Monday 25th

The Sunday paper came this morning. Did the Times even print a paper today? I won’t mind if it doesn’t; Monday’s paper is almost always the most disposable. But for the Metropolitan Diary, which nowadays seems determined to show that, changes in style notwithstanding, New York is pretty much what it was in 1925, the Monday paper doesn’t have anything going for it, and its relative thinness — more a matter of content, at least for home subscribers (who get so many of the Sunday sections on Saturday), than of bulk — causes a small weekly spasm of withdrawal. On the other hand, plowing through the Review — a nosegay of bloviation (by regular contributors) and temptation (teasers for forthcoming books) — on a Monday morning can be harrowing. Monday’s paper, after all, reflects the severe cutback in leisure that Monday brings.

The big news — the only news, really — is that Michael Bloomberg is once again considering a third-party bid for the presidency. And that headline is really all there is to the story, for the moment. It will take a few minutes for reactions to accumulate. Maybe the phantom Monday Times is full of responses to a proposed Bloomberg candidacy. Everybody read about it online yesterday. Would Bloomberg get my vote? How many ways are there to say ‘yes’?

The big story, however, is the compare-and-contrast account of the water situation in Flint, Michigan: compare what officials said, once the decision was made to detach the city from Detroit’s supply (which was, it seems, “expensive” — however safe), with what was actually the case. This is perhaps the most dramatic tale of élite failure in our time, and I hope that it will be anatomized down to the last group-think minutes of the smallest political commission. The denial and disregard of the toxic pollution of a necessity of life by elected and appointed officials is so dire that one hears tumbrils over the horizon. What is keeping the good people of Flint from lynching the city manager, one wonders. Perhaps he has prudently left town. It difficult to fight off the conviction that, after due judicial process, Governor Snyder ought to be put to death by robots wielding lead pipes.

Meanwhile, snow. Looking at the Times’s Web site this morning, I see a lot about snow removal but nothing about store restocking. Not that I’ll need to shop for a few days yet. I still have the makings of Chicken Tetrazzini on hand, not to mention a Carbonnade à la Flamande that needs no more than sauce-finishing and a sliced baguette. As soon as the new pizza stone arrives, I can get back in the pizza business. The old stone broke because it was round, and I had to store it vertically. Inevitably, it did a wheelie, tipped over, and shattered. No more round pizza stones. King Arthur, source of the replacement, advises me to leave the new one on the bottom shelf of the oven. I’ll give that a try. I’m told that the stone, along with some re-usable sheets of parchment (now declared to be a necessity in baking pizza at home, probably because they reduce dependence on cornmeal, which scatters everywhere and then burns, like the crumbs at the bottom of the toaster), yeast and yet another sourdough starter, is in transit. Yes, but when will it get here?

Although I spent about four hours in the kitchen on Saturday, prepping this and baking that, and, more important, straightening a few cupboards, I did a lot of reading over the weekend. In the journals, there was Heather Havrilevsky on Nicholas Sparks (Bookforum) and Tanya Gold on the Royal Family (Harper’s), shrieks both. There was Barbara Pym’s Less Than Angels (1955), which I pulled down from the shelf for pleasure. And there was Thomas Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy (1587? 1592?), which — well, I forget why I decided to re-read it. The decision was made a few years ago. When the Penguin Classic arrived (Five Revenge Tragedies, edited by Emma Smith; the first Quarto version of Hamlet (1603) is included — Polonius appears as “Corambis,” and the two flunkies immortalized by Tom Stoppard as “Rossencraft” and “Gilderstone”), I read the first couple of scenes of Act I but then stopped, defeated by the dreadful writing. In a more conscientious frame of mind, I pulled it down again last week, and struggled through it in a couple of days, finishing it on Saturday afternoon.

Having just read the Rosencranz and Guildenstern version of Hamlet, I was well-prepped to deplore Thomas Kyd’s prosody, which is long on witless repetitions and longer on witless rhymes. Consider the opening lines of 2.4, delivered by Horatio in what turns out to be his last scene. (Despite his expectation of security, he is murdered at the end of it.)

