. "Wood says that these horns supply shoes for the Khirgiz horses, and also a good substitute for stirrup-irons" as well. Who knew horns could be so useful? The French, it turns out. According to a Paris newspaper report dated November 24, 1894, French horse owners in Lyons regularly shod their horses with sheep horns (though not the horns of the large sheep of the Pamirs) because they didn't slip on the cobblestones. "Horses thus shod can be driven, it is said, at the most rapid pace over the worst pavement without slipping."
I am reading Marco Polo, there are two ways to do this, and I'm using both. The first is to take a modern edition and just plow through the book; in my case it's Marco Polo in the Everyman's Library edition, translated by Marsden, revised by Wright, and newly revised and edited by Peter Harris, with a short introduction by the great English travel writer Colin Thubron. It's a handsome edition, easy to hold, beautifully printed. But the notes are minimal, and nothing demands notes more than Marco Polo. Just the names alone are daunting. Cities have their old names and their new; towns the same; peoples likewise. The maps are inadequate and nobody demands maps more than Marco, with his complicated itinerary, his many years on the road. It's not a long book, you could read it in a couple of days; but you'd come away from it thinking, well, that was interesting, but how much of it is true? And what is one to make of the amazing tales?
So I'm also reading the Yule-Cordier edition, in two volumes, published by that indispensable company Dover Books, which took upon themselves the noble task of republishing in its entirety the extravagantly annotated Yule-Cordier edition of the nineteenth century, and it is from the above, in all its Victorian splendor, that the news above about the horned sheep of the Pamirs, and the Keiaz people, comes; and I have to tell you, I haven't had this much fun since I ran down Mt. Rainier. (Actually, I boot-skied down Mt. Rainier.) The books themselves are more or less the same: same text, in other words, with some slight variations; because the texts of Marco Polo exist in any number of manuscript versions from the 14th century, and there are definitely variations. But the notes: was anybody ever more indefatigable than Sir Henry Yule and Henri Cordier? One of the things that has fascinated me for a long time is the enormous Iron Gate that Alexander the Great is supposed to have constructed somewhere in the Caucasus Mountains to keep the giant Biblical wild men Gog and Magog, who may or may not have been associated with the ten lost tribes of Israel, locked up in their mountain fastnesses, so that they could not erupt into the civilized world. Marco Polo mentions this gate in his book and it is all the prompting Yule needs to take us to Derbend, where the remains of this fabled gate and its attendant wall run along ridge lines in the mountains for a distance of eighteen or twenty miles, and there are pictures even of the remains, and the town of Derbend, washed by the Caspian Sea, and reports from people who have been there. And there it is, the legends of Alexander's life mixed with Biblical legends about Gog and Magog, and travelers' tales, and it just takes your breath away. We live in an endlessly fascinating world; we emerge from an endlessly fascinating past. The Spanish conquistadors who conquered Mexico and Peru saw themselves as following in Alexander's footsteps, and what is the legend of El Dorado but an echo of the ants as big as foxes who dug gold out of the ground in India (which Polo mentions later in his book) and piled it beside their burrows? Because the Americas were the new Asia.
I read through the modern edition of Marco and then turn to the Yule-Cordier when I run into something I want to know more about. This is what it means to have a large library, and to dig into it. I acquired the Yule-Cordier years ago, and it has sat on my shelves unread for maybe twenty years. The Everyman's Library edition I've had for maybe eight years. Now I'm reading them both, and I don't want it to end. This is my gold, gold of the mind, and it is why I've wound up with 7,000 books.
Tuesday, December 21, 2010
MYTHOLOGIES
December 21, 2010:
Yes, 7,000 books. I haven't actually counted them; what I did was count the books on a few standard-length shelves, then count the shelves, then guess the numbers of books piled up on various floors, and finally guess the number in storage. Doing this is to be reminded of Henry David Thoreau's rueful remark to somebody, possibly Emerson, after his publisher sent him the two or three hundred copies of his book A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers that had failed to sell (the bulk of the printing), that he now had a library of six hundred books, about half of which he had written himself. I have something similar, several cartons of books I edited for the National Geographic Society Press, but I don't count those as part of my library. I'm trying to find a place to give them away to, but can't imagine why anybody would want eight or nine copies of, say, Sven Hedin's My Life as an Explorer, fascinating as it is.
The other day I picked up a book that's been kicking around my library for many years, Roland Barthes's Mythologies. It, too, is a fascinating book, and I looked through it to see what I had made of it when I first read it, because it's full of my notes. I had bought it in the early 1970s from England--I once had an account at Blackwell's, the Oxford bookseller--because English books were a bit cheaper than American books, and the bookseller's catalogues were far more interesting, and also because I wanted to keep up with French thought, which was beginning to take over humanities studies in this country. I thought it might provide a method; at the time I was trying to figure out how to approach the American dream. I had a contract to write a book about the history of the American dream, and it seemed clear to me that the American dream was a myth, but it wasn't clear what kind, or how it worked in the culture. And I thought Barthes might provide a way to think about such things.
The book turned out not to be all that helpful; rereading the book, I find myself as puzzled now as I was then by Barthes's analyses. On the ways the public "reads" particular events, like a wrestling match, or particular things, like wine and milk, he's brilliant. Wine, for example, he calls a "resilient totem," which is an excellent phrase, and notes that it "supports a varied mythology which does not trouble about contradictions." For the common man, wine connects him to his Frenchness; everyone 'knows' that French wine is the best, and that only the French really understand wine. For the writer, however, it serves another function. "The local white wine or the beaujolais of the writer is meant to cut him off from the all too expected environment of cocktails and expensive drinks (the only ones which snobbishness leads one to offer him). Wine will deliver him from myths, will remove some of his intellectualism," will turn him into a man of the people, in short, connect him with the proletariat he longs to relate to, make him more virile, and so on. It's amusing and illuminating; we all know intellectuals who hang out in bars because that's where the "real people" are, the carpenters and plumbers who play darts and watch football and occasionally get into fights.
But when Barthes writes about the more abstract questions of how myths operate semiotically, it becomes much harder to follow his distinctions. Here my old notes express confusion and frustration, and as I read the section over again I am no clearer on what Barthes is trying to say.
Nevertheless I love this book. It is, for one thing, quite handsome. The dust jacket is a soft purple, darkened with age, and the back cover holds a full-page photo of Barthes himself, looking sideways at the camera, a cigarette in his right hand, which rests on an open book--what is a French intellectual without his cigarette?--and a small, dry smile on his face, itself handsome and somehow very French. The book has been moved many times, from residence to residence; it has been packed in boxes, rearranged on shelves, and it shows its wear, not only internally with my notes--my handwriting has hardly changed at all in the last thirty or forty years--but externally, with little scuff marks, a scratch or two, and the oil that has come off my skin and soaked into the paper of the jacket and lent it a certain patina. We talk about rooms looking lived in. Books can look lived in, too, and one of the pleasures of collecting rare books is precisely this lived-in look they acquire with age; it is the smell, the feel of them, and their aura. I once owned a book that belonged to Daniel Webster; it had his signature in it, on the front free endpaper (in rare book parlance that's FFE), very firmly, boldly written. It is fatal to grow attached to books, or to anything, and I have sold thousands of my books over the years, including the rarest, but their beauty simply as objects, quite apart from whatever knowledge or pleasure the reading of them reveals, continues to attract me. They are the other half of a relationship that is in some ways like a friendship. Whom shall I be talking with today? The difficult Barthes, or shall I once again follow the elderly American Lambert Strether as he walks the streets of Paris for the very first time and begins to understand that the life he has not had any opportunity to lead is the life he was meant for. That, of course, is Henry James, the book is The Ambassadors, I've read it twice and my copy of it, which is not distinguished in any way, is also something I love. Because the text is not just a text, available on an electronic device nobody could possibly love. It is a physical thing, paper, cardboard, cloth, glue, ink. It has a feel and a familiarity that makes it yours in a way no electronic gadget can supply.
