There Will Never Be Anyone Like Me Again

One thing I cherished about my childhood was its frequent sense of delicious boredom.

I was a failure at most of the activities that middle-class children today are practically required to take part in: organized sports, summer camp, and so forth.  I was good at music, and greatly enjoyed music lessons, but otherwise I was allowed a great deal of time to entertain myself as best I could.

At that time, television and its limited number of channels was the only electronic entertainment.  My parents tried to limit television watching, and though I often succeeded in surpassing the limit, I got tired of it past a certain point.

So off I went with my neighborhood friends (with whom, it must be said, I am no longer in touch. It was somewhat evident to me then, and it is completely clear to me now that what we had most in common was age and proximity; by my teen years we had drifted far apart).  We rode bicycles in between neighbors' houses; more than once did I smash my orthodonture on a tree branch - that is what I most remember.  We played a variation of tag called 'chase' that involved hiding places and a much larger play area, which included neighbors' garages and all sorts of other places where the neighborhood children of today would never be allowed to roam; this was my favorite game.  We played board games, inevitably disrupted by arguments.

None of our activities were very edifying or offered lasting pleasure, as they were usually marred by senseless arguments (these were not limited to our sedentary games) which, when I did not provoke them outright, I took perverse pleasure in prolonging.  I wish I could say I benefited from the 'socialization' that group play is touted as offering; instead I increasingly got the sense that group activities were intrinsically unrewarding - for better or for worse, this feeling has remained with me to this day, though at least it has somewhat diminished, fortunately.

In the summers I would spend three weeks with my mother and sister on my grandparents' farm in Mississippi.  I had no playmates apart from my sister and a relative who was a year older.  As my perverse delight in sabotaging interactions with other children had by then already become habitual, I was left to my own devices a great deal.  The television set could pick up precisely one station. So I devised my own entertainments, which included using solar power to incinerate fire ants and making crude toy artillery pieces from firecrackers, small sections of metal pipe, and marbles; it must mean something that I have chosen to mention those two pursuits first, though I can certainly recall other ones.

I had no lasting retreat from the external world.  Like it or not, I had no barrier between it and whatever sense of self I then possessed. I could leave the world whenever I wished, but I always had to return.  Since then, I have become reconciled, however imperfectly, to the notion that the world outside myself is my reference point.

It is no exaggeration to say that children of today are for the most part spared the vexing problem of boredom, as they are offered so many easy ways to escape it that were unavailable to my generation.  Considering all the trouble I went through to grapple with my own boredom and sense of disconnection with others, I could be envious, or just as easily, contemptuous.  If I am actually contemptuous, it is not of the children who are endlessly sedated by automobile DVD players and hand-held electronic devices. I do feel badly for children, in that most of them will never be allowed truly to be alone. In the emptiness and seeming futility of boredom there is sublimity, which could lead to wisdom, though certainly not as a matter of course. I hope it is not as terrible as I believe it is that we are denying children the chance to discover this.

Fear For The Future

Our faith in technology is close to absolute.  Almost without exception, we embrace almost every technological innovation without reflection.  To the extent we are aware of the consequences of technology, we accept them as necessary ones.  Whoever raises questions about the impact of technology on society and culture will not command a significant audience.

Our latest embrace of technology - going back about thirty-five years, one could say - has to do with the benefits and convenience of personal computing and communications, but even from the very beginnings of industry, the benefits of industrial technology and capacity have always outweighed considerations of the costs.  Even today, the voices of concern about economies based on production and consumption are scattered.

We may be proceeding headlong towards - or have even passed - an environmental and technological point of no return, yet our day-to-day concern is not yet visceral, far from it.  This lack of urgency is in contrast to the fantastic predictions of doom that preoccupy popular culture and stem from a seeming fear of the eventual impact of environmental degradation and the ever-expanding reach of technology (forces that can barely induce a shrug in present-day real life).  The permanent degradation of the human condition, brought on by the very same technology and consumerism which have become the principal elements of today's secular religion, has become one of Hollywood's favorite themes.  This may just be a way of projecting onto the future our concern for the present. By foretelling disaster in our popular literature, films and many video games, we obliquely assuage our guilt over our present lack of resolve in the face of trends that, in obviously a very real way, really do threaten the life most of us take for granted.

When I was young there were also disaster films.  But they were generally not about environmental cataclysms and technology run amok. In most cases they were about one-time events beyond human control: earthquakes, air and sea disasters, fires.  They also dealt with the aftermath of nuclear war - again, a one-time event, though obviously of human origin. The "dystopian" scenarios envisioned in many of today's films, on the other hand, have to do with the demise of civilization over a long period of environmental or social decline.  Technology, while not as often the main subject of dystopian cinema, is often portrayed as a malevolent force employed to keep humans under strict surveillance and control.