Now that the night begins with sable wings
To overcloud the brightness of the sun,
And that in darkness pleasures may be done,
Come Bel-Imperia, let us to the bower,
And there in safety pass a pleasant hour.

I don’t mind sharing what this reminded me of:

To you, my little prairie flower,
I’m thinking of you every hour.

That’s the poem that Daniel Leeson reads, having written it down on a sheet of paper, to Lucy Warriner, in The Awful Truth, while Lucy’s husband, Jerry, lurks behind the doorway, armed with a pencil, which he surreptitiously brushes against Lucy’s ribs, making her giggle inappropriately. The terrible thing about these verses is that they really are deathless! Their inanity is unsurpassed.

Though now you’re just a friend to me,
I wonder what the end will be. [Tickle]
Oh, you would make my life divine
If you would change your name to mine.

In my senior year at Blair, I wrote a paper on The Spanish Tragedy. We were given a list of works to choose from, and this was one of them. I can only imagine what drew me to it. The subtitle, perhaps (“Hieronimo’s mad againe”), or the promise of betrayal and blood. But all the gore in the world can’t make up for the complete lack of psychological shading. I dimly recall being distressed by the play’s tedium, and I’m sure that my paper did not get a very high mark. And how lucky we are that the name “Bel-Imperia” did not catch on.

Less Than Angels reminded me of Eileen Myles, the poet who has been much in the news because — I forget why. Myles has called for men to stop writing books for fifty years and making movies for a hundred. This makes a lot of sense to me, although if I am offered the chance to publish a book I shall not decline. When I was a boy, it was doubted that women were really capable of men’s work; a generation later, we have reached a stalemate in which women are permitted to do anything so long as they accept half-pay. If only more men would step out of the working world for a while, becoming dependent upon their wives, we might rectify this imbalance.

Less Than Angels is infused with a tamped-down impatience with <sigh. men. It bubbles away, just below the laughter. Every now and then it is allowed to spew forth, but only for a moment, and only through the cross mouth of Miss Clovis, the administrative battleaxe who likes nothing so much as needling men. The men in Miss Clovis’s life are mostly anthropologists, and Pym has a field day studying them.

The most romantic character in the book is not the nineteen year-old anthropology student, Deirdre Swan, who would be the heroine of a more orthodox novel, but her spinster aunt, Rhoda Wellcome. Rhoda is a Mary who would willingly be Martha to the right man — a quantity unlikely to materialize in her shy, protected life. Rhoda is one of Pym’s miracle characters, respectable, churchgoing, more than a little strait-laced, but lovable withal. Rhoda is always learning things. Here she is at a dinner that she and her sister are giving for an assortment of friends and neighbors, including Deirdre’s first love, Tom Mallow. Rhoda’s sister starts a conversation by asking what people eat in Africa.

“The Hadzapi tribe will eat anything that is edible except for the hyena,'”declared Alaric precisely.

“Oh, well…” Mabel spread out her hands in a hopeless little gesture.

“The butcher wouldn’t offer you hyena anyway,” giggled Phyllis.

“Most African tribes are very fond of meat when they can get it,” said Tom.

“Yes, and many of them relish even putrescent meat,” said Alaric solemnly.

“Do they understand the principles of cooking as we know it?” asked Rhoda.

“Oh, yes, a good many of them do,” said Alaric. “In some very primitive societies, though, they would just fling the unskinned carcase on the fire and hope for the best.”

“Yes, like that film of the Australian aborigines we saw at the Anthropology Club,” said Deirdre. “They flung a kangaroo on the fire and cooked it like that.”