The only thing I have from my parents' house, my house, besides a few pictures and the family photographs, is a small round table that holds books in a revolving case beneath the top. I asked my mother for it and she gave it to me on the spot. I remember my father after he retired reading the World Book Encyclopedia, which they had bought for my brother and me to help us with our schoolwork, volume by volume, cover to cover. Sometimes I wonder where it came from, the various intellectual passions, the insatiable curiosity. Was it indeed my father? Does it come from forebears at all? I don't know. I'm probably living out my own mythology, trying to be the hero of my own story, the last independent scholar. It certainly seems so. And so it may be: learning may not be the way to enlightenment. But it's the way I chose and I'm not going to change now. What's the Zen saying? Live as if you were going to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were going to live forever. Exactly. If I thought I were going to die tomorrow, what would I be doing now? I would be reading one of my books.
Yes, 7,000 books. I haven't actually counted them; what I did was count the books on a few standard-length shelves, then count the shelves, then guess the numbers of books piled up on various floors, and finally guess the number in storage. Doing this is to be reminded of Henry David Thoreau's rueful remark to somebody, possibly Emerson, after his publisher sent him the two or three hundred copies of his book A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers that had failed to sell (the bulk of the printing), that he now had a library of six hundred books, about half of which he had written himself. I have something similar, several cartons of books I edited for the National Geographic Society Press, but I don't count those as part of my library. I'm trying to find a place to give them away to, but can't imagine why anybody would want eight or nine copies of, say, Sven Hedin's My Life as an Explorer, fascinating as it is.
The other day I picked up a book that's been kicking around my library for many years, Roland Barthes's Mythologies. It, too, is a fascinating book, and I looked through it to see what I had made of it when I first read it, because it's full of my notes. I had bought it in the early 1970s from England--I once had an account at Blackwell's, the Oxford bookseller--because English books were a bit cheaper than American books, and the bookseller's catalogues were far more interesting, and also because I wanted to keep up with French thought, which was beginning to take over humanities studies in this country. I thought it might provide a method; at the time I was trying to figure out how to approach the American dream. I had a contract to write a book about the history of the American dream, and it seemed clear to me that the American dream was a myth, but it wasn't clear what kind, or how it worked in the culture. And I thought Barthes might provide a way to think about such things.
The book turned out not to be all that helpful; rereading the book, I find myself as puzzled now as I was then by Barthes's analyses. On the ways the public "reads" particular events, like a wrestling match, or particular things, like wine and milk, he's brilliant. Wine, for example, he calls a "resilient totem," which is an excellent phrase, and notes that it "supports a varied mythology which does not trouble about contradictions." For the common man, wine connects him to his Frenchness; everyone 'knows' that French wine is the best, and that only the French really understand wine. For the writer, however, it serves another function. "The local white wine or the beaujolais of the writer is meant to cut him off from the all too expected environment of cocktails and expensive drinks (the only ones which snobbishness leads one to offer him). Wine will deliver him from myths, will remove some of his intellectualism," will turn him into a man of the people, in short, connect him with the proletariat he longs to relate to, make him more virile, and so on. It's amusing and illuminating; we all know intellectuals who hang out in bars because that's where the "real people" are, the carpenters and plumbers who play darts and watch football and occasionally get into fights.
But when Barthes writes about the more abstract questions of how myths operate semiotically, it becomes much harder to follow his distinctions. Here my old notes express confusion and frustration, and as I read the section over again I am no clearer on what Barthes is trying to say.
Nevertheless I love this book. It is, for one thing, quite handsome. The dust jacket is a soft purple, darkened with age, and the back cover holds a full-page photo of Barthes himself, looking sideways at the camera, a cigarette in his right hand, which rests on an open book--what is a French intellectual without his cigarette?--and a small, dry smile on his face, itself handsome and somehow very French. The book has been moved many times, from residence to residence; it has been packed in boxes, rearranged on shelves, and it shows its wear, not only internally with my notes--my handwriting has hardly changed at all in the last thirty or forty years--but externally, with little scuff marks, a scratch or two, and the oil that has come off my skin and soaked into the paper of the jacket and lent it a certain patina. We talk about rooms looking lived in. Books can look lived in, too, and one of the pleasures of collecting rare books is precisely this lived-in look they acquire with age; it is the smell, the feel of them, and their aura. I once owned a book that belonged to Daniel Webster; it had his signature in it, on the front free endpaper (in rare book parlance that's FFE), very firmly, boldly written. It is fatal to grow attached to books, or to anything, and I have sold thousands of my books over the years, including the rarest, but their beauty simply as objects, quite apart from whatever knowledge or pleasure the reading of them reveals, continues to attract me. They are the other half of a relationship that is in some ways like a friendship. Whom shall I be talking with today? The difficult Barthes, or shall I once again follow the elderly American Lambert Strether as he walks the streets of Paris for the very first time and begins to understand that the life he has not had any opportunity to lead is the life he was meant for. That, of course, is Henry James, the book is The Ambassadors, I've read it twice and my copy of it, which is not distinguished in any way, is also something I love. Because the text is not just a text, available on an electronic device nobody could possibly love. It is a physical thing, paper, cardboard, cloth, glue, ink. It has a feel and a familiarity that makes it yours in a way no electronic gadget can supply.
The only thing I have from my parents' house, my house, besides a few pictures and the family photographs, is a small round table that holds books in a revolving case beneath the top. I asked my mother for it and she gave it to me on the spot. I remember my father after he retired reading the World Book Encyclopedia, which they had bought for my brother and me to help us with our schoolwork, volume by volume, cover to cover. Sometimes I wonder where it came from, the various intellectual passions, the insatiable curiosity. Was it indeed my father? Does it come from forebears at all? I don't know. I'm probably living out my own mythology, trying to be the hero of my own story, the last independent scholar. It certainly seems so. And so it may be: learning may not be the way to enlightenment. But it's the way I chose and I'm not going to change now. What's the Zen saying? Live as if you were going to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were going to live forever. Exactly. If I thought I were going to die tomorrow, what would I be doing now? I would be reading one of my books.
Thursday, December 16, 2010
BOOKISHNESS
December 16, 2010
Our front porch is enclosed and semi-heated, although it faces northwest and nothing facing northwest, which is where Canadian cold fronts come from, is ever going to be really warm here except in summer; but it doesn't matter, we don't use it anyway even though I have a large desk there. I actually work upstairs. The large desk mostly holds the bills. And the room itself holds books. When people walk in through our front door they pass through this room, and it is not uncommon for them to say, I love this room, or words to that effect. They have a vision of themselves taking a year off and finding a nice chair someplace and burrowing through the books to their hearts' content, nothing to stop them from reading and reading, and reading some more.
I had lunch with my friend Ken Robbins today and he told me about somebody he knows, or knows of, whom he calls a "peripatetic reader." This is a person who reads while he walks, holding a book in front of his face as he ambles down the street or across the room; he reads, he says, up to 18 hours a day, and at the same time manages to navigate the world. Remarkable. As a result, says Ken, he's incredibly erudite. I also would sometimes like to be incredibly erudite, drop appropriate quotations into conversation, add facts to arguments that completely destroy one position or maybe its opposite, call in examples from Darwin or refer to Shroedinger's cat while discussing Keats: dazzle, in short. I've never been particularly dazzling. Not aggressive enough, too unsure of my ground. My trouble is that I never think I know enough. I have all these books, 7,000 of them, but I don't pretend to know all that much. Well, OK--sometimes I do pretend, but in fact I'm well aware of my limitations.
The truth is, it's not all that easy living with so many books. They sit on your shelves and stare at you, wanting your attention. You look at a book you decided to keep when it came in for review and you wonder, what happened to the great interest I once had in this subject? and you realize, the interest has faded. Or it's there, dormant, but you don't have time for it now. And it's not just the time reading takes. I sometimes pick a book off my shelf to read and find that I've already read it; the margins are pockmarked with my notes. Yet I have no memory of what's in the book, and I don't remember when I might have read it. Are the filing cabinets in my brain full? Can nothing more be jammed in there? And books do take so much time. In the midst of life, bedeviled by errands, meals, friendship, sleep, movies and TV, parties, gardening, and the endless task of straightening up the house, it might take months to read a really long book. It took months to read Richard Holmes's The Age of Wonder, which I loved; but it was a really long book, I had to fit it in to my other work, and into my life, and it took months. Who has months? Sometimes I think I should have just one book, or a few. Three hundred years ago most people had a Bible, and not much else. Maybe a Book of Common Prayer, or an almanac. They would know those books extremely well, I imagine. Whereas I know a great many books, none of them well at all. If I had to confine myself to a hundred books out of my library, which ones would I choose? Probably they would all be classics, books that the experience of centuries of readers has certified as what lasts. But think of the difficulty of so drastically refurnishing one's mind! I might be too old to do it. The fox knows many things, as Tolstoy said, but the hedgehog knows one big thing. Well, I'm a fox by nature. I can't be content to know just one thing well; I have to know a great many things, if only superficially.
