Gotham Diary:
Can’t Take Я Us
23 January 2014

Here it is, nearly four, and I’m just sitting down. Well, I went out today. I wrapped myself up nicely, and I grabbed a hospital cane — one of those metal, adjustable things — on my way out the door. I was glad I had it, just outside the building, where a patch of iciness was resisting the scattered halite on a sloping stretch, but, otherwise, the cane was more a comfort than an aide. The sidewalks were clear, if damp. There was slush here and there, and even a few puddles, but no ice aside from that patch alongside the driveway.

Although I set out to buy “only a few things,” I spent nearly seventy dollars at the discount cosmetics shop and nearly twice that at Fairway. You tell me. I had the Fairway stuff delivered, the first time I’ve done that there. I took with me some chicken and a couple of limes, to get the marination going for these evening’s dinner. The delivery took place about forty minutes later, and I put everything away. I’m trying to avoid putting off the little things — which sounds virtuous enough but is in fact tricky to the point of treacherousness, as the little things are numerous enough to swallow up an entire day. And they make writing more effortful; writing, for me anyway, is a carefree pastime, and if I’ve just applied my brain to the organization of a closet shelf or even to emptying the dishwasher (the household task that I’d like most to be spared — and putting away dishes that have been washed and let to dry in a rack on the counter is no better), the free play of ideas that Matthew Arnold mooned about is hard to get going.

***

I have a few books to write about, but I’m not in the mood just now to talk, or even to think, about either of them. I finished one of them late last week, and copied out all the tagged passages (nearly thirty) on Sunday. Whereupon I promptly lost interest in the subject (CIA Arabists in the early Cold War). The other book, Paul Hazard’s The Crisis of the European Mind, 1680-1715, I reached the end of last night, and have yet to copy out the tags. Not that that’s what holds me back. It’s rather that Hazard is so vastly erudite. As Anthony Grafton notes in his introduction to the new NYRB republication, Hazard appears to have read all of his source material in the original languages — Latin, Italian, German, and English, as well as French. He also seems to have exhausted the bibliography, so to speak, perusing the output of an alarming number of writers whose names were unknown to me.

More often, I’m happy to say, Hazard taught me things about writers whose names I did know, but not much beyond. (St-Évremond, for example, whose name was rather wickedly appropriated by Dickens for use in A Tale of Two Cities and whose work appears to be out of print even in France.) And I was able to follow Hazard’s narrative about the shift in worldview, from the static, classicist outlook that prevailed through the early part of Louis XIV’s reign, to the fractured currents of criticism and longing — sense and sensibility — that coursed through the Eighteenth Century. But I got no closer to understanding Spinoza. The Crisis of the European Mind is meant, I think, as an appetizer, as an invitation to read much more deeply. As such, it is intellectual history at its best.

At least I’ll have my notes.

***

What snagged my interest earlier today was a piece by Wyatt Mason in the new New York Review of Books (LXI/2), entitled “Make This Not True.” It purports to be a review of Tenth of December, the story collection by George Saunders that came out about a year ago, but it’s not quite that. (And what would be the point at this late date?) It’s partly a discussion of

two distinct directions fiction might take as it moves into the twenty-first century — two paths that have, in fact, been debated through recent years and that we may see, in Franzen and Saunders, flowering into competing visions, not merely of fiction but of being.

And partly an unlooked-for analysis, if that term is allowed in such a context, of the Buddhist ideas at work in Saunders’s writing. Actually, it is both things at the same time. In Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, personal salvation is shown to be (quite literally) a matter of togetherness, of bodies pressed together for warmth. Meanwhile,

Saunders’s stories suggest that the ambition to connect outwardly isn’t the only path we can choose. Rather his fiction shows us that the path to reconciliation with our condition is inward, a journey we must make alone.

No sooner do I type this out than I see the two currents that I mentioned earlier, springing apart at the end of Paul Hazard’s account of European intellectual (and spiritual) life at the end of the Seventeenth Century. This time, the cliff over which both currents tumble is the passivity and superficiality that communications technology, from broadcast television to the iPhone, has inflicted on so many otherwise intelligent minds. Jonathan Franzen writes copiously, and sometimes cantankerously, about resisting these effects, perhaps by dispensing with the technology; while George Saunders writes, in his fiction, about transcending them. (In several stories, such as Escape from Spiderhead, dead characters literally rise up into the sky over a receding earth, their understanding swelling with the altitude.) I would say that Franzen is an optimist, while Saunders’s outlook is not countervailingly pessimist but rather post-tragic. The awful thing has already occurred; it’s too late for it not to happen. In the bleakest imaginable way, there is nothing to be afraid of.

Call me a cantankerous optimist. I’m especially cantankerous these days because the Super Bowl is coming up, and for the first time in my life I’m seeing the game not as a non-event on my calendar, which it has always been, but as an arguable evil. Whether American football was ever a pardonable sport, it isn’t one anymore. We know too much about the lasting damage that ensues when men make a game of tearing each other apart. Evidence of the mental degradation that is caused by repeated concussions has piled up into an obscene mass. No less unpardonable — because no less degrading — is the dereliction that has allowed the Super Bowl to slide into standing as the pre-eminent cultural spectacle of American life. We celebrate our freedom by lavishing vast sums on luxury-raddled stadiums while not only neglecting to teach our children how to use and enjoy their minds, but showing them how to abuse them.

George Saunders knows how to make the forces that deaden American lives look lurid and ridiculous. He lights from within the mindlessness that reduces humanity to monstrosity. His writing is so powerful that it catches me off guard, and makes me laugh against my will. But it leaves me feeling hopeless. The people who are reading and responding to his stories don’t need them, and the people who do need them don’t read. I’m more heartened by Jonathan Franzen’s complaining. Buddhism seems, in contrast, a regrettable means of internal exile.