Complacency would seem to explain our unwillingness to contemplate the consequences of our unceasing development, except in fiction.  But it might be more precise to describe it as displaced fear.  As it is too awful to look seriously at the real signs pointing to what our eventual fate might be, it is much easier to imagine the future implications of our present inaction and leave things at that.

Where Are All The Pseudointellectuals?

I have imagined a scene of which I am perhaps inordinately fond.  The year is 1960 or thereabouts and the setting is the Hungarian Pastry Shop on West 111th Street in New York.  A group of six to ten Columbia students are seated around a table.  Some of them are wearing oversize sweaters and scarves, as it is the dead of winter.  The windows are foggy.  While the students are talking animatedly, the proprietor - the original one - is working behind the counter, studiously indifferent to the youths' loud declarations and accompanying gestures.

The students are debating some issue of the day, such as civil rights or the future of the newly independent nations.  Or they are discussing what existentialism is or the merits of a title published by The Grove Press.

For argument's sake, let us suppose that with our hindsight we know that most of what these students are saying is jejune nonsense, because the point here is not that whether these undergraduates possess or lack perspicacity.  What is noteworthy is that they are so engaged by ideas.

Today I'm not sure whether you could recreate this gathering and its intellectual ferment.  I know you might say, first of all, that they might be too distracted by some sort of mobile device to maintain their engagement in a lengthy public discussion.  That is as may be.  What I wonder about far more is whether large ideas would hold anything like the same appeal to today's undergraduate patrons of the Hungarian Pastry Shop.

Of course, the Columbia student of today is most likely a somewhat higher "achiever" than his counterpart of fifty years ago.  His degree of engagement with learning is equal, or at worst, only slightly less.  Specific things - as it happens, very important ones - might inspire him: locally-grown food, alternative energy, penal reform, and so on. 

But does the student of today embody the same amalgam of innocence, reckless intellectual enthusiasm, and lack of self-consciousness?  More tellingly, does the broader culture, even at an elite university, foster far-ranging intellectual inquiry any longer in quite the same way as it might have 50 years ago? You might object and say it does, but I am afraid it does not.

The Spoken American Language

Almost no native of the United States seems to be able to speak more than a few sentences consecutively without committing a glaring error of vocabulary or grammar.  This is without respect to education level.

Some foreigners, and even some Americans, would gleefully attribute this to our "vulgarity", "stupidity" and so forth.

Here one should point out that a high proportion of the cleverest and most accomplished people in the world are actually American.  Our profound sense of practicality which, blended with a prodigious confidence and yes, intelligence, has resulted in many successful Americans becoming noteworthy well beyond our borders.  Other countries are lucky to have a bare handful of celebrities with international recognition.  We have hundreds, if not more, and their fame is wholly justified.

Whatever else we may be, we are not dull-witted. Yet when our countrymen are called upon to speak, whatever the occasion, the result is sometimes an appalling disaster. Americans seem consciously to avoid any vocabulary choice which might aid them in lending added force to their argument.  They are unable to conjugate verbs that are separated from their subjects by more than a few words.  They are drawn to wrong words or even malapropisms like a moth to candle flame.  Quite often they begin a sentence seemingly having no more idea about how it should end than you or I would.

I have been puzzled by this.  However, I now realize that it is owing to a peculiarity of our culture, and not to a fault in our national character.  Yes, public speaking is no longer taught in school.  But at bottom, I think we are afraid that if we were to speak with greater care, we would seem too arch.  An American can only be so dry before his thirst overwhelms him.  An American has a horror of appearing to be "inaccessible".  By rounding the angles of his speech until his meaning must be guessed; by insisting on being colloquial, however unsuitable the circumstances; by unconsciously insisting that his interlocutor is always his equal by choosing simple words that only approximate his intended meaning -- these are the almost intentional errors Americans feel compelled to use in their speech to mollify their listeners.

What an American almost never seems to want to do, however, is bend his audience with the power of rhetoric, supported by conviction.  We are uncomfortable with the arresting phrase, with the poetic juxtaposition of words.  We do not wish to stir, to artfully provoke, to paint a word-picture of demanding originality.

So while on the one hand it is considerate of us, I suppose, never to challenge one another with speech possessing unanswerable logic and poetic forcefulness, we are also being cowardly for avoiding the slight mental discipline it would take to speak, at the least, correctly.  Once we regained some comfort with the correct spoken language (we would have to lose the fear of seeming snobbish), we could move to improve our public discourse. Our politicians could give speeches that, on occasion, ennoble (we currently lack so much as one first-rate speaker in our political class, including our president*).  We could inject much-needed refinement into our private discourse.  In developing the art of conversation we could actually exalt ourselves.

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We are inundated with language.  But it is of mediocre quality.  Just as perniciously, we are no longer encouraged to treat certain texts with reverence.  For example, the King James Bible is a very important artifact, but it is no longer sacred both as a literary text and as a religious authority. The authority of language, as language, has all but disappeared.

