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cheerful meditations for mid-February
Feb. 9th, 2007 11:10 amI had meant, some months back, to cite Kurt Andersen’s article in New York magazine (“The End of the World As They Know It”) on why everyone was either dreading or longing for apocalypse at the moment, depending on one’s condition of belief regarding the topic and expectation of what would follow thereafter.
In my glacially slow progress through Against the Day, this morning I reached this passage on page 712:
“This was a period in the history of human emotion when ‘romance’ had slipped into an inexpensive subfusc of self-awareness, … as if in some stylistic acknowledgement of the great trembling that showed through, now and then, to some more than others, of a hateful future nearly at hand and inescapable. But many were as likely to misinterpret the deep signals as physical symptoms, or another case of ‘nerves,’ or, like the earlier, dimmer Cyprian, some kind of ‘romance’ in the offing, however little prepared he might have been for that.”
This is very nearly a burlesqued, Pynchonized summary of Robert Musil’s oft-cited novel The Man Without Qualities, if you recall. The characters are all concerned with their inner lives, or the great themes of statecraft, or simply muddling through, except for the protagonist who is concerned with what it means to encounter what he thinks of as the Other Condition, and while this great dance of absurd circumstance and deep thought is going on, the world in which they live is on the verge of being plunged into precisely the historical nightmare that all of them are too preoccupied to see coming.
We see our environmental nightmare coming, and lackadaisically debate what it would take to keep the world’s oceans from creeping gradually up the beaches of Miami and over the entire country of Tuvalu, but the world capitals that happen to be inland and on higher ground find it difficult to get exercised about the topic, and those whose short-term future is built on not investing money in drastic solutions continue to insist that the phenomenon is as inevitable and inescapable as the Ice Ages.
In the meantime all the different energies of global cultural collision keep us preoccupied with the question of whether we will fall prey to the pettiest of anarchies or physical poverties long before larger forces can do us in. Ask any number of displaced professionals in highly diversified economies, not to mention the multitudes of day laborers who live out what Tolstoy, I think it was, called a migration in the search for work that rivals the wanderings of Odysseus. Every one of them, like myself, would just as soon be thinking exclusively about getting their prescriptions filled before showing up at work on time, and then what to do with the Friday night after, rather than with whether the framework that allows any of those things will continue to exist. And given the slightest amount of stability, each of them promptly lapses back into thinking that way. Who wouldn’t?
This is part of what lay behind my brief reflection on the delectable surreality of having Salman Rushdie and the Dalai Lama on the same university payroll. The two represent the most opposing solutions possible to the same vast general array of forces. In addition, each calls forth in other people the crudest of emotional responses for the highest and deepest of abstracted reasons, and responses at both ends of the emotional spectrum, too. (But perhaps, given the sheer diversity of ideologies, conditions and temperaments, all of us evoke love, hate, admiration and contempt in more or less equal measure? some just more spectacularly than others.)
One represents an imaginative, skeptical-analytical approach to resolving the dilemmas confronting his own life and the world in general; the other represents an analytic, nontheistically mystical approach that is in some ways as untraditional in terms of his own cultural inheritance as the other’s is in terms of the one into which he was born. There are few points on which they would agree unequivocally, except that we live on a planet in which self-deception, desire and unalloyed anger are as likely to plunge us into catastrophe as has ever been the case. And that parts of the planet have, at different times and for different reasons, been out to nail their asses.
And that, given the opportunity, we would all really just as soon go back to sleep and forget the whole thing.
Glad I got that out of the way a decent interval before Valentine’s Day. Damn, I wish my synthesizing reflections were better timed, but they aren’t.
More on why I wonder what Glenn Mullin knows about the inner life of the Dalai Lama, later. Salman Rushdie’s inner life is of immense interest also, but being as how he is a novelist and not a spiritual leader, it’s of interest more as a subset of our inherent desire to engage in gossip. A desire which is well assuaged by incomprehensible behavior, but Rushdie doesn’t seem to operate that way, nor does His Holiness. Both lead lives that seem consistent with their initial public premises, which already distinguishes them from a good many public figures we know and do or do not love.
Given the ongoing need to get some errands taken care of before the workday starts, I shall be surprised if the projected essay on this topic ever arrives. Really. Any day now. It’ll be great, I promise.
On the topic of apocalypse with which I began, my collected poems once had an epigraph (since displaced by a passage from John Crowley’s Love and Sleep ) extracted from an interview with Milan Kundera: “Q: Do you believe the world is coming to an end? A: The feeling that the world is rushing to ruin is an ancient one. Q: So we have nothing to worry about? A: On the contrary. When a fear has been present in the human mind for countless ages, there must be something to it.”
