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The antique cartoon strip I have long used to sum up my life is one in which Good Ol’ Charlie Brown is rebuked by Peppermint Patty for not understanding anything, and says to himself in the final cartoon panel, “I don’t even understand what it is I don’t understand.” (Chuck’s problem is that Patty has been rehearsing all the details to herself, but doesn’t pass them along to the subject of her reflections.)
One of my favorite fatuous lines in ancient rock’n’roll songs comes from Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth”: “Nobody’s right if everybody’s wrong,” which actually is a fairly profound summary of the political standoff that the song is describing.
Some moments of the world are so entangled with overlapping conflicts that, indeed, nobody understands them. Those who think they understand them are the most self-deluded of all. Usually, it all ends badly.
I have the terrible feeling that this is one of those moments, but since I don’t understand it all that completely, I desperately hope I am wrong.
In any case, the only way to proceed is to act as if there were a way of fixing it all, or at least some of it. (The “it” consists of too many overlapping problems to spell out here, but you know what they are. Don’t you? One of the problems is that no two of us are likely to list exactly the same problems, much less the same suggestions as to what is to be done about them.)
Works of literature sometimes seem to sum up our dilemmas. I am wondering which books or movies or online series do that for people reading this. I suspect there would be a lot of non-overlapping answers.
At different points earlier in my life, I had certain books that I thought offered pointers regarding the way out. I now realize that in fact they portrayed the insoluble aspects of the dilemma (the real answers lay somewhere else) and that because they portrayed a past that was forty to sixty years gone when I read them, I wasn’t understanding them the right way, either.
Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities is an unfinished novel of which only the first three volumes were available in English translation when I read it, more than once, forty-plus years ago. I was convinced that Musil had hit upon the answer in the many different drafts of the fourth volume, and had only failed to choose which option when he died much sooner than he had anticipated. By the time the fourth volume of fragments was translated, I had decided otherwise, and have never read it.
Musil was writing the novel while Europe was drifting through ever worsening catastrophes, sliding towards a second world war while he wrote about an immense cast of characters who were cluelessly stumbling along in a world that was sliding towards a first one. Everyone thought they knew what to do about the crises of the day, from spiritual anomie to prison reform, and nobody understood the biggest crisis of all, which was far from apparent to their political leaders, either.
Some of us resonated with this novel (some of us to the point of being obsessed with Vienna 1900 in general, since so much of the art and literature spoke to where we were in America at that very moment—and still does, actually). The problem was that we were incapable of seeing that not a single one of the characters was right, even Ulrich the man without qualities with whom Musil clearly identified. He couldn’t finish writing the novel because he couldn’t get his main character out of the overwhelming existential dilemma that the times had created even for someone who thought he understood them, or was on the way to understanding them.
Ten or twelve years earlier in my life, T. S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land had been the touchstone of my experience, to the point that when I first visited London fifty years ago, I sought out the geographic points that had haunted me for the previous half dozen years: Magnus Martyr, St. Mary Woolnoth, King William Street. The remnants of the Blitz amid the heavy concrete replacement structures added to the layers of history in a city in which I was also resonating with Mods and Rockers.
Eliot’s poem was actually a perfect reflection of the condition of a hopelessly neurotic American adrift in a collapsing culture in the wake of the most disorienting war since the Napoleonic upheavals a century earlier. The times were a mess, just like the Sixties, I thought, although the mess was actually much larger, and Eliot’s response to it was to portray some of the social situations he didn’t like very much, and symbolize the bloody confrontations on the Continent he could scarcely make heads or tails of, because nobody else could either, as the First World War was succeeded by five years of internecine warfare in the former Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires, resulting in the misshapen birth of “faraway countries about which we know almost nothing,” to misquote Chamberlain about Czechoslovakia at the time of the Munich conference fifteen years later.
Coming out of smalltown South with few frames of reference, I was convinced that Eliot’s superimposition of the Grail legends as mystery cult on top of the mess of a crumbling culture represented a real way out for the alienated world of 1964. Or it would if taken onward to the world of the Four Quartets, from Burnt Norton to Little Gidding. But by the time Eliot died in January 1965, a new world was coming into being with its own different messes, and different books in which the writers’ implicit solutions were only reflections of their own bewilderment.