I've had two significant dreams about books in my life. In one, I came upon a large tower of books, a four-sided bookcase three feet taller than myself, and all the books in it were bound in leather, they were eighteenth-century books, and they were mine. But they were ruinous. Water damage, fire, something had ruined them. In the second, a similar event: upstairs on the third floor of my dacha was my library, low bookshelves under the windows on all floor walls of the room. They were all in Russian. But the roof was open to the sky and the books were soggy, unreadable, papier mache. I have no idea whether these dreams about books have any significance. But they were deeply disturbing, and I have not forgotten them.
And at the back of my mind, Socrates, who professed to know nothing, and was always asking his pupils for instruction and then reasoning with them to show them that they, too, did not know what they thought they knew. That's one reason, perhaps, why history attracts me--at least it's over. It's not still happening. It's fixed. But of course it is still happening; history drives through us like, to mangle Dylan Thomas's line, the flower drives through its green fuse. We are the fruit of all the centuries before us, and what those centuries were, what they meant, is not revealed until we come along, and understand it at last. And, obviously, this is a continuous process. So, Socrates: there is no solid knowledge. We drift about on a sea of uncertainty, and for the most part this sea is far too deep for any anchor to find bottom. I could read all 7,000 books in the house and I would not be any closer to wisdom.
Well, maybe a little.
Our front porch is enclosed and semi-heated, although it faces northwest and nothing facing northwest, which is where Canadian cold fronts come from, is ever going to be really warm here except in summer; but it doesn't matter, we don't use it anyway even though I have a large desk there. I actually work upstairs. The large desk mostly holds the bills. And the room itself holds books. When people walk in through our front door they pass through this room, and it is not uncommon for them to say, I love this room, or words to that effect. They have a vision of themselves taking a year off and finding a nice chair someplace and burrowing through the books to their hearts' content, nothing to stop them from reading and reading, and reading some more.
I had lunch with my friend Ken Robbins today and he told me about somebody he knows, or knows of, whom he calls a "peripatetic reader." This is a person who reads while he walks, holding a book in front of his face as he ambles down the street or across the room; he reads, he says, up to 18 hours a day, and at the same time manages to navigate the world. Remarkable. As a result, says Ken, he's incredibly erudite. I also would sometimes like to be incredibly erudite, drop appropriate quotations into conversation, add facts to arguments that completely destroy one position or maybe its opposite, call in examples from Darwin or refer to Shroedinger's cat while discussing Keats: dazzle, in short. I've never been particularly dazzling. Not aggressive enough, too unsure of my ground. My trouble is that I never think I know enough. I have all these books, 7,000 of them, but I don't pretend to know all that much. Well, OK--sometimes I do pretend, but in fact I'm well aware of my limitations.
The truth is, it's not all that easy living with so many books. They sit on your shelves and stare at you, wanting your attention. You look at a book you decided to keep when it came in for review and you wonder, what happened to the great interest I once had in this subject? and you realize, the interest has faded. Or it's there, dormant, but you don't have time for it now. And it's not just the time reading takes. I sometimes pick a book off my shelf to read and find that I've already read it; the margins are pockmarked with my notes. Yet I have no memory of what's in the book, and I don't remember when I might have read it. Are the filing cabinets in my brain full? Can nothing more be jammed in there? And books do take so much time. In the midst of life, bedeviled by errands, meals, friendship, sleep, movies and TV, parties, gardening, and the endless task of straightening up the house, it might take months to read a really long book. It took months to read Richard Holmes's The Age of Wonder, which I loved; but it was a really long book, I had to fit it in to my other work, and into my life, and it took months. Who has months? Sometimes I think I should have just one book, or a few. Three hundred years ago most people had a Bible, and not much else. Maybe a Book of Common Prayer, or an almanac. They would know those books extremely well, I imagine. Whereas I know a great many books, none of them well at all. If I had to confine myself to a hundred books out of my library, which ones would I choose? Probably they would all be classics, books that the experience of centuries of readers has certified as what lasts. But think of the difficulty of so drastically refurnishing one's mind! I might be too old to do it. The fox knows many things, as Tolstoy said, but the hedgehog knows one big thing. Well, I'm a fox by nature. I can't be content to know just one thing well; I have to know a great many things, if only superficially.
I've had two significant dreams about books in my life. In one, I came upon a large tower of books, a four-sided bookcase three feet taller than myself, and all the books in it were bound in leather, they were eighteenth-century books, and they were mine. But they were ruinous. Water damage, fire, something had ruined them. In the second, a similar event: upstairs on the third floor of my dacha was my library, low bookshelves under the windows on all floor walls of the room. They were all in Russian. But the roof was open to the sky and the books were soggy, unreadable, papier mache. I have no idea whether these dreams about books have any significance. But they were deeply disturbing, and I have not forgotten them.
And at the back of my mind, Socrates, who professed to know nothing, and was always asking his pupils for instruction and then reasoning with them to show them that they, too, did not know what they thought they knew. That's one reason, perhaps, why history attracts me--at least it's over. It's not still happening. It's fixed. But of course it is still happening; history drives through us like, to mangle Dylan Thomas's line, the flower drives through its green fuse. We are the fruit of all the centuries before us, and what those centuries were, what they meant, is not revealed until we come along, and understand it at last. And, obviously, this is a continuous process. So, Socrates: there is no solid knowledge. We drift about on a sea of uncertainty, and for the most part this sea is far too deep for any anchor to find bottom. I could read all 7,000 books in the house and I would not be any closer to wisdom.
Well, maybe a little.
Tuesday, December 7, 2010
THIRTY OR FORTY YEARS, AND A DAY
December 7, 2010:
I woke up at five-thirty this morning from a dream in which somebody was pounding on the door, or the floor, and could not go back to sleep. Yesterday's blog entry--that poem--I knew something was wrong. You always know something is wrong. I can't tell you how many versions of it I've been through, lengthening the list, shortening it, trying to find out what it needed. It needed something. Even when I had posted it yesterday I kept going back to it, changing a word, two words, but focusing on the last line. It was the last line that really bothered me. It was weak, didn't quite convey what I wanted, which was that sense at night when you hear the trains in the distance, as I used to do when I was a child, and you can't sleep, that sense of distance, of things passing away and passing you by, of loss and loneliness; and all that was congruent with the mood of the poem and I thought it was just a matter of finding the right combination that suggested that. But it didn't feel right. It felt clumsy and obvious.
So here I am, fresh from my own sleeplessness, after struggling with this and trying to doze off and failing, with the newest version. I can't promise that I'm done with it, but this one is better, I think, and it tells us more about this person and how much he's holding inside; and maybe it even says something about pain. I don't know. You tell me.
THE INVENTORY
Sunlight folded into the window curtains.
The five doors out of the house, the seventeen inside.
A cherry side table we both wanted once.
Your translation of Proust, and mine.
The wall clock in the kitchen, still ticking.
The wedding photograph in its Tiffany frame.
Lamplight and solitude in the long evening.
Train whistles screaming through the night.
Let me add that my mother had an old cherry side table, and my brother took it into his house when she died. It was a beautiful table. The doors into the house are now "out of the house," the connotation being that the house is, in a sense, a trap; and why five? I once lived in a big old house that had five such doors, during my first marriage. It also had more than sixty windows. Poems are made of these bits and pieces, personal and impersonal. We've all seen wedding photos in Tiffany frames, but I've never owned one. Wall clocks always work, don't they, and go on working, and time always passes.
But I say too much. I like this version better, and it's now after eight, and I can forget about this poem for a while. Until I see something in it, at any rate, that shouldn't be there, or something else that should. I'll let you know if that happens.