“Now, who would like some potato salad?” said Rhoda, feeling that there was something a little unappetizing about the conversation. She had imagined that the presence of what she thought of as clever people would bring about some subtle change in the usual small talk. The sentences would be like bright jugglers’ balls, spinning through the air and being deftly caught and thrown up again. But she saw now that that conversation could also be compared to a series of incongruous objects, scrubbing-brushes, dish-cloths, knives, being flung or hurtling rather than spinning, which were sometimes not caught at all but fell to the ground with resounding thuds. In the haze brought about by Malcolm’s cocktail, she saw the little dark-skinned aborigines, swinging the kangaroo by its legs and hurtling it on to the fire. Certainly she had to admit that the conversation was different from what it usually was and perhaps that was the best that could be expected. (146-7)

Tom Mallow, for all his county background, is no more a hero than Deirdre is a heroine, and he comes to a Waughian end back in Africa. The older woman that Tom leaves for callow Deirdre is far more interesting. Catherine Oliphant writes advice and fiction for women’s magazines; it does not go without saying that she rarely follows her own advice. She has a marvelous scene with an aunt of Tom’s who “drops in” for a conversation that is right out of La Traviata, as Catherine herself points out. The aunt is too late: she is almost disappointed to learn that Tom is no longer living in sin with a woman so poised, chic, and intelligent as Catherine. This is not, however, to suggest that Catherine is Our Kind. There is a corresponding scene at the end that Pym handles just as well, and perhaps even better, by resisting classical echoes and even closure itself. Tom’s sister, a countrywoman, summons Catherine and Deirdre to her club in St James’s; Tom’s first love, whose first love appears to be golden retrievers, is also of the party. It is decided that Tom’s papers, currently en route from Africa, ought to be sent to Miss Clovis; beyond that, connection is resisted. Pym shows why this must be so.

Catherine did not think it would matter very much how they dressed since it would be most unlikely that they would attain the standard set by Josephine and Elaine.

When Catherine and Deirdre entered the lounge of the club, Catherine’s suspicions were proved correct, for they had hardly set foot on the soft carpet before two women, both wearing well-cut grey suits, small hats and pearls, and carrying fur wraps, stood up and advanced toward them. It was perhaps humiliating, Catherine felt, that she and Deirdre should be so easily recognized, hatless, in loose tweed coats and flat shoes. Deirdre had scraped back her loose and flowing hair into a kind of tail and darkened her eyebrows so much that she looked quite fierce. Catherine was just herself, but had made an effort to be neater than usual. (250-1)

Less Than Angels is not entirely misanthropist. There is a young man called Digby Fox, initially part of a Rosencrantz-and-Guildenstern pair of poor young graduate students (the other winds up marrying a debutante and going into Leadenhall Street). When Tom Mallow leaves for Africa, his friends gather to see him off at one of those old-fashioned “air terminals” from which you would take a bus to the actual airport. As soon as Tom’s bus departs, Deirdre laments that she and the others are now part of the past.

“Only where he is concerned,” said Digby. “We are still ourselves, you know.”

He had taken her arm and was attending to her with great kindness and solicitude. Catherine was glad to see this and made no attempt to take upon herself the role of comforter, which is often regarded as a kind of female monopoly though it can be admirably filled by the right kind of man. (193)

Yet another novel that I was sad to put down.

I don’t know how far I’m going to get with Daniel Martin. The first chapter is rebarbative with agricultural terminology that nobody knows anymore. Nevertheless, John Fowles declared that the novel was “intended as a defense and illustration of an unfashionable philosophy, humanism, and also as an exploration of what it is to be English.” The exploration is undoubtedly dated, and I expect that I’ll disagree with Fowles about humanism, but I’ve got to read the book to find out.

***

Tuesday 26th

Two papers today: Monday’s and Tuesday’s. Having gotten through both, I want to go back to bed. And I should, if I didn’t have a doctor’s appointment this afternoon. Also, there is this to write. It’s especially important to write something today, because I am not going to write anything tomorrow, nothing for The Daily Blague, that is, not tomorrow nor on any future Wednesday. Even without the help of such crude yardsticks as word counts, regular readers will have observed an increase in — more crudity — output. Volume. Verbiage. It has poured forth readily enough, but it has consumed all of the energy that I have for intellectual activity, loosely defined, by which I mean that I simply cannot bring myself to go through the mail or do anything else having to do with knowledge work. By the time I’ve proof-read what I’ve written, somewhere in the early afternoon, I am shot for the day, good for nothing that involves the brain. Oh, I can read. But reading doesn’t count.