One of my favorite fatuous lines in ancient rock’n’roll songs comes from Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth”: “Nobody’s right if everybody’s wrong,” which actually is a fairly profound summary of the political standoff that the song is describing.
Some moments of the world are so entangled with overlapping conflicts that, indeed, nobody understands them. Those who think they understand them are the most self-deluded of all. Usually, it all ends badly.
I have the terrible feeling that this is one of those moments, but since I don’t understand it all that completely, I desperately hope I am wrong.
In any case, the only way to proceed is to act as if there were a way of fixing it all, or at least some of it. (The “it” consists of too many overlapping problems to spell out here, but you know what they are. Don’t you? One of the problems is that no two of us are likely to list exactly the same problems, much less the same suggestions as to what is to be done about them.)
Works of literature sometimes seem to sum up our dilemmas. I am wondering which books or movies or online series do that for people reading this. I suspect there would be a lot of non-overlapping answers.
At different points earlier in my life, I had certain books that I thought offered pointers regarding the way out. I now realize that in fact they portrayed the insoluble aspects of the dilemma (the real answers lay somewhere else) and that because they portrayed a past that was forty to sixty years gone when I read them, I wasn’t understanding them the right way, either.
Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities is an unfinished novel of which only the first three volumes were available in English translation when I read it, more than once, forty-plus years ago. I was convinced that Musil had hit upon the answer in the many different drafts of the fourth volume, and had only failed to choose which option when he died much sooner than he had anticipated. By the time the fourth volume of fragments was translated, I had decided otherwise, and have never read it.
Musil was writing the novel while Europe was drifting through ever worsening catastrophes, sliding towards a second world war while he wrote about an immense cast of characters who were cluelessly stumbling along in a world that was sliding towards a first one. Everyone thought they knew what to do about the crises of the day, from spiritual anomie to prison reform, and nobody understood the biggest crisis of all, which was far from apparent to their political leaders, either.
Some of us resonated with this novel (some of us to the point of being obsessed with Vienna 1900 in general, since so much of the art and literature spoke to where we were in America at that very moment—and still does, actually). The problem was that we were incapable of seeing that not a single one of the characters was right, even Ulrich the man without qualities with whom Musil clearly identified. He couldn’t finish writing the novel because he couldn’t get his main character out of the overwhelming existential dilemma that the times had created even for someone who thought he understood them, or was on the way to understanding them.
Ten or twelve years earlier in my life, T. S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land had been the touchstone of my experience, to the point that when I first visited London fifty years ago, I sought out the geographic points that had haunted me for the previous half dozen years: Magnus Martyr, St. Mary Woolnoth, King William Street. The remnants of the Blitz amid the heavy concrete replacement structures added to the layers of history in a city in which I was also resonating with Mods and Rockers.
Eliot’s poem was actually a perfect reflection of the condition of a hopelessly neurotic American adrift in a collapsing culture in the wake of the most disorienting war since the Napoleonic upheavals a century earlier. The times were a mess, just like the Sixties, I thought, although the mess was actually much larger, and Eliot’s response to it was to portray some of the social situations he didn’t like very much, and symbolize the bloody confrontations on the Continent he could scarcely make heads or tails of, because nobody else could either, as the First World War was succeeded by five years of internecine warfare in the former Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires, resulting in the misshapen birth of “faraway countries about which we know almost nothing,” to misquote Chamberlain about Czechoslovakia at the time of the Munich conference fifteen years later.
Coming out of smalltown South with few frames of reference, I was convinced that Eliot’s superimposition of the Grail legends as mystery cult on top of the mess of a crumbling culture represented a real way out for the alienated world of 1964. Or it would if taken onward to the world of the Four Quartets, from Burnt Norton to Little Gidding. But by the time Eliot died in January 1965, a new world was coming into being with its own different messes, and different books in which the writers’ implicit solutions were only reflections of their own bewilderment.