I woke up at five-thirty this morning from a dream in which somebody was pounding on the door, or the floor, and could not go back to sleep. Yesterday's blog entry--that poem--I knew something was wrong. You always know something is wrong. I can't tell you how many versions of it I've been through, lengthening the list, shortening it, trying to find out what it needed. It needed something. Even when I had posted it yesterday I kept going back to it, changing a word, two words, but focusing on the last line. It was the last line that really bothered me. It was weak, didn't quite convey what I wanted, which was that sense at night when you hear the trains in the distance, as I used to do when I was a child, and you can't sleep, that sense of distance, of things passing away and passing you by, of loss and loneliness; and all that was congruent with the mood of the poem and I thought it was just a matter of finding the right combination that suggested that. But it didn't feel right. It felt clumsy and obvious.
So here I am, fresh from my own sleeplessness, after struggling with this and trying to doze off and failing, with the newest version. I can't promise that I'm done with it, but this one is better, I think, and it tells us more about this person and how much he's holding inside; and maybe it even says something about pain. I don't know. You tell me.
THE INVENTORY
Sunlight folded into the window curtains.
The five doors out of the house, the seventeen inside.
A cherry side table we both wanted once.
Your translation of Proust, and mine.
The wall clock in the kitchen, still ticking.
The wedding photograph in its Tiffany frame.
Lamplight and solitude in the long evening.
Train whistles screaming through the night.
Let me add that my mother had an old cherry side table, and my brother took it into his house when she died. It was a beautiful table. The doors into the house are now "out of the house," the connotation being that the house is, in a sense, a trap; and why five? I once lived in a big old house that had five such doors, during my first marriage. It also had more than sixty windows. Poems are made of these bits and pieces, personal and impersonal. We've all seen wedding photos in Tiffany frames, but I've never owned one. Wall clocks always work, don't they, and go on working, and time always passes.
But I say too much. I like this version better, and it's now after eight, and I can forget about this poem for a while. Until I see something in it, at any rate, that shouldn't be there, or something else that should. I'll let you know if that happens.
Monday, December 6, 2010
HOW LONG DOES IT TAKE TO WRITE A POEM?
December 6, 2010:
I sent four of my poems to TLS (the Times Literary Supplement) on Saturday. I wrote them all many years ago, when I still had ambitions to be a published poet. At the time I had no reason to think I couldn't be a published poet; TLS had taken a poem of mine at that time, and shortly after several other publications took poems. The late Ian Hamilton was the poetry editor of TLS then, my college friend Michael Fried was Hamilton's friend and living in England as a Rhodes Scholar, he recommended the poem to Hamilton, and voila! there I was, in print. TLS was the first publication to pay me for something I had written; ultimately a check came for $7.63, or something close to that--three pounds in English money. The poem ran right above a review of one of Norman Mailer's books.
But in the end I was not moved to pursue poetry as a career path. I had always wanted to be a writer, but not necessarily a poet; I wrote poems mostly because I had no time to do anything else. I was working full-time, I was married, I had children, I commuted back and forth to the city, and the work I was doing involved writing. Under those circumstances, writing anything more ambitious than a poem was more or less out of the question. So that's what I did, write poems, working in the little spare time I had, and learning in the process how to bring a piece of writing to an end. In lyric poems, the end is everything; if you can do endings you have taken a very big step in learning how to write.
Poetry as a career path, however, was something else. Just about nobody makes a living at it. In those days, and even more so today, to survive as a poet you either had to teach, like almost every poet then and now who didn't have an independent income, or you had to have another job. Wallace Stevens, insurance lawyer. William Carlos Williams, doctor. John Ashbery, art critic and editor at Art News. I disliked teaching and wasn't very good at it, so that was out. I could have gone on with poetry after the peculiar writing job I had came to an end--I was a wealthy businessman's personal historian; when he died, so did the job; but he left me and his other personal employees seven years salary, tax-free, as a parting gift--since I then had a bit of money. But the money wasn't going to last all that long, and then what? Another job? Try teaching again? No thanks. It wasn't only the lack of an income, it was a certain amount of distaste for what a poetry career involved, especially the nasty competitiveness that was part of it, too many ambitious people striving for too few rewards. I wasn't that ambitious. I knew I was good, but I didn't think I could be great. I still wrote poems from time to time, but getting them into print no longer seemed that important. I wrote them for myself, for my own pleasure, and as a form of verbal play. When a line came to me, I pursued it. Many of them emerged from pain. Poetry is one of the great clarifiers when it comes to pain.
Ultimately I wound up with about twenty, maybe twenty-five unpublished poems that I liked well enough to keep in my files, and in the past couple of years I've been looking at them again and fiddling with them. And it's interesting: the original feelings that led to these poems have softened, if not entirely dissolved, and I can see their faults much more clearly. With that has come the insight necessary to find ways to make those faults go away. They are now much better poems than they were originally. Michael Fried and Thomas Carnicelli, who was our official "class poet" and I, all of us trying to write poems at the time, used to talk in college about the poem as a made object, a verbal artifact, and we all knew that what we were writing didn't have much to do with what bad poets think of as "self-expression." We were trying to make art. Our feelings had little to do with it, they were merely the occasion, the spark that kindled the process of making. And that process is fascinating, both to pursue and to watch oneself pursue. It's a little like doing a crossword puzzle, but much more intense and much more difficult, and you find yourself wondering every time, can you do it? Can you find the right word, the turn of phrase, the gut punch at the end that doubles your reader over with its power? And because I have no attachment to publication, though that would be nice, or to a career as a poet, the whole thing has a purity about it that I really like. So I'm back to it.
How long does it take, then, to write a poem? Sometimes thirty or forty years. I remember reading Rilke on this, in his Letters to a Young Poet, where he talks about the poem working its way into your blood; not until then, he said, should you write. Or Alexander Pope, who advised the wannabes who sent him poems to read to put them in a drawer and lock that drawer and not open it for a year or two. I speak from experience; it's good advice.
I have no idea whether TLS will take these poems, and it doesn't matter. I'd like to see them in print, but I'll be happy to have written them even if they never see the light of day. They're good, I know that, and I'm satisfied with them, and I'll send copies to my friends who read poetry, or write it, and let it go at that. Or maybe to the handful of people who follow this blog.
Here's one of those poems:
THE INVENTORY
Sunlight folded into the window curtains.
The five doors into the house, the seventeen inside.
A cherry table we both wanted once.
Your translation of Proust, and mine.
The wall clock in the kitchen, still ticking.
The wedding photograph in its Tiffany frame.
Lamplight and solitude in the long evening.
Train whistles at night, with their associations.
I sent four of my poems to TLS (the Times Literary Supplement) on Saturday. I wrote them all many years ago, when I still had ambitions to be a published poet. At the time I had no reason to think I couldn't be a published poet; TLS had taken a poem of mine at that time, and shortly after several other publications took poems. The late Ian Hamilton was the poetry editor of TLS then, my college friend Michael Fried was Hamilton's friend and living in England as a Rhodes Scholar, he recommended the poem to Hamilton, and voila! there I was, in print. TLS was the first publication to pay me for something I had written; ultimately a check came for $7.63, or something close to that--three pounds in English money. The poem ran right above a review of one of Norman Mailer's books.
But in the end I was not moved to pursue poetry as a career path. I had always wanted to be a writer, but not necessarily a poet; I wrote poems mostly because I had no time to do anything else. I was working full-time, I was married, I had children, I commuted back and forth to the city, and the work I was doing involved writing. Under those circumstances, writing anything more ambitious than a poem was more or less out of the question. So that's what I did, write poems, working in the little spare time I had, and learning in the process how to bring a piece of writing to an end. In lyric poems, the end is everything; if you can do endings you have taken a very big step in learning how to write.
Poetry as a career path, however, was something else. Just about nobody makes a living at it. In those days, and even more so today, to survive as a poet you either had to teach, like almost every poet then and now who didn't have an independent income, or you had to have another job. Wallace Stevens, insurance lawyer. William Carlos Williams, doctor. John Ashbery, art critic and editor at Art News. I disliked teaching and wasn't very good at it, so that was out. I could have gone on with poetry after the peculiar writing job I had came to an end--I was a wealthy businessman's personal historian; when he died, so did the job; but he left me and his other personal employees seven years salary, tax-free, as a parting gift--since I then had a bit of money. But the money wasn't going to last all that long, and then what? Another job? Try teaching again? No thanks. It wasn't only the lack of an income, it was a certain amount of distaste for what a poetry career involved, especially the nasty competitiveness that was part of it, too many ambitious people striving for too few rewards. I wasn't that ambitious. I knew I was good, but I didn't think I could be great. I still wrote poems from time to time, but getting them into print no longer seemed that important. I wrote them for myself, for my own pleasure, and as a form of verbal play. When a line came to me, I pursued it. Many of them emerged from pain. Poetry is one of the great clarifiers when it comes to pain.