There are the weekend days, it’s true — but they are weekend days. They are not work days. So I must reserve a weekday for housework: not just the bills and such but the magazine renewals and the insurance forms and the cards in which I send our grandson a contribution to his allowance — now shockingly overdue, just like everything else. Wednesdays have long been my day for going out, running errands, seeing doctors — yes, I’ll be at the dermatologist’s tomorrow — so it makes sense (or at least I hope it does) to clear the whole day for current affairs.

It seems increasingly clear to me that this site’s days are numbered, that, sooner or later, I am going to spend my mornings writing something else. I may very well do this online, but it will not be a Web log. It will be an intellectual memoir. That sounds pretty grandiose, doesn’t it. But I say that as modestly as one might speak of writing a novel. I myself am not going to write a novel. This is not to say that my intellectual memoir will be altogether free of fiction, for who can make such a promise? And I do hope to make a story of it, because it is the elemental urge to tell a story, my story, that propels me. I still don’t know quite what this story is, but I do know a great deal more about it now than I did, say, a year ago, or even last summer. I have been letting the DBR teach me what it is — one of the reasons for the increase in writing. Until very recently, I worried that my story was so peculiar that it would turn out to be a vaguely repellent curiosity, but lately I have felt the smack of cliché: my story, while indeed my own, is just like everybody else’s.

***

Like every lump of human stuff, I feel, at least at times, both incomplete and excluded: alone. Like everyone else, I want to put an end to these uncomfortable feelings. Some people believe that it is possible to overcome the isolation of the body, but I don’t; I believe that our very sense of who we are, each of us, is the consequence of being sealed within our skin. Union, escape, transcendence — call it what you will; it can’t happen the physical world. So we have invented a spiritual counterpart to our corporeal individuality; but we can never be quite sure that the spirits are real. Or we worry that our spirits are not as robust as we should like them to be. The strongest faith is not entirely, absolutely unwavering. Something is always missing. This is the story of everyone who is conscious of having a story. Something was missing, so I set out to find it. And I found something else instead.

Because all we have at the start is the sense of missing — incompleteness and exclusion. What we miss must, because we miss it, be somewhere. Where? So we look, but without knowing what for. Everyone who has a story — and this is by no means everybody, unfortunately — finds something else, something that takes the sense of being partial and isolated off the boil. It is something that we didn’t know was there, and to some extent it is brought into existence by our search. We must discover it for ourselves. This may sound trite, but it stands in sharp contrast to our idea that children needn’t be expected to stumble onto the rules of grammar or the multiplication tables by themselves. There are many things that can be taught, but the thing that each of us is looking for must be custom-made. It is created, if not by, then in the search.

Please do not misunderstand me to be saying that Man creates God. What I am saying is that each of us who believes in God creates his or her peculiar relationship to God — a relationship that cannot be fully comprehended by words. (To put the matter with greater piety, we allow God to frame our relationship.) The outward parts of this relationship may be rigorously orthodox, adhering in every particular to the pertinent catechism, and yet be privately distinct. For we can never know what some else’s relation to God might be. All we know is our own, and, as I say, we cannot fully express it even to ourselves. This is true no matter what the object of our relationship might be; all that is certain is that this relationship is the thing that takes the place of what we thought we were looking for.

For we began by looking for something that would make us feel complete and included within ourselves. Instead, we found relationship. To another person, perhaps. To a kind of work. To an understanding of the cosmos. The person, the work, the cosmos — these all remain outside us, beyond the envelope of skin that contains us. But the relationship to them stops the wound of incompleteness and exclusion. And that is the story told by everybody who has a story to tell. As I say, not everybody does. Some people do not, or cannot, find relationships. Some people will not settle for relationships; they demand thorough-going, self-sufficient autonomy. Some people are too damaged to sustain a relationship, and can’t seem to be healed. Some people fear that relationships are just another illusion. Many people have terrible judgment. All that we can do for these unfortunates is to tell our stories better. We can never tell our stories well enough.

