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It’s one of the maddening perversities of human psychology that we only notice we’re alive when we’re reminded we’re going to die, the same way some of us appreciate our girlfriends only after they’ve become exes.
Time makes us all betray ourselves and get back to the busywork of living.
At my cabin on the Chesapeake Bay I’ll see bald eagles swoop up from the water with wriggling little fish in their talons, and whenever they accidentally drop their catch, I like to imagine that fish trying to tell his friends about his own near-death experience, a perspective so unprecedented there are no words in the fish language to describe it: for a short time he was outside the world, he could see forever, there’s so much more than they knew, but he’s glad to be back.
It’s like the revelation I had the first time I ever flew in an airplane as a kid: when you break through the cloud cover you realize that above the passing squalls and doldrums there is a realm of eternal sunlight, so keen and brilliant you have to squint against it, a vision to hold on to when you descend once again beneath the clouds, under the oppressive, petty jurisdiction of the local weather.
A friend of mine reports that all the women he’s polled have been enthusiastic advocates of the bold romantic gesture, but this, he suspects, is because they’re all automatically picturing John Cusack making it, not Steve Buscemi or Peter Lorre or the Creature from the Black Lagoon. Often you don’t know whether you’re the hero of a romantic comedy or the villain on a Lifetime special until the restraining order arrives.
We’ve all worn the diaper.
It’s easy to forget that such lives are more fun to read about than to live. Biographies tend to focus on the delirious highs, like Ava Gardner and Frank Sinatra tossing empty champagne bottles out of their convertible and shooting out street lights with a pistol on their first date, and elide the years when the subject lies alone in bed drinking and watching her own old movies on late-night TV. The goal of a life is not to provide material for good stories.
At such times we are certainly not at our best but we are undeniably at our most human—utterly vulnerable, naked and laid open, a mess.
Anytime I hear about another one of us gone berserk, shooting up his ex’s office or drowning her kids to free herself up for her Internet boyfriend, the question I always ask is not, like every other tongue-clucking pundit in the country, how could this have happened? but why doesn’t this happen every day? It makes me proud of all of us who are secretly going to pieces behind closed doors but still somehow keeping it together for the public, collaborating in the shaky ongoing effort of not letting civilization fall apart for one more day.
The trick, I suppose, is to find someone with a touch of the pathology you require, but not so much that it will destroy you.
I’m reminded of Shakespeare’s Henry plays after Falstaff has died: Prince Hal, having spent his twenties as a drunken fuckup, puts riotous youth and disreputable friends behind and finds a place in life for dignity, honor, and achievement—but it also feels as if everything best and happiest and most human has gone out of the world. As if great things may lie ahead, but the good times are over.
Blanche DuBois once protested, “I never lied in my heart.”
One of the more insidious properties of secrets is that they impose secrecy on the people around them, suborning them all into silence.
It sounds like we’re all telling ourselves the same story over and over: How They Tried to Fuck Me Over, sometimes with the happy denouement: But I Showed Them! So many letters to the editor and comments on the Internet have this same tone of thrilled vindication: these are people who have been vigilantly on the lookout for something to be offended by, and found it.
they share the same flawed premise as most conspiracy theories: that the world is way more well planned and organized than it really is. They ascribe a malevolent intentionality to what is more likely simple ineptitude or neglect.
outrage is like a lot of other things that feel good but, over time, devour us from the inside out. Except it’s even more insidious than most vices because we don’t even consciously acknowledge that it’s a pleasure. We prefer to think of it as a disagreeable but fundamentally healthy reaction to negative stimuli, like pain or nausea, rather than admit that it’s a shameful kick we eagerly indulge again and again, like compulsive masturbation.
It sometimes seems as if most of the news consists of outrage porn, selected specifically to pander to our impulse to judge and punish, to get us off on righteous indignation.
One reason we rush so quickly to the vulgar satisfactions of judgment, and love to revel in our righteous outrage, is that it spares us from the impotent pain of empathy, and the harder, messier work of understanding.
What dooms our best efforts to cultivate empathy and compassion is always, of course, other people.
What exactly these two kinds of people are is a question that’s been the subject of a lot of dubious ideation over the last decade or so. One study at the University of California at Berkeley collated the results of fifty years’ worth of psychological research literature and correlated conservatism to a constellation of personality traits like authoritarianism, dogmatism, intolerance of ambiguity, the need for cognitive closure, and something called “terror management.” It concluded: “the core ideology of conservatism stresses resistance to change and justification of inequality,”3 which even
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Let me propose that if your beliefs or convictions matter more to you than people—if they require you to act as though you were a worse person than you are—you may have lost perspective.
My laughter at this story was fond and grudging, the kind that says: That fuckin’ guy.
The same thing that makes friendship so valuable is what makes it so tenuous: it is purely voluntary.
people are drawn to each other because they’re giving each other something they both need, and they drift apart again when they aren’t getting it or don’t need it anymore.
It’s impossible for me to believe now that there may come a day when Harold and I no longer want to call each other all that often, and we’ll have a hard time remembering what we talked about for all those thousands of hours. But for now, at least, we still have Nothing, except company.