In my glacially slow progress through Against the Day, this morning I reached this passage on page 712:
“This was a period in the history of human emotion when ‘romance’ had slipped into an inexpensive subfusc of self-awareness, … as if in some stylistic acknowledgement of the great trembling that showed through, now and then, to some more than others, of a hateful future nearly at hand and inescapable. But many were as likely to misinterpret the deep signals as physical symptoms, or another case of ‘nerves,’ or, like the earlier, dimmer Cyprian, some kind of ‘romance’ in the offing, however little prepared he might have been for that.”
This is very nearly a burlesqued, Pynchonized summary of Robert Musil’s oft-cited novel The Man Without Qualities, if you recall. The characters are all concerned with their inner lives, or the great themes of statecraft, or simply muddling through, except for the protagonist who is concerned with what it means to encounter what he thinks of as the Other Condition, and while this great dance of absurd circumstance and deep thought is going on, the world in which they live is on the verge of being plunged into precisely the historical nightmare that all of them are too preoccupied to see coming.
We see our environmental nightmare coming, and lackadaisically debate what it would take to keep the world’s oceans from creeping gradually up the beaches of Miami and over the entire country of Tuvalu, but the world capitals that happen to be inland and on higher ground find it difficult to get exercised about the topic, and those whose short-term future is built on not investing money in drastic solutions continue to insist that the phenomenon is as inevitable and inescapable as the Ice Ages.
In the meantime all the different energies of global cultural collision keep us preoccupied with the question of whether we will fall prey to the pettiest of anarchies or physical poverties long before larger forces can do us in. Ask any number of displaced professionals in highly diversified economies, not to mention the multitudes of day laborers who live out what Tolstoy, I think it was, called a migration in the search for work that rivals the wanderings of Odysseus. Every one of them, like myself, would just as soon be thinking exclusively about getting their prescriptions filled before showing up at work on time, and then what to do with the Friday night after, rather than with whether the framework that allows any of those things will continue to exist. And given the slightest amount of stability, each of them promptly lapses back into thinking that way. Who wouldn’t?
This is part of what lay behind my brief reflection on the delectable surreality of having Salman Rushdie and the Dalai Lama on the same university payroll. The two represent the most opposing solutions possible to the same vast general array of forces. In addition, each calls forth in other people the crudest of emotional responses for the highest and deepest of abstracted reasons, and responses at both ends of the emotional spectrum, too. (But perhaps, given the sheer diversity of ideologies, conditions and temperaments, all of us evoke love, hate, admiration and contempt in more or less equal measure? some just more spectacularly than others.)
One represents an imaginative, skeptical-analytical approach to resolving the dilemmas confronting his own life and the world in general; the other represents an analytic, nontheistically mystical approach that is in some ways as untraditional in terms of his own cultural inheritance as the other’s is in terms of the one into which he was born. There are few points on which they would agree unequivocally, except that we live on a planet in which self-deception, desire and unalloyed anger are as likely to plunge us into catastrophe as has ever been the case. And that parts of the planet have, at different times and for different reasons, been out to nail their asses.
And that, given the opportunity, we would all really just as soon go back to sleep and forget the whole thing.
Glad I got that out of the way a decent interval before Valentine’s Day. Damn, I wish my synthesizing reflections were better timed, but they aren’t.
More on why I wonder what Glenn Mullin knows about the inner life of the Dalai Lama, later. Salman Rushdie’s inner life is of immense interest also, but being as how he is a novelist and not a spiritual leader, it’s of interest more as a subset of our inherent desire to engage in gossip. A desire which is well assuaged by incomprehensible behavior, but Rushdie doesn’t seem to operate that way, nor does His Holiness. Both lead lives that seem consistent with their initial public premises, which already distinguishes them from a good many public figures we know and do or do not love.
Given the ongoing need to get some errands taken care of before the workday starts, I shall be surprised if the projected essay on this topic ever arrives. Really. Any day now. It’ll be great, I promise.
On the topic of apocalypse with which I began, my collected poems once had an epigraph (since displaced by a passage from John Crowley’s Love and Sleep ) extracted from an interview with Milan Kundera: “Q: Do you believe the world is coming to an end? A: The feeling that the world is rushing to ruin is an ancient one. Q: So we have nothing to worry about? A: On the contrary. When a fear has been present in the human mind for countless ages, there must be something to it.”