***

I believe that what we find when we set out to look for what’s missing is, simply, humanity. Although we are human beings, we do not possess humanity. We participate in it unawares. I am part of your humanity, even though I don’t give it a thought. Humanity is other people. Humanity makes your life, your very existence, possible. It teaches you everything that you know. It creates the world that you inhabit on this planet. Humanity feeds you; indeed, there is no other source of nourishment. Without humanity, you would be nothing. And yet, you have to find it for yourself.

It is always hard to find what is standing right in front of you. We come out of childhood thinking that we know about the world, but we are mistaken: all we know is what is useful to a child. Unless something is terribly wrong, children do not know that they are incomplete or excluded: they are complete and included in their parents. Then — the horror of adolescence — their parents become other people. Rather, they cease to be what you thought they were. And yet, there they are, standing just as they always have. They are still your parents, but they are also distinct human beings, and you must find them again in humanity, that world of other people. This is understandably difficult.

I never knew my own parents, but I don’t know how important this is. Other people took the place of my parents, and the main thing to know about this is that I was told about the arrangement when I was seven years old. Perhaps the thing to know is the way I took the news. Some people, I understand, hear such news and don’t find that it makes much difference. They go on loving their parents just as much as ever, as parents. To my thinking, the salient aspect is surprise. If the news that you were adopted as an infant comes as a surprise, then I do not think that it will change anything. But if the news confirms something that you have always suspected, then you will permit yourself to acknowledge other feelings. If you are like me, you will undergo the totality of adolescence right there, in that teary hour by the fireplace. The experience will be grievously premature. What, after all, do seven year-olds really understand, about where babies come from? In any case, your parents will become human beings ahead of schedule. And, by their own admission, they are no longer quite your parents.

***

Thursday 28th

The foregoing paragraphs triggered an emergency response from an old friend who happens to be a doctor. She detected what I’ll call a note of suicidal resignation. I wrote back to reassure her, but I do see what bothered her, and I don’t dismiss it. I believe that some people do kill themselves because they are tired. They don’t do anything dramatic, but they stop taking care of themselves, they stop watching out. They walk in front of a bus, not deliberately but not unawares, either. They stop taking their meds. They let go. And I am very tired.

Part of it is age, but by “age” I don’t mean the physical fallapart so much as the weariness of having seen enough. There’s a piece in today’s Times — today’s Upshot column. Josh Barro reports:

The process of labor market adjustment is “gummier than anybody realized,” said Mr. Hanson, a professor at the University of California at San Diego. The persistent negative effects of Chinese trade on much of the American labor market have “toppled much of the received wisdom about the impact of trade on labor markets,” Mr. Hanson wrote with his co-authors, especially the “consensus that trade could be strongly redistributive in theory but was relatively benign in practice.”

Well, gee. Thanks for waking up, you guys! Barro gives economists a pass because, historically — and I can see you becoming tired enough to walk in front of a bus whenever I say “historically” — foreign competition did not disrupt labor markets. That’s because we were competing with Canada and Germany and other places of comparable per capita wealth. Who knew that China would be different? How could anybody not know? If you squint, Barro’s piece reads like a joke from The Onion.

Gummier — I like that. But it explains why I’m so tired.

In my fatigue, I have dreamed up yet another constitutional amendment: if voter turnout in federal elections (presidential or not) drops below sixty percent, then the government is disbanded — it simply ceases to exist. The Fed shuts down, the armed forces go home, and airports become much more dangerous but also much more convenient. The more I think about it, the less frivolous this suggestion seems. It might take the extremism out of American politics, like, forever.

***

I’m also tired because I want to say something about what living is like — and I’m thinking about all people alive today, now, not just Americans — but I want to say it without sounding “philosophical.” One of the things that disappointed me, when I tried to sketch my idea yesterday, was that, for all the jocularity with which I tried to loosen up my insights, I caught myself beginning a sentence with “It follows…” That’s what I mean by “philosophy.” If this, then that. The rigors of reason, the urge to account for everything in some grand, all-accommodating system. I disclaim any and all ambitions to think systematically, but the ground is so littered with the habits of systematic speech that it’s hard not to trip over them. Isn’t there another way of talking about how we live?