Ultimately I wound up with about twenty, maybe twenty-five unpublished poems that I liked well enough to keep in my files, and in the past couple of years I've been looking at them again and fiddling with them. And it's interesting: the original feelings that led to these poems have softened, if not entirely dissolved, and I can see their faults much more clearly. With that has come the insight necessary to find ways to make those faults go away. They are now much better poems than they were originally. Michael Fried and Thomas Carnicelli, who was our official "class poet" and I, all of us trying to write poems at the time, used to talk in college about the poem as a made object, a verbal artifact, and we all knew that what we were writing didn't have much to do with what bad poets think of as "self-expression." We were trying to make art. Our feelings had little to do with it, they were merely the occasion, the spark that kindled the process of making. And that process is fascinating, both to pursue and to watch oneself pursue. It's a little like doing a crossword puzzle, but much more intense and much more difficult, and you find yourself wondering every time, can you do it? Can you find the right word, the turn of phrase, the gut punch at the end that doubles your reader over with its power? And because I have no attachment to publication, though that would be nice, or to a career as a poet, the whole thing has a purity about it that I really like. So I'm back to it.
How long does it take, then, to write a poem? Sometimes thirty or forty years. I remember reading Rilke on this, in his Letters to a Young Poet, where he talks about the poem working its way into your blood; not until then, he said, should you write. Or Alexander Pope, who advised the wannabes who sent him poems to read to put them in a drawer and lock that drawer and not open it for a year or two. I speak from experience; it's good advice.
I have no idea whether TLS will take these poems, and it doesn't matter. I'd like to see them in print, but I'll be happy to have written them even if they never see the light of day. They're good, I know that, and I'm satisfied with them, and I'll send copies to my friends who read poetry, or write it, and let it go at that. Or maybe to the handful of people who follow this blog.
Here's one of those poems:
THE INVENTORY
Sunlight folded into the window curtains.
The five doors into the house, the seventeen inside.
A cherry table we both wanted once.
Your translation of Proust, and mine.
The wall clock in the kitchen, still ticking.
The wedding photograph in its Tiffany frame.
Lamplight and solitude in the long evening.
Train whistles at night, with their associations.
Wednesday, November 10, 2010
A MODEST PROPOSAL
I read recently that Rand Paul and other Tea Party members newly elected to Congress want to return to a literal reading of the Constitution and eliminate a number of Federal departments and functions: Education, I believe, is one; Housing and Urban Development another. There must be more, but I can't keep up.
At first I was alarmed. It's going to be hard enough losing NPR, public television, and school lunches, which I'm sure are on their list. But then I sat back and thought about it for a while, and came to the conclusion that they weren't nearly ambitious enough. When I was putting together my edition of the Lewis and Clark journals I read up on the Louisiana Purchase, and learned all about Thomas Jefferson's struggle with his own conscience about the Constitution and its interpretation when Napoleon offered him the Louisiana Territory. Jefferson could not find the authority anywhere in the Constitution for him to buy the Territory, and he didn't have time to go to Congress and obtain that authority because Napoleon wanted a decision, and the money, right away, so he could resume his war with Great Britain. Jefferson made the purchase, but suffered a great deal of anguish in the process. He did indeed violate the Constitution, which nowhere gives a President the right to buy land and double the size of the country. Don't think the country was thrilled by it, either. Whole sections, especially in New England, objected to it. As they saw it, Jefferson had overstepped his authority, and the move must inevitably diminish their own power as population and opportunity shifted west.
Now the Tea Party seems to have the balance of power; therefore now, if ever, we have a chance to redress the wrong Jefferson did to the Constitution. I suggest that we offer to sell all that land back to France. I'm quite serious about this. I can see all kinds of benefits.
A/ We could sell it back at the same price, but with interest. The money must come to several billions by now, and we could put that toward reducing the national deficit.
B/ The move would immediately save us billions as well in the agricultural subsidies we now pay to farmers in what would become, once more, French territory. I haven't looked closely at a map, but I believe that would encompass all of Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, North and South Dakota, Montana, Colorado--all the lands, in short, drained by the Missouri River. Plus Louisiana, Arkansas, and the City of New Orleans. Just think of it: next time a hurricane blows into New Orleans and drowns it, the problem wouldn't be ours. Nor would Midwest droughts. The French are famous for subsidizing their own farmers, and protecting their interests with high tariffs on imported farm goods; they've been doing that since Jefferson's time.
C/ By eliminating so much of the so-called Heartland, the sale would move the location of the "real" America and "real" Americans, with their "real" values, which appear to have relocated to the Midwest sometime in the nineteenth century, much closer to the East Coast again, making those of us who live there feel authentically American again.
D/ It would move French influence, French culture, French educational savoir, not to mention French food, much closer to us, with results that could only be beneficial. French schools, for example, are rigorous about spelling. There would be no more embarrassment about the signs that show up at Tea Party rallies, which must inevitably raise difficult questions about the intelligence and sophistication of Tea Party members.
E/ Closer means easier to reach. It would take a while for French cities to spring up in Kansas or South Dakota, but I can foresee a future in which Americans, who would now all be living east of the Mississippi or West of the Rockies, would find a place like Des Moines very attractive, if only for its three- or even four-star restaurants. Turn a French chef loose on a good Midwestern steak and who knows what new levels of culinary pleasure might emerge.
F/ And the French are known for not being obese, even though they eat so well, and so much cheese. Again, it might take a while, but surely French influence would work miracles on the current level of obesity, and all the costs associated with it, now found in the Midwest. And speaking of health, I'm sure the Midwest, instead of losing population, would gain; people would emigrate just to get in under the French health care system, one of the world's best.
G/ Last but not least, millions of the residents of this territory would learn French. It's an elegant language, an advantage in itself, but more than that it has been known ever since the Enlightenment as the language of Reason (yes, with a capital R). These new French citizens would be encouraged to read the Enlightenment philosophers, up to and including Jefferson himself, and learn something about the principles on which the United States of America, their former homeland, was founded.
But overriding all these considerations, however beneficial, is the fact that the move would correct one of the major historical errors in American history and return the Constitution to its proper place as the sole source, the only guide, by which the country can be governed. Not only would this return us to a state of absolute purity, it would make the current members of the Supreme Court supremely happy.
At first I was alarmed. It's going to be hard enough losing NPR, public television, and school lunches, which I'm sure are on their list. But then I sat back and thought about it for a while, and came to the conclusion that they weren't nearly ambitious enough. When I was putting together my edition of the Lewis and Clark journals I read up on the Louisiana Purchase, and learned all about Thomas Jefferson's struggle with his own conscience about the Constitution and its interpretation when Napoleon offered him the Louisiana Territory. Jefferson could not find the authority anywhere in the Constitution for him to buy the Territory, and he didn't have time to go to Congress and obtain that authority because Napoleon wanted a decision, and the money, right away, so he could resume his war with Great Britain. Jefferson made the purchase, but suffered a great deal of anguish in the process. He did indeed violate the Constitution, which nowhere gives a President the right to buy land and double the size of the country. Don't think the country was thrilled by it, either. Whole sections, especially in New England, objected to it. As they saw it, Jefferson had overstepped his authority, and the move must inevitably diminish their own power as population and opportunity shifted west.
Now the Tea Party seems to have the balance of power; therefore now, if ever, we have a chance to redress the wrong Jefferson did to the Constitution. I suggest that we offer to sell all that land back to France. I'm quite serious about this. I can see all kinds of benefits.
A/ We could sell it back at the same price, but with interest. The money must come to several billions by now, and we could put that toward reducing the national deficit.