I never saw him meet anyone he didn’t question in depth about their lives, their vocations and interests. They’d be self-conscious at first, but then become increasingly animated, trying to articulate answers to questions no one had ever cared enough to ask them before. It was hard to tell whether he was genuinely interested in people or if he was simply voracious for information, and regarded everyone he met as a new resource. Whatever the case, having someone pay attention to you with that kind of active intelligence made you feel as if your thoughts and experiences were valuable. Ken was
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the essence of creativity is fucking around; art is that which is done for the hell of it.
most of us decide not what to believe but whom to believe. And I say believe because for most people, such decisions are matters of faith rather than reason.
As Kim Stanley Robinson writes, “An excess of reason is in itself a form of madness.”3
he never seemed to understand that exhausting someone in argument isn’t the same as convincing them. In fact it frequently accomplishes the opposite.
Clearly I’m eager to believe that Ken just has an ideological axe to grind, or some neurotic personal investment in peak oil, because if he is deluded, and all I have to worry about is a friend going crazy, it means I can go back to scheming various longshot seductions and wondering whether the Captain America movie will be any good instead of putting solar panels on my cabin and learning how to garden, at which I have always sucked.
We think of color blindness as a defect, but it enables those afflicted with it to see through camouflage.
we all grow up on a diet of stories about the lone voice of reason trying to warn everyone about some imminent calamity, from Noah to Jor-El, and instinctively side with this hero and despise the ignorant ovine masses who jeer him or try to silence him. And yet whenever such a person appears in real life, our reflex is to join in with the mobs of scoffers and call them alarmists, hysterics, conspiracy freaks, and doomsayers.
Nietzsche wrote, “One often contradicts an opinion when it is really only the tone in which it has been presented that is unsympathetic.”8 Or, as The Dude put it: “You’re not wrong, Walter—you’re just an asshole.”
“It’s popular to think the world gets changed by delightful people,” as Rebecca Solnit says, “but agents of change are often obsessive, intransigent, unreasonable, and demanding.”10
who wouldn’t rather read—or write—an essay about rhetoric and belief systems and a friendship’s end than an article informing you that you and your children are probably going to die
The last and saddest lesson I learned from him is that most of us are motivated not by reason or even self-interest, but something more like middle school politics.
Not long ago, when I was staying with some friends who have a young daughter, one of them tiredly reported that there were more “pee clothes” to add to the laundry, and then thought to ask me if I had anything I wanted to throw in the wash. I answered, not to be a smartass but in simple truth: “Not with pee clothes.”
What my friend was really telling me with her laundry offer, which I was too preoccupied with my own Referendum to hear, was that I was family.
The problem is, we only get one chance at this, with no do-overs. Life is an unrepeatable experiment with no control. In his novel about marriage, Light Years, James Salter writes: “For whatever we do, even whatever we do not do prevents us from doing its opposite. Acts demolish their alternatives, that is the pardox.”1
A case for why being content with one's lot in life is so critical in the pursuit of happiness.
The problem is, we only get one chance at this, with no do-overs. Life is an unrepeatable experiment with no control. In his novel about marriage, Light Years, James Salter writes: “For whatever we do, even whatever we do not do prevents us from doing its opposite. Acts demolish their alternatives, that is the pardox.”1
in the rush to get away, this pefson has done the exact oposite, and most tragically of all - in cruel and unfair twist of fate, hurt the person he could have otherwise normally have escaped to when the world felt like just a little too much
One of the hardest things to look at is the life we didn’t lead, the path not taken, potential left unfulfilled.
So it’s tempting to read other people’s lives as cautionary fables or repudiations of our own, to covet or denigrate them instead of seeing them for what they are: other people’s lives, island universes, unknowable.
I’ve also had enough experience with the mentally ill and addicted to know that the people in most desperate need of help are often the most adamantly unhelpable. Not only will you fail to help them, but they will deplete every bit of help you have—your money, time, patience, and kindness—and then move on to the next pushover as unthinkingly as a swarm of locusts devouring a field.
She tends to think the sanest policy is a sort of spiritual triage, saving your efforts for those who are likely to make it with a little immediate aid—a small loan, a job recommendation, a couch to crash on for a week or two—and dispassionately ignoring the moribund. But what do you do if you don’t have the option to walk away, to hang up or hit IGNORE, because you’re bound to someone by obligation or love?
Whether they’re happy or not they are, at least, content. They’ve made their choices and learned to live with them. They have, for better or worse, become themselves.
As I was saying...
Once, after watching me play a piano piece using my own idiosyncratic self-taught technique, which, like my typing, doesn’t use the pinkies at all, Jim said: “You’re weirder than me.” His tone was funny—like a legless beggar checking out the new guy on his block who’s just a torso.
It was irreal!
I also can’t tell whether Jim’s old personality has changed or whether other people’s perceptions of him/her have. Some of my friends thought she was extremely competitive with me, which would probably have gone unremarked-upon between male friends, and is hardly unheard-of among artists of either gender. Some people—most of them female—found Jenny self-absorbed, talking incessantly about herself. I don’t recall anyone making this criticism of Jim, even though he was also very much a center-of-attention kind of guy, the sort who clowns and holds forth as a way of drowning out his fundamental
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wow, very insightul into our biases
tend to think that anyone who conforms too closely to his or her assigned gender role must not be all that independent-minded or brave.