Yes, there is, but it takes much longer to get across. So much longer that, just thinking about it, I want to curl up and sleep forever.

And yet there is hope in “forever.” Do we have all day? We have forever. We have, at any rate, as long as we’re here.

That sounds nice: no rush. But look what happens when I say, “This is going to take forever.” Not so nice. It is not really the same statement, put in different words, at all. The difference between “have” and “take” is all the difference in the world.

***

Can we talk? I am a human being. I am stuck in the frame of a tall, overweight male, nearly seventy years old. I always have a beard, and sometimes a twinkle in my eye. I am a bundle — it really doesn’t matter whether “I” am the bundle or “my frame,” the thing I’m stuck in, is the bundle — of skills and experiences. The thing to know about me, since we are probably never going to meet, is that I like to read, and that I especially like to read things that make me laugh. I go in for shrieks, as the Mitford sisters put it. Just for the spice of it, I’ll add that I’m crazy about the fragrance of the carbonnades â la flamande that is filling the kitchen. I made the stew myself, but I credit its miraculousness to the veal broth that I bought at Agata & Valentina.

Philosophers ranging from Hume to Descartes tell me that I might be imagining that fragrance, not to mention the existence of Agata & Valentina. They warn that I cannot be sure about anything outside the bundle that contains me. I could be living in the middle of an illusion. Life could be a dream.

Well, that certainly sounds like the kind of thought that would preoccupy a thinker living in the middle of the intellectual storm that dumped the scientific revolution on us, and then the industrial revolution. Year after year ever since, students at the best schools have been taught what Descartes and Hume and the rest thought. Then they have forgotten all about it, most of them, because life is not a dream. Hume may be right — we see what we want or expect to see — but this does not mean that there is nothing to see. There is something self-cancelling about the idea that the material world in which we think we live does not really exist: it stops in its tracks and then evaporates. You cannot make anything of it. As Descartes might have ventured, the real world exists because we think it exists.

To understand this world scientifically, these days, is to get tangled up in entangled particles, and a lot of other rebarbative concepts. Knock yourselves out, say I to the scientists. But I’m going to go on experiencing the world from inside my bundle, no matter what you tell me. I am not going to try to figure out how my bundle really works, or what it really consists of. I am not interested in “really.” I am interested in “ordinarily.” I am interested in making the ordinary a little neater, a little more consistent, perhaps even a little more helpful.

***

What I want to talk about is the problem that we all have, as human beings, locked up in our bundles of skin and saddled with what we call “human nature.” This phrase, “human nature,” is used as if it expressed a scientific understanding of what it means to be human. As such, it’s a folk science, and not scientific in the least. “Human nature” is a collection of received truths about how people behave, grounded in the understanding that it is almost impossible for them to behave otherwise. This is why philosophers and others get so worked up about “altruism.” Altruism appears to be contrary to human nature, so how can it exist. Does it exist, skeptics ask. We could sit here all day, or even forever, and never get to the problem posed by the appearance of altruism, not because selflessness and sacrifice are hard to understand — they’re not! — but because it’s difficult to reconcile them with “human nature.” Our ideas about “human nature” have borrowed a great deal from genuinely scientific inquiries, and especially from the investigations of Charles Darwin, but these borrowings have been selective, and we have invested them with “meanings” that existed long before Darwin. Who needed Darwin to tell us that we are selfish? Nobody. What Darwin did, we say, was this: he proved, scientifically, that “human nature’ is selfish. Nonsense.

So, here we have this thing called “human nature” that, by and large, we deplore, even though we can’t escape it. So we say.

And over there, we have something called “humanity.” We associate that word not with selfishness or greed or lust or murderous rage, but with nice things — altruism, for example. We have a concept of “the humane.” The “humane” is all good. If everybody were humane, there would be no problems on earth. Well, illness and death, maybe, but you know what I mean. Humane behavior is admirable and desirable. But what is not human about “humane”? Why does our concept of human nature seem to exclude everything that is encompassed by our idea of the humane?