B/ The move would immediately save us billions as well in the agricultural subsidies we now pay to farmers in what would become, once more, French territory. I haven't looked closely at a map, but I believe that would encompass all of Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, North and South Dakota, Montana, Colorado--all the lands, in short, drained by the Missouri River. Plus Louisiana, Arkansas, and the City of New Orleans. Just think of it: next time a hurricane blows into New Orleans and drowns it, the problem wouldn't be ours. Nor would Midwest droughts. The French are famous for subsidizing their own farmers, and protecting their interests with high tariffs on imported farm goods; they've been doing that since Jefferson's time.
C/ By eliminating so much of the so-called Heartland, the sale would move the location of the "real" America and "real" Americans, with their "real" values, which appear to have relocated to the Midwest sometime in the nineteenth century, much closer to the East Coast again, making those of us who live there feel authentically American again.
D/ It would move French influence, French culture, French educational savoir, not to mention French food, much closer to us, with results that could only be beneficial. French schools, for example, are rigorous about spelling. There would be no more embarrassment about the signs that show up at Tea Party rallies, which must inevitably raise difficult questions about the intelligence and sophistication of Tea Party members.
E/ Closer means easier to reach. It would take a while for French cities to spring up in Kansas or South Dakota, but I can foresee a future in which Americans, who would now all be living east of the Mississippi or West of the Rockies, would find a place like Des Moines very attractive, if only for its three- or even four-star restaurants. Turn a French chef loose on a good Midwestern steak and who knows what new levels of culinary pleasure might emerge.
F/ And the French are known for not being obese, even though they eat so well, and so much cheese. Again, it might take a while, but surely French influence would work miracles on the current level of obesity, and all the costs associated with it, now found in the Midwest. And speaking of health, I'm sure the Midwest, instead of losing population, would gain; people would emigrate just to get in under the French health care system, one of the world's best.
G/ Last but not least, millions of the residents of this territory would learn French. It's an elegant language, an advantage in itself, but more than that it has been known ever since the Enlightenment as the language of Reason (yes, with a capital R). These new French citizens would be encouraged to read the Enlightenment philosophers, up to and including Jefferson himself, and learn something about the principles on which the United States of America, their former homeland, was founded.
But overriding all these considerations, however beneficial, is the fact that the move would correct one of the major historical errors in American history and return the Constitution to its proper place as the sole source, the only guide, by which the country can be governed. Not only would this return us to a state of absolute purity, it would make the current members of the Supreme Court supremely happy.
Friday, November 5, 2010
1968
I've been reading Jules Witcover's book about 1968 and it has brought it all back, not just the turmoil in the nation but my own pesonal turmoil. That was the year my first wife and I bought our big old house in Shrub Oak, the year I almost left her and did, actually, stay away a couple of nights, and... well, not a good year. Mid-life crisis? Hardly; I was only 31 years old. The mid-life crisis came later. But otherwise, out there in the world, a huge crisis. The protests against the war in Vietnam were getting bigger and bigger, blacks were continuing to march, demanding a chance to live the life the rest of us took for granted, the pressure on Lyndon Johnson to end the war was growing unbearable, finally forcing him out of the race for the Presidency, and then the assassinations: first Martin Luther King, Jr., then Robert Kennedy. Unrest on a scale not seen in this country since the Civil War.
If you look at a crisis as a teaching tool, however, you can learn a lot from it. I had grown up as part of the Silent Generation, so dubbed in Life magazine, I think it was, or maybe in Time, because we didn't speak out about much of anything and stayed out of politics. But there wasn't much to speak out about. Our elders had invented and used atomic weapons, we were raised to dive under our school desks when the sirens went off, and when the Beats came along most of us watched from a distance. I was a child during World War II. My brother and I read the papers, two of them in the house every day, and thus at an impressionable age learned something about the world and what kind of place it was, and what human beings were capable of. In college I went by myself to see the famous Holocaust documentary Night and Fog and there were the piles of human skin destined for lampshades, the living skeletons in the camps and the horror, all of it sickening beyond belief. I think we all collectively concluded that the private life was best. Human beings are irredeemable. We retreated into ourselves.
Then the Sixties came and we watched the draft age kids march and riot and occupy university buildings and demand change and reform and freedom. Freedom, the old cry. And I, for one, thought, what is this? Freedom? In this country we're all pretty much free already. At bottom, I believed, what they wanted was to be free of the draft. And I was right. When the draft ended, so did the marches and the protests. The war went on, but the Sixties and all they supposedly meant were over. The net result of the Sixties was Sixties style, blue jeans, a whole new kind of music, and the nostalgia for those things that crops up in revivals like Hair. Otherwise little had happened in this country. Our politics was the same. No significant portion of the population retreated to countryside communes. It was all about the draft. After the Sixties came the Me Decade. I wrote about this for GQ in the late '80s, and made enemies among the editors; but they printed the piece. We do not live in a revolutionary country. We live in a rather staid, commercially minded, conservative country where most citizens just want to make money--as much as they can. The rest is relatively superficial.
So it remains today. I try to tell my liberal friends, hey, guys, we live on the East Coast among our kind and the rest of the country is different. The novelist and poet Jim Harrison calls New York and the West Coast the "dream coasts." In between, the "real" America. It's actually no more "real" than the dream coasts, but it is definitely different, another country, really, and it is a miracle we've stayed one country for so long. Right now things look very bad for liberals, and I am one, but I think in the long term not much will change. What will the result of this election be? Stalemate. Gridlock. The sentiments of the country will remain deeply divided, the human chain saws on the cable channels will rev up and do their absolute best to make as much noise as possible, and volcanoes will continue to erupt and floods come and the news will be dire.
But hey: they've got nothing on the Nazis. Injustice of all kinds is prevalent and the people are ignorant and delusional, but that's always been the case, here and everywhere. It's contentious, but so far it's not killing, and we've been relatively lucky: no recent assassinations.. And yes, there's Abu Ghraib, but even there they didn't make lampshades out of human skin. We should all calm down. My brother was a Republican all his life and you couldn't walk into his house without Fox News being on the tube, but I loved him anyway. His kids are mostly Republicans, I suspect, but I love them, too. And with luck the economy will improve and Obama will wise up, having learned lessons from this particular crisis of his own, and next time things will go better for those who believe that it is possible to bring a little more justice into the world, even though this world is pretty much out of anybody's control.
If you look at a crisis as a teaching tool, however, you can learn a lot from it. I had grown up as part of the Silent Generation, so dubbed in Life magazine, I think it was, or maybe in Time, because we didn't speak out about much of anything and stayed out of politics. But there wasn't much to speak out about. Our elders had invented and used atomic weapons, we were raised to dive under our school desks when the sirens went off, and when the Beats came along most of us watched from a distance. I was a child during World War II. My brother and I read the papers, two of them in the house every day, and thus at an impressionable age learned something about the world and what kind of place it was, and what human beings were capable of. In college I went by myself to see the famous Holocaust documentary Night and Fog and there were the piles of human skin destined for lampshades, the living skeletons in the camps and the horror, all of it sickening beyond belief. I think we all collectively concluded that the private life was best. Human beings are irredeemable. We retreated into ourselves.
Then the Sixties came and we watched the draft age kids march and riot and occupy university buildings and demand change and reform and freedom. Freedom, the old cry. And I, for one, thought, what is this? Freedom? In this country we're all pretty much free already. At bottom, I believed, what they wanted was to be free of the draft. And I was right. When the draft ended, so did the marches and the protests. The war went on, but the Sixties and all they supposedly meant were over. The net result of the Sixties was Sixties style, blue jeans, a whole new kind of music, and the nostalgia for those things that crops up in revivals like Hair. Otherwise little had happened in this country. Our politics was the same. No significant portion of the population retreated to countryside communes. It was all about the draft. After the Sixties came the Me Decade. I wrote about this for GQ in the late '80s, and made enemies among the editors; but they printed the piece. We do not live in a revolutionary country. We live in a rather staid, commercially minded, conservative country where most citizens just want to make money--as much as they can. The rest is relatively superficial.
So it remains today. I try to tell my liberal friends, hey, guys, we live on the East Coast among our kind and the rest of the country is different. The novelist and poet Jim Harrison calls New York and the West Coast the "dream coasts." In between, the "real" America. It's actually no more "real" than the dream coasts, but it is definitely different, another country, really, and it is a miracle we've stayed one country for so long. Right now things look very bad for liberals, and I am one, but I think in the long term not much will change. What will the result of this election be? Stalemate. Gridlock. The sentiments of the country will remain deeply divided, the human chain saws on the cable channels will rev up and do their absolute best to make as much noise as possible, and volcanoes will continue to erupt and floods come and the news will be dire.