In school, this abdication of authority regarding language takes different forms: grammar has ceased to be taught as a discrete subject; in written exercises, expression and form are accorded equal weight; reading assignments must, seemingly, never be in a language that might be unfamiliar to students.

One can decry this as one wishes.  But the insidious effects of no longer having any supreme guides for how we speak and write are much more widespread than just our school curricula.  Our culture practically forces us to speak to one another in a language but also in a tone that is familiar. While this may be relaxing to some, it is impoverishing and in the end, exhausting and dispiriting if one happens to pay any attention to how words are used.  There could be no harm in once again recognizing that we all occupy a discrete personal sphere which, if properly respected (as circumstances will permit), could result in our daily interactions being a great deal more fruitful, to say nothing of more enjoyable.  Moreover, if we were only slightly more correct in our bearing and speech, we would actually raise ourselves in the estimation of others- that is, if being raised in another's estimation is seen as an important value.  The pitfall to avoid, of course, is appearing stiff, which will never happen if one just uses some common sense.

I would never advise anyone to be more conscious of his speech if I hadn't seen countless encounters needlessly spoiled by a lack of regard on the part of the person initiating the conversation for the condition of the person being addressed.  This is the American vice.  I am convinced that it is our poverty in oral language, every bit as much as it is our famous "rudeness", that makes conversational exchanges frequently so excruciating in this country.

*The famous phrases of our president, at least some of which seem to have been concocted by speech writers, seem to me to be on the level of greeting-card mottoes.

A Loss

The pluperfect subjunctive has effectively disappeared from spoken English, and is all but gone from the written language as well.  I have taken on the task of convincing you that this is a loss worth noting.

"If I had known, I would never have come" has steadily been replaced by "If I would have known, I wouldn't have come," even among the well educated.

I will not decry this from the point of view of a grammarian, however much one might be tempted.  Instead, mourn with me a loss to the English-speaking mind and spirit.

Though the subjunctive is often not noticeable as a distinct verb tense, as it is in many other languages, it has always been very much present in the spirit of English - until relatively recently. 

The past subjunctive, if you don't know, often expresses a non-existent condition in the dependent clause ("If I had...), followed by the impact of this condition on the speaker's action, were it to come to pass, in the independent clause ("...then I would...").  In my opinion, it is one of the most elegant constructions in any of the many languages in which it is used, for it shows the speaker's possession of absolute clear-sightedness in the moment of speaking, contrasting poetically with his or her lack of it at some point in the all-too-recent past.

The contemporary bowdlerization of the pluperfect subjunctive removes the speaker from the exposed midpoint of the action; indeed, the declaration is no longer even the subjunctive.  His chronological placement in the events referred to, both theoretical and real, has been hopelessly muddled; his degree of responsibility is no longer clear.  The power of speech is now the lesser for it.

Changing a Nation

It is not possible for a person to question completely the foundation upon which rests his sense of self.  No matter how wrong-headed, for for that matter cruel and pointless one's way of being, one must justify to oneself why one has the character one has.

In many cases, people will resist attempting even slight alterations in their own attitudes and comportment. They are in the main satisfied with, or at least reconciled to who they are and how they got that way; they can revisit the fundamental parts of their character, but success is never assured.

There are some truths about oneself that one can never fully face, and in this way nations are like people.  If we bear this in mind it might be easier to understand why a country as great as the United States does not have the proportionate ability to change itself.

All countries, like all people, are limited in their capacity for self-reflection.  They are as proud as any person; they always see themselves as virtuous.

The United States has been favored by fortune, but also by talent and yes, virtue - even now.  We have justly enjoyed the fruits of our disciplined labor.  We have created a haven and the conditions for the majority of us to enjoy it.  We demand a lot of others and use more than our share of resources, but to ask us to be less demanding and more mindful of what we use would be to punish us for our success as a national enterprise.

We do not have the culture of our southern neighbor or the kindliness of our northern one, but we have always tried to do so much more than they; our ambitions have been heroic.  So, for us to act as if we were an ordinary country is psychically absurd.  No one, not even ourselves, has the right to demand from us a fundamental change.  Indeed, we have only changed when circumstances have forced change upon us.

Inconveniently, however, other great countries have transformed themselves, often with our help.  They have become almost the opposite of what they were, and the world has then been able to enjoy peace.  We must become the opposite of what we are for the world to survive, while preserving that which is great about us. This is the challenge of a great nation.

Diary: A Hell of Screens

At a restaurant we were recently met by a dispiriting sight: almost without exception, the guests were looking at electronic screens of various kinds, not at one another.

One should have known this might happen, yet I was brought up short.  The possibility of attention from someone or something not present prevailed over an interaction, perhaps satisfying, perhaps not - who knows? - with the person opposite.

It is my own vanity that makes me object to all this. I want to be tolerated in spite of my own dullness; I don't want anyone to prefer something over me.

Will that even remain possible in time?