I have a hunch about this. It is not a theory. It is just a thought that emerged from thinking about these things. When I was writing about it yesterday, I expressed it in bullet points, which is what led me into if/then territory. So today, Instead of building up my argument, I am going to begin with its conclusion, and then support it, but with observations instead of proofs. I am trying to avoid the appearance of proving anything. There is one little axiom that I should like to deploy, for syntactical and rhetorical reasons: “humanity” is the manifestation of “the humane.” Not really, mind you; not scientifically. But that’s how we tend to speak of it. It’s how we think that interests me, because I think that we’d be better off if we thought a little more clearly.

Humanity, as I wrote the other day, is other people. For each of us, humanity consists of people we know, and, less importantly, of people whom we don’t know. This is my conclusion. I’m very well aware that some people are so disgusted by human nature that they don’t think much of the people whom they know, either, because they are also so visibly infected with human nature. For such people, humanity tends to exist on the other side of the world, among people who speak different languages and who live without the corruption of brass and marble mod cons. I feel sorry for people who take this dim view of things, although I’m a little impatient with them, too, because so many of them live in my neighborhood.

Humanity also consists of everything that people — and note here that I use “people” as a term for individuals in whom human nature and humanity intersect — have ever done. Most of this is invisible, but that doesn’t make it nothing. Our manners, our language — everything that we take for granted as children is the result of everything that has ever been done. Perhaps that is a second axiom; maybe it’s just common sense with a telephoto lens. Mozart is dead. His music lives on, and is very much a part of humanity. But I like to think that his fondness for dressing up and giving parties is still with us, too, however dimly. I like to think of him in his ballroom — he had an apartment big enough to hold one, for a while. Yes! His own ballroom. And here you thought he was poor, because aren’t all the best artists? Plus, Amadeus? But Mozart was not poor; he was broke, and now you know why. I like to think of Mozart insisting that nobody else could play the piano as well as he could. A real pain, this guy! I like the stories about Mozart, some of which are true. They are all part of humanity — along with the great music.

Now, the important thing about humanity, I want to suggest, is not that it is so much better than human nature. We like to make humanity out to be better than human nature because we feel stuck with our own human nature, but hopeful about everybody else’s humanity. When I say that humanity is other people, I’m saying a lot, and one of those things is that we like to think that it is up to everybody else to be humane. For ourselves, for each of us, it is just too hard. We can be humane every once in a while, but we are not the Pope or Mother Teresa. The Pope and Mother Teresa, however, are, or were, other people, and capable of great humanity. But this is just one of the things that I mean when I say that humanity is other people.

What I want to say most about humanity is that it is our connection with humanity — with other people, with what other people have done — that makes us humane. Each of us. We are transformed by each connection from bundles of self into something greater. The greater the number of connections, the greater the transformation. There is a certain limitation, of course. All the connections in the world are not going to relieve us of the need to take care of our individual bundles. We can’t give away all our possessions and hope for the best. (Maybe with Eileen Myles in mind, Jesus never seems to have asked a woman to give away all her possessions and follow him. He knew a good thing.) We have to take care of ourselves, if only to spare other people the drudgery. But this is a limitation, not an obstacle. We are still free to redeem our crummy human nature by making contact with what’s good about other people.

Do admit that I haven’t told you anything that you didn’t already know.

I have this little aide-memoire that I want you to take. Fix it on a lapel pin, if you like.

Human>e.

***

Friday 29th

These thoughts about humanity, and what it means for each of us — or most of us, or many of us, or the few of us who can be bothered to think about it, or maybe just for you and me; just me? — leads me to thoughts about hope and ignorance. The union of hope and ignorance is most clearly illuminated by the prospect of your death. You hope that your death will be peaceful, painless, surrounded by loved ones, &c. You hope that you will die neither in a violent explosion nor after twenty years in a vegetative state. Perhaps you hope that you will never die. All of this hoping depends on ignorance. The minute you knew, if you could know, the time and circumstances of your death, no matter how distant and rosy, hope would give way to a sentence of death — a heavy thing to live with. We may hate uncertainty when it comes to things that we want or need, but ignorance about many things that lie in the future is the cushion from which reposing hope springs to life.