But hey: they've got nothing on the Nazis. Injustice of all kinds is prevalent and the people are ignorant and delusional, but that's always been the case, here and everywhere. It's contentious, but so far it's not killing, and we've been relatively lucky: no recent assassinations.. And yes, there's Abu Ghraib, but even there they didn't make lampshades out of human skin. We should all calm down. My brother was a Republican all his life and you couldn't walk into his house without Fox News being on the tube, but I loved him anyway. His kids are mostly Republicans, I suspect, but I love them, too. And with luck the economy will improve and Obama will wise up, having learned lessons from this particular crisis of his own, and next time things will go better for those who believe that it is possible to bring a little more justice into the world, even though this world is pretty much out of anybody's control.
Monday, October 25, 2010
MISSING OUT
I've made a kind of joke out of missing the sexual revolution in the 1960s. I was married in 1958, the marriage lasted eighteen years, those eighteen years ran right through the sexual revolution, and I did my best to stay faithful and save my marriage, because two people were seldom as different as my first wife and me and if I had been unfaithful we wouldn't have stood a chance. As it was I did fall miserably in love with somebody halfway through, and suffered for it for at least a year. But we had kids.
Still, all around me men and women were getting laid at a great rate, and my friend Bart and I used to get together once in a while and lament our bad fortune at missing it. To miss it was to miss out on the times, the zeitgeist, as if life was passing one by. I felt as if I were standing on the river bank and everybody else was midstream, bouncing up and down on their wild ride through the rapids. They, of course, were laughing. I was biting my lips. Isn't it important to be part of one's times, to get on the horse, to participate in history, live life as fully as possible?
Actually that's an interesting question, and I don't know the answer to it. Would Emily Dickinson have done better if she left her house once in a while, joined the Lady's Village Improvement Society, sang solos in church, had an affair? Henry James had an extremely social life but apparently never had sex with a woman, and probably not with a man, either, although it seems likely he was gay. But it doesn't seem to have kept him from understanding a great deal about human beings. I read most of the first volume of his collected letters a few years ago and found out that, a, he suffered from severe constipation, b, he once attended a dissection in a teaching hospital in Europe and watched as they took a dead body apart, c, he walked over the Alps, Switzerland to Italy, and then down into the Italian valleys, and d, he fell into a kind of ecstasy as he walked around Rome for the first time and wound up living in Rome for a grand total of four years off and on during his life. There are those who think he could have used a good lay, but I'm not one of them.
Sex, drugs, and rock and roll--basically, I missed them all. Born too soon, I suppose. Rock and roll I'm not in the least sorry about. I love the Beatles but can't stand heavy metal or the Rolling Stones or the loudness of the whole business. The loudness is just noise, and it barely has structure for me and no appeal at all. Once Lorraine and I were in Oregon, we were having dinner with a friend of mine, Jody Proctor, and his wife Kit Sibert, and also with the drummer for the Blues Travelers, a well-known rock group; the drummer was engaged to Jody's daughter and after dinner we would all go to an auditorium where the Blues Travelers would be giving a concert. Before we left Jody gave us ear plugs. We never got past the intro band. It was deafening, even with ear plugs. I hated it. I'm a quiet man. We sometimes wind up at dinner parties with shouters, men especially who get a bit drunk and want to dominate the conversation and will shout you down and will not listen, and I just shut up. I won't compete with it. It's not really conversation. Evenings like that are boring and irritating.
But I didn't entirely miss out on drugs. I came to like dope and used it once in a while, although never alone, and although I've never tried cocaine I did try LSD once, and that was one of the most interesting experiences of my life. I was writing my first book at the time, on the mental health system, and wanted to know what a schizophrenic episode felt like from the inside and LSD was supposed to mimic it. My friend John and I drove up to the Catskills and picked up my friend Jody Sibert, Kit Sibert's sister, in Woodstock and we drove to a little cabin on an obscure road somewhere in the western end of the Catskills, a gray day, and went inside and I took a hit of blotter acid and waited, and nothing happened, and then things did start to happen. The room, for one thing, breathed when I breathed. The music of the flies buzzing at the windows organized itself into actual music. We listened to music, John and Jody and I, trying the baroque at first, but it proved, because your mind is moving at incredible speed, to be slow and tedious, so Jody, who stayed sober through it all, put on some Ravi Shankar and that, it turned out, was the actual music of the gods; and I thought most deeply, because that's what I did, I thought, as I say at great speed, about what had brought me there, all the twists and turns, parents, grandparents, great-grandparents taking this road instead of that, making an endless series of choices any one of which could have eliminated all chance of me being there that day; and it was as if the whole thing had been designed, all those choices, all life to that point, to bring me there to discover how infinitely complex it is, this tapestry the gods weave us into. Then I hallucinated our guardians, three spirits in human form standing about a foot off the ground, very shadowy, talking with each other; and at one point Jody bent down over me and said, whatever you're thinking right now, that's the way it is, and I had precisely at that point been thinking, whatever I'm thinking right now, that's the way it is. And this went on for hours. Toward the end we went outdoors into the misty rain and I looked at the surrounding hills and realized that beyond the horizon we were looking at, the horizon of hills, was nothing, only the potential, only not-yet-time, and that it was somehow our task on this earth to be, and ... well, I don't know. I took a Thorazine to come back down. The high lasted into the next day. I never felt the need to take acid again. Never wanted to. I had understood what I needed to understand.
None of this had any relationship to mental illness, as it happens. The book was a disaster, sold fewer than 5,000 copies, I got sued for libel for a case I described in which a child died, that cost me $45,000 in legal fees, the only consolation being that I not only won the suit, I made law in the state of Kansas. But that's a whole other story.
So here's the question: have I missed anything? Yeah, a whole lot. But maybe it all makes sense in the end.
Still, all around me men and women were getting laid at a great rate, and my friend Bart and I used to get together once in a while and lament our bad fortune at missing it. To miss it was to miss out on the times, the zeitgeist, as if life was passing one by. I felt as if I were standing on the river bank and everybody else was midstream, bouncing up and down on their wild ride through the rapids. They, of course, were laughing. I was biting my lips. Isn't it important to be part of one's times, to get on the horse, to participate in history, live life as fully as possible?
Actually that's an interesting question, and I don't know the answer to it. Would Emily Dickinson have done better if she left her house once in a while, joined the Lady's Village Improvement Society, sang solos in church, had an affair? Henry James had an extremely social life but apparently never had sex with a woman, and probably not with a man, either, although it seems likely he was gay. But it doesn't seem to have kept him from understanding a great deal about human beings. I read most of the first volume of his collected letters a few years ago and found out that, a, he suffered from severe constipation, b, he once attended a dissection in a teaching hospital in Europe and watched as they took a dead body apart, c, he walked over the Alps, Switzerland to Italy, and then down into the Italian valleys, and d, he fell into a kind of ecstasy as he walked around Rome for the first time and wound up living in Rome for a grand total of four years off and on during his life. There are those who think he could have used a good lay, but I'm not one of them.
Sex, drugs, and rock and roll--basically, I missed them all. Born too soon, I suppose. Rock and roll I'm not in the least sorry about. I love the Beatles but can't stand heavy metal or the Rolling Stones or the loudness of the whole business. The loudness is just noise, and it barely has structure for me and no appeal at all. Once Lorraine and I were in Oregon, we were having dinner with a friend of mine, Jody Proctor, and his wife Kit Sibert, and also with the drummer for the Blues Travelers, a well-known rock group; the drummer was engaged to Jody's daughter and after dinner we would all go to an auditorium where the Blues Travelers would be giving a concert. Before we left Jody gave us ear plugs. We never got past the intro band. It was deafening, even with ear plugs. I hated it. I'm a quiet man. We sometimes wind up at dinner parties with shouters, men especially who get a bit drunk and want to dominate the conversation and will shout you down and will not listen, and I just shut up. I won't compete with it. It's not really conversation. Evenings like that are boring and irritating.
