The Topeka School

by Ben Lerner

Picture us briefly illuminated by the headlights of a passing truck as it circles the roundabout on Greenwood Avenue: a thirty-three-year-old psychologist from New York who once smoked a cigarette with Bob Dylan on Clinton Street and a six-foot-three bespectacled Old World analyst in his seventies who’d been friendly with Einstein. We’d stroll through the punishing August humidity discussing my interns against a backdrop of cicadas. On the one hand, Klaus, surely the only man in Topeka outfitted in white linen, could not take these kids—with their refrigerators full of food, their air-conditioning and television, their freedom from stigma or state violence—seriously; what could be more obvious than the fact that they did not know what suffering was, that if they suffered from anything it was precisely this lack of suffering, a kind of neuropathy that came from too much ease, too much sugar, a kind of existential gout? And then, on the other hand, Klaus took them very seriously indeed; they are told constantly, the culture tells them, although “culture” is hardly the word, Klaus said, patting his forehead with a handkerchief cut from the same linen as his suit, that they are individuals, rugged even, but in fact they are emptied out, isolate, mass men without a mass, although they’re not men, obviously, but boys, perpetual boys, Peter Pans, man-children, since America is adolescence without end, boys without religion on the one hand or a charismatic leader on the other; the...