Hope and ignorance are also joined in humanity, at least as I’ve presented it here. You will never know what is going on in another person’s mind. And this is a good thing, because it allows you to hope that the other person is well-disposed toward you, perhaps even in love with you (whatever that means to you). I don’t mean to be cynical; your hoping that someone loves you does not mean that you are not, in fact, beloved. It means that you don’t know what loving you means to your lover, and allows for hopes of an even more perfect union. What you don’t know may very well hurt you, but by the same token it clears the ground for hope.

When it comes to the benefits of forging connections with friends and lovers, or simply making the most of the connections that parenthood creates, our dispensers of general wisdom can get pretty dogmatic. There is more insistence than assurance in the claim that these connections are Good For You, that they will make you Happy and Fulfilled, and so on. Unfortunately, luck has a role to play here: we can only hope that we do not live up the Orinoco, stranded far away, in time or space, from the society that would encourage us to make the most of ourselves, and that would present us with our compleat soul mate. We shall never know; but some of us, certainly, will feel happy enough with where we are and whom we’re with not to be bothered by such thoughts. Others, just as certainly, I fear, will not know such satisfaction. They may devote themselves to their work and do their best to make happy families, but find themselves unable to suppress the question, Is this all there is? I have no words of wisdom for such discontent; I can only say that I respect it. This means that I refrain from suggesting making lemonade out of lemons.

I do feel, however, that connections, even when they fall short, contribute true wisdom and a sense of completion, neither of which can ever be mined from within. If I recognize that life can be rough, I nevertheless insist that stoicism and other modes of withdrawal are childish, little more than spiteful but pathetic reactions to (and would-be rejections of) life’s vicissitudes. John Donne:

No man is an Iland, intire of it selfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine; if a Clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as well as if a Mannor of thy friends or of thine owne were; any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.

***

A number of political humorists (citations?) have speculated that Donald Trump never intended his presidential bid to attract long-term support, and that many of his moves, such as his line about Mexican murderers and rapists, have been intended to sabotage it, the joke being that he can’t figure out how to turn the damned thing off. I love this idea almost as much as I love Alan Bennett’s portrait of the Queen as an “uncommon reader,” but I don’t believe either of them. Nevertheless, I won’t be surprised if the Donald makes use of this campaign analysis, if that is the word, in the event that last night’s pity party winds up putting him out of the running. The important thing for Trump is to win, and it doesn’t matter at what. Claiming to have pulled off an outrageous bluff would be just as good as winning the White House, so long as that improbable coiffure were wreathed in triumph.

“He clerked for Rehnquist?” Kathleen expostulated this morning, reading about Ted Cruz in the Times. I myself just learned that the other day, when the paper ran a photograph of Cruz, not even wearing a jacket, sitting to the left of the robed Chief Justice. I was more surprised to see how pretty Cruz used to be, how Elvis-like. The old maxim is true again: pretty people have to choose the face or the figure. If you stay trim, as Cruz has done, you risk becoming, as Cruz has done, extravagantly unattractive. Kathleen was also shocked to read that Cruz went to Harvard Law. Yes, and Princeton, too, I put in, making sure that her understanding of Cruz as a populist was complete. As I always say, Only in Texas.

The problem with Hillary Clinton as a candidate is that she seats the united couple of hope and ignorance on a very scratchy horsehair sofa, upon which comfort will always be an impossibility. You hope, considering the alternatives, that she will win, but you can’t quite summon the ignorance required to believe that she ought to win. Clinton has an unparalleled ignorance problem: we know her far too well. While it is generally true that we know nothing about what somebody else is really like inside, it is entirely possible that this unknowable somebody inside Hillary was strangled to death at some point no later than her Goldwater Republican days. Mrs Clinton is diligent and capable, and she will perform her presidential duties more than satisfactorily. But she will not be a leader: she will not fill the ignorant with hope.

In all fairness, it ought to be pointed out that even Barack Obama could not do that.

Bon week-end à tous!

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Monday, January 25th, 2016 at 2:32 pm.