But I didn't entirely miss out on drugs. I came to like dope and used it once in a while, although never alone, and although I've never tried cocaine I did try LSD once, and that was one of the most interesting experiences of my life. I was writing my first book at the time, on the mental health system, and wanted to know what a schizophrenic episode felt like from the inside and LSD was supposed to mimic it. My friend John and I drove up to the Catskills and picked up my friend Jody Sibert, Kit Sibert's sister, in Woodstock and we drove to a little cabin on an obscure road somewhere in the western end of the Catskills, a gray day, and went inside and I took a hit of blotter acid and waited, and nothing happened, and then things did start to happen. The room, for one thing, breathed when I breathed. The music of the flies buzzing at the windows organized itself into actual music. We listened to music, John and Jody and I, trying the baroque at first, but it proved, because your mind is moving at incredible speed, to be slow and tedious, so Jody, who stayed sober through it all, put on some Ravi Shankar and that, it turned out, was the actual music of the gods; and I thought most deeply, because that's what I did, I thought, as I say at great speed, about what had brought me there, all the twists and turns, parents, grandparents, great-grandparents taking this road instead of that, making an endless series of choices any one of which could have eliminated all chance of me being there that day; and it was as if the whole thing had been designed, all those choices, all life to that point, to bring me there to discover how infinitely complex it is, this tapestry the gods weave us into. Then I hallucinated our guardians, three spirits in human form standing about a foot off the ground, very shadowy, talking with each other; and at one point Jody bent down over me and said, whatever you're thinking right now, that's the way it is, and I had precisely at that point been thinking, whatever I'm thinking right now, that's the way it is. And this went on for hours. Toward the end we went outdoors into the misty rain and I looked at the surrounding hills and realized that beyond the horizon we were looking at, the horizon of hills, was nothing, only the potential, only not-yet-time, and that it was somehow our task on this earth to be, and ... well, I don't know. I took a Thorazine to come back down. The high lasted into the next day. I never felt the need to take acid again. Never wanted to. I had understood what I needed to understand.
None of this had any relationship to mental illness, as it happens. The book was a disaster, sold fewer than 5,000 copies, I got sued for libel for a case I described in which a child died, that cost me $45,000 in legal fees, the only consolation being that I not only won the suit, I made law in the state of Kansas. But that's a whole other story.
So here's the question: have I missed anything? Yeah, a whole lot. But maybe it all makes sense in the end.
Saturday, October 16, 2010
AMERICA
OCTOBER 16, 2010:
For months now I've been preoccupied, reading, trying to think my way through America past and present so that I can begin my next book, all in the midst of an election campaign dominated by the most remarkable crowd of lunatics and clowns this country has ever seen. The political positions are even more irrational than usual, the candidates a depressing bunch of ideologues and shameless liars, and the Tea Party is simply idiotic. It's one thing not to be able to spell--and they're famous for that--but it's quite another to fantasize that we can all can live in a world that vanished in the 1830s. The people who think there's too much government control, too many regulations, too many taxes, etc., will be the first to scream when the lack of protection wipes out their savings, say, or a bigger than usual pothole takes out their rear axle . Why, after all, should the FDIC--that's the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation--insure our bank deposits at all? Isn't that another unnecessary government program? How about we buy private insurance for our bank deposits? We could go back to private roads, too, like the turnpike that a company of entrepreneurs built between here, in Sag Harbor, and East Hampton in the late 1700s. We could all then pay a fee whenever we decided to drive someplace. We would have toll booths, and toll keepers: jobs! Why should there be air traffic controllers for that matter, or National Institutes of Health, or a Library of Congress? The Tea Party doesn't want to improve the world as it is, make things run better, elect smarter people. They want to pretend the world as it is doesn't exist.
It's hard not to see the country declining. I'm a historian, I'm supposed to put current events into perspective, but if you look at the figures, at what's happening to middle class income, which has been stagnant in real dollars since 1973 and actually in decline the last few years, at the widening gap between the rich and the rest of us, greater than it has been since the 1920s, at a collapsing infrastructure, at the rate of global warming, at educational achievement, which continues to get worse and worse, the decline of the United States of America is impossible to deny. The mood of the country is not positive. Half the population, according to the latest poll, no longer believes in the American dream, no longer thinks they have much of a chance to do better than their parents, no longer gets starry-eyed about the future.
When the country's political life is so debased it becomes a nuisance and a distraction to pay attention to it, yet how does one not? I am reading books about Richard Nixon and the 1960s and 1970s, about the "meaning" of America, and also about the tone the Spanish first set in the Americas in the early sixteenth century, and you can see threads running from the Spanish obsession with gold and, along with it, failed Spanish attempts to set up utopian governments among the Indians, right through to the explosion of corporate greed on Wall Street during the real estate boom and the last hippie communes of the 1970s. It is a struggle, but I'm beginning to see a pattern. But outside my windows the yelling continues. Part of me thinks, well, let the idiots get into office. Maybe it will wake them up. Maybe they'll understand then that governing a country this huge, this diverse, this contrarious and this complex takes more than slogans and ideologies and mini-think. It takes, more than anything else, intelligence. Then compromise. A certain amount of good will, which includes a willingness to listen, and to think outside their little boxes. And a power of persuasion that goes way beyond singing to their own choir.
But it also takes something more. I think it was Walt Whitman who said that great poetry requires a great audience. So in politics: a great government requires a great electorate. Right now, I see no sign of a great electorate in the uninformed, irrational, angry voters of the United States.
For months now I've been preoccupied, reading, trying to think my way through America past and present so that I can begin my next book, all in the midst of an election campaign dominated by the most remarkable crowd of lunatics and clowns this country has ever seen. The political positions are even more irrational than usual, the candidates a depressing bunch of ideologues and shameless liars, and the Tea Party is simply idiotic. It's one thing not to be able to spell--and they're famous for that--but it's quite another to fantasize that we can all can live in a world that vanished in the 1830s. The people who think there's too much government control, too many regulations, too many taxes, etc., will be the first to scream when the lack of protection wipes out their savings, say, or a bigger than usual pothole takes out their rear axle . Why, after all, should the FDIC--that's the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation--insure our bank deposits at all? Isn't that another unnecessary government program? How about we buy private insurance for our bank deposits? We could go back to private roads, too, like the turnpike that a company of entrepreneurs built between here, in Sag Harbor, and East Hampton in the late 1700s. We could all then pay a fee whenever we decided to drive someplace. We would have toll booths, and toll keepers: jobs! Why should there be air traffic controllers for that matter, or National Institutes of Health, or a Library of Congress? The Tea Party doesn't want to improve the world as it is, make things run better, elect smarter people. They want to pretend the world as it is doesn't exist.
It's hard not to see the country declining. I'm a historian, I'm supposed to put current events into perspective, but if you look at the figures, at what's happening to middle class income, which has been stagnant in real dollars since 1973 and actually in decline the last few years, at the widening gap between the rich and the rest of us, greater than it has been since the 1920s, at a collapsing infrastructure, at the rate of global warming, at educational achievement, which continues to get worse and worse, the decline of the United States of America is impossible to deny. The mood of the country is not positive. Half the population, according to the latest poll, no longer believes in the American dream, no longer thinks they have much of a chance to do better than their parents, no longer gets starry-eyed about the future.
When the country's political life is so debased it becomes a nuisance and a distraction to pay attention to it, yet how does one not? I am reading books about Richard Nixon and the 1960s and 1970s, about the "meaning" of America, and also about the tone the Spanish first set in the Americas in the early sixteenth century, and you can see threads running from the Spanish obsession with gold and, along with it, failed Spanish attempts to set up utopian governments among the Indians, right through to the explosion of corporate greed on Wall Street during the real estate boom and the last hippie communes of the 1970s. It is a struggle, but I'm beginning to see a pattern. But outside my windows the yelling continues. Part of me thinks, well, let the idiots get into office. Maybe it will wake them up. Maybe they'll understand then that governing a country this huge, this diverse, this contrarious and this complex takes more than slogans and ideologies and mini-think. It takes, more than anything else, intelligence. Then compromise. A certain amount of good will, which includes a willingness to listen, and to think outside their little boxes. And a power of persuasion that goes way beyond singing to their own choir.
But it also takes something more. I think it was Walt Whitman who said that great poetry requires a great audience. So in politics: a great government requires a great electorate. Right now, I see no sign of a great electorate in the uninformed, irrational, angry voters of the United States.
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