Actually, I don’t exactly have expectations. I have hopes, and fears. Mostly the fears predominate these days. When my kids were young I could still hope we might not totally screw up the environment for them, but now that we’ve done so, and are more deeply sold out than ever to profiteering industrialism with its future- horizon of a few months, any hope I have that coming generations may have ease and peace in life has become very tenuous, and has to reach far, far forward into the dark.
In Your Spare Time
Actually, I don’t exactly have expectations. I have hopes, and fears. Mostly the fears predominate these days. When my kids were young I could still hope we might not totally screw up the environment for them, but now that we’ve done so, and are more deeply sold out than ever to profiteering industrialism with its future- horizon of a few months, any hope I have that coming generations may have ease and peace in life has become very tenuous, and has to reach far, far forward into the dark.
The second is “Economic stability and growth for the U.S.” That stymied me totally. What a marvelous example of capitalist thinking, or nonthinking: to consider growth and stability as the same thing! I finally wrote in the margin, “You can’t have both,” and didn’t check a box.
But it was Question 18 that really got me down. “In your spare time, what do you do? (check all that apply).” And the list begins: “Golf . . .”
But I cannot find anywhere in my life a time, or a kind of time, that is unoccupied. I am free, but my time is not. My time is fully and vitally occupied with sleep, with daydreaming, with doing business and writing friends and family on email, with reading, with writing poetry, with writing prose, with thinking, with forgetting, with embroidering, with cooking and eating a meal and cleaning up the kitchen, with construing Virgil, with meeting friends, with talking with my husband, with going out to shop for groceries, with walking if I can walk and traveling if we are traveling, with sitting Vipassana sometimes, with watching a movie sometimes, with doing the Eight Precious Chinese exercises when I can, with lying down for an afternoon rest with a volume of Krazy Kat to read and my own slightly crazy cat occupying the region between my upper thighs and mid- calves, where he arranges himself and goes instantly and deeply to sleep. None of this is spare time. I can’t spare it. What is Harvard thinking of? I am going to be eighty- one next week. I have no time to spare.
The Sissy Strikes Back
If you eat your sardines and leafy greens and wear SPF 150 and develop your abs and blabs and slabs or whatever they are in order to live a long life, that’s good, and maybe it will work. But the longer a life is, the more of it will be old age.
The Diminished Thing
Encouragement by denial, however well- meaning, backfires. Fear is seldom wise and never kind. Who is it you’re cheering up, anyhow? Is it really the geezer?
To tell me my old age doesn’t exist is to tell me I don’t exist. Erase my age, you erase my life— me.
So if I “decide”— if my opinion is— that living a long time just means getting ugly, weak, useless, and in the way, I waste no respect on old people, just as if my opinion is that all young people are scary, insolent, unreliable, and unteachable, I waste no respect on them.
Respect has often been overenforced and almost universally misplaced (the poor must respect the rich, all women must respect all men, etc.). But when applied in moderation and with judgment, the social requirement of respectful behavior to others, by repressing aggression and requiring self- control, makes room for understanding. It creates a space where appreciation and affection can grow.
Choosing a Cat
A middle- aged, sedate, homebody cat, suitable for owners in their eighties. Male, for no reason but that the cats I have loved most dearly were males. Black, I hoped, as I like black cats and had read that they are the least popular choice for adoption.
No, I didn’t. Send him back, look at other cats, make a choice of one, maybe not him? I couldn’t. Fate or the Lord of the Animals or whatever had presented me with a cat, again. OK.
Chosen by a Cat
And then he cleans both bowls and goes into the living room and maybe flies around a little bit, but mostly just sits and digests in bliss.
Meanwhile, he usually spends a good part of the day with me in my study, sleeping on the printer, about a foot from my right elbow. He fixated on me to start with and still tends to follow me up and down stairs and keep nearby, though he’s gaining more independence, which is good— if I wanted to be the center of the universe I’d have a dog.
Would You Please Fucking Stop?
Would You Please Fucking Stop?
I guess what’s happened is that what used to be a shockword has become a noise that’s supposed to intensify the emotion in what you’re saying. Or maybe it occurs just to bridge the gap between words, so that actual words become the shit that happens in between saying fucking?
I remember when swearing, though tame by modern standards, was quite varied and often highly characteristic. There were people who swore as an art form— performing a dazzling juncture of the inordinate and the unexpected. It seems weird to me that only two words are now used as cusswords, and by many people used so constantly that they can’t talk or even write without them.
Le roi est mort, vive le fucking roi.
Readers’ Questions
After I’d answered the letter, I thought about how promptly and with what pleasure I’d done so. And I looked at the never- decreasing stack of letters waiting to be answered and thought how much I wanted to put off answering them, because so many of them would be so difficult, some so impossible . . . Yet I very much wanted to answer them, because they were written by people who liked or at least were responding to my work, had questions about it, and took the trouble to tell me so, and thus deserve the trouble— and sometimes the pleasure— of an answer.
They ask large, general questions, sometimes stemming from some branch of learning the writers know way, way more about than I do, such as philosophy or metaphysics or information theory.
Or else they ask large, general questions based on large, general misconceptions about how writers work— such as, Where do you get your ideas from? What is the message of your book? Why did you write this book? Why do you write?
This last question (which is in fact highly metaphysical) is often asked by young readers. Some writers, even ones who don’t actually write for a living, answer it “For money,” which certainly stops all further discussion, being the deadest of dead ends. My honest answer for it is “Because I like to,” but that’s seldom what the questioner wants to hear, or what the teacher wants to find in the book review or the term paper. They want something meaningful.
Writing is a risky bidness. No guarantees. You have to take the chance. I’m happy to take it. I love taking it. So my stuff gets misread, misunderstood, misinterpreted— so what? If it’s the real stuff, it will survive almost any abuse other than being ignored, disappeared, not read.
Having My Cake
And hearing it that way as a kid, I thought, Hunh? but didn’t say anything, because there is no way, no possible way, a kid can ask about everything grownups say that the kid thinks Hunh? about. So I just tried to figure it out. And once I got stuck with the illogic of the cake you have being the cake you can’t eat, the possibility never occurred to me that it was all about hoarding vs. gobbling, or the necessity of choice when there is no middle way.
Papa H
I think Homer outwits most writers who have written on the War, by not taking sides.
But we want it to. “My strength is as the strength of ten because my heart is pure.”
A Much-Needed Literary Award
I couldn’t help thinking how cool it would have been if Mo Yan had used some of his Nobel Prize money to set up a fund for the publication of Chinese authors whose writings support total freedom of speech. But this seems unlikely.
Lem was a difficult, arrogant, sometimes insufferable man, but a courageous one and a first- rate author, writing with more independence of mind than would seem possible in Poland under the Soviet regime. I was very angry at the injustice of the crass and petty insult offered him by the SFWA. I dropped my membership and, feeling it would be shameless to accept an award for a story about political intolerance from a group that had just displayed political intolerance, took my entry out of Nebula competition shortly before the winners were to be announced. The SFWA called me to plead with me not to withdraw it, since it had, in fact, won. I couldn’t do that. So— with the perfect irony that awaits anybody who strikes a noble pose on high moral ground— my award went to the runner- up: Isaac Asimov, the old chieftain of the Cold Warriors.
He felt that the huge label “Success” that the Nobel sticks on an author’s forehead would, as it were, hide his face. His becoming a “Nobelist” would adulterate his authority as Sartre.
TGAN and TGOW
But mostly because I didn’t and don’t think we have much idea of what’s enduringly excellent until it’s endured. Been around quite a long time. Five or six decades, to start with.
I was socially unaware as only a middle- class white kid in a middle- class white city can be.
TGAN Again
The problem is in the phrase itself. “Great” and “Novel” are fine enough. But “the” is needlessly exclusionary, and “American” is unfortunately parochial. The whole, capitalized, seems to speak to a deep and abiding insecurity, perhaps a colonial legacy.
The Narrative Gift as a Moral Conundrum
Plot hesitates, pauses, doubles back (Proust), forecasts, leaps, doubling or tripling simultaneous trajectories (Dickens), diagrams a geometry onto the story line (Hardy), makes the story Ariadne’s string leading through a labyrinth (mysteries), turns the story into a cobweb, a waltz, a vast symphonic structure in time (the novel in general) . . .
But the