Gotham Diary:
FOMO
4 June 2014
Leafing through The New Yorker yesterday after a chapter of Tante Hannah’s Thinking, I was game for just about anything, so I read Christine Smallwood’s piece about reading stunts in general and Phyllis Rose’s The Shelf: From LEQ to LES.
Rose first gets the idea for “The Shelf” while browsing the stacks of the New York Society Library, on the Upper East Side. Founded in 1754, it is the oldest library in the city, a place where a grandfather clock keeps time and the décor runs to “marble, murals, and mahogany.” (Its patrons have included George Washington, Herman Melville, and Willa Cather, and though the reference room is open to the public, to borrow books you must pay a yearly membership fee of two hundred and twenty-five dollars.) Rose has gone to the library to get the book “Hurricane,” by Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall (of “Mutiny on the Bounty” fame), recommended by friends who were on their own mission to become Nordhoff and Hall completists. But when she finds the book she realizes that she does not want to read it after all. Looking around idly, she sees dozens of Nordhoff and Hall titles, and she has never heard of any of them. “What were the other books like?” she wonders. “Who were all these scribblers whose work filled the shelves? Did they find their lives as writers rewarding? Who reads their work now? Are we missing out?” It is a decidedly contemporary feeling, this FOMO, this fear of missing out. She will conquer it.
The Society Library is a quaint and pleasant place; Kathleen and I belonged for a few years, back in the Eighties. I wandered the stacks a bit myself, but instead of feeling that I was missing out on things, I felt distracted. Already, however, my vocation as a writing reader was taking shape, and even before the appropriate subject matter was clear to me, I knew that I was not going to be the discoverer of forgotten masterpieces. I simply didn’t trust my judgment anymore. I had been so capricious and pigheaded as a young person, exercising my eye for the unusual without any real idea of what was “usual” (except that it must be very dull). This fatuous phase didn’t last long, and it did yield a few valuable nuggets, such as Strauss’ Capriccio (which no one here seemed to have heard of in those days, much less actually heard). But I soon learned how silly I sounded, and also how dangerous it was to wait to run into things.
I’ve been thinking about FOMO ever since I first encountered the acronym, not so very long ago I should think. FOMO is definitely one of the irritations that I have outgrown — or so I tell myself. The only thing that I’m afraid of missing out on is a clearer sense of what’s already in my head, and how it interrelates; in short, I want to understand what I’ve seen and heard. And then I want to make a few persuasive remarks about how I did it.
(When Strether tells little Bilham in Gloriani’s garden, “Live all you can; it’s a mistake not to,” he is not prescribing the composition of a bucket list, but merely warning against falling into a mental routine. It is, after all, in our minds that we truly live — as any hangover will tell you.)
I am no longer worried about missing out on the unknown. This is partly because I have learned where to look — Crawford Doyle’s shopwindows, for instance — for unexpected things that might prove to be interesting — Miklós Bánffy’s Transylvian Trilogy, for example: unsurpassably interesting! Aside from such priceless spots, I give the up-and-coming a wide berth. I no longer follow the blogs that focus on young, slightly experimental authors; I’ve had to give away too many disappointing promises. I’ve given up trying to keep up, not because I can’t but because it’s not very satisfying. My thinking on other fronts, moreover, has led me to doubt the importance of the merely new, especially if it is blocking out everything else; I worry a lot about what I see as a national novelty addiction. If there are forgotten masterpieces out there, I hope that other readers will unearth them; it’s not my fach to do so.
***
As you can see, I was not particularly afflicted by FOMO even in adolescence, hooked as I was on my own idiosyncrasies. But in fact I had a much worse form of the disease. I wasn’t worried about missing out on books, or even on travel. I was terrified of missing out on feelings.
Just writing that down chills my blood.
Stendhal claimed — didn’t he? (but where?) — that people wouldn’t fall in love if they hadn’t read about it first. I can divide my life into two parts, first the one in which I was without a doubt one of Stendhal’s people, and then the part that I spent (and am still spending) with Kathleen, which I think would have happened even if I had never read about love, because it was all about “Kathleen” and not about “love.” Perhaps I shouldn’t have appreciated her so quickly and clearly if I had not knocked around and been knocked around by my curiosity about love. But that would be a matter of degree.
Growing up, I knew of two kinds of love: dutiful relationships, high forms of charity, really; and mad, irresponsible passion, which I never saw first-hand but which I knew led to death or to prison. Looking back on the adults I knew as a child, I see a crowd of couples at a cocktail party. For all the flirting that goes on at a good cocktail party, no other kind of gathering could be less romantic, not even a quilting bee. I never saw these people at any other time. You might hear of love, but you never saw it in action, as it were, no matter how many children were produced.
When I went off to Notre Dame, after a couple of happy years minding my own business at an all-boys boarding school, I was confronted head-on with the mystery of love, which I was most determined not to miss out on. (Mind, this had nothing to do with hormones. I’m talking about love.) There were no girls at Notre Dame itself, but there were plenty of them across Highway 31 at St Mary’s. I went to a mixer promptly, and emerged with a girlfriend. Just like that! This relationship lasted until the Christmas vacation that was followed by a personal disarray that it seems grandiose to describe as a “suicide attempt.” My next foray, which lasted longer and ran much deeper, causing terrible wreckage (not to me), occupied my sophomore year — the one in which all the friends I’d made as a freshman the first time were juniors. I cannot bring myself to write with any particularity about this relationship, which got as far, despite parental discouragement, as a ring, partly because it is still so mortifying (and rightly so!), and partly because any kind of discussion seems disrespectful to the woman involved. It’s not that I was a wicked cad. But I was a cad. I got in way over my head, in this pursuit of love, and I did not heed the incredibly sage friend who responded to my rhapsodies by saying, “You sound like you’re more in love with love than in love.” Ouch! My wounded vanity made sure that I did not agree, or act accordingly. But perhaps I caught a glimpse of my spectral stubbornness. It’s the only remark made by an outsider to the relationship that I can recall from the whole awful mess.
Which reminds me of something else from this week’s New Yorker: “If you can, see girls as, like, people, instead of pathways to kissing and/or salvation.” That’s the advice to young men given by Young Adult author John Green. I wish somebody had tried to teach me that when I was still young. I wish also that someone had been wise and/or interested enough to tell me how unlikely it would be for me to find a loving companion until I had done a lot of growing up. Ditto for my companion-to-be! But that’s Bronxville for you. Despite my good manners, I was feral where I ought to have been decent.
***
Puzzle to chew on: I read the other day (well, in last week’s New Yorker) that the last of Edward St Aubyn’s maternal grandmother’s husbands — the writer is descended from the husband before that — was a Prince de Talleyrand. This prince, for whom his wife bought the Villa Colombe, Edith Wharton’s place in St-Brice-sous-Forêt, held onto his wife’s money when she died, instead of dispensing it to his stepdaughters, setting up a chain of disinheritances that would in due course injure St Aubyn. Now, what I want to know is whether this is the same Prince de Talleyrand whose subsequent wife, and later ex-wife, married, in turn, Gaston Palewski, the Polish-French diplomat whom Nancy Mitford called “Col” and hoped desperately to marry. He told her that he couldn’t marry a divorcée, not if he wanted to remain DeGaulle’s right-hand man. But he went and married a divorcée anyway, just not Nancy. Next thing you know, Nancy was attacked by a terrible and presently fatal cancer. And now that the son of the Prince de Talleyrand above has himself died (if I’ve got this right), the Museum has been able to purchase Gérard’s magnificent picture of his illustrious collateral ancestor. Please observe that there are three major writers in this tea-dance, plus one statesman of world-historical significance.
Daily Blague news update: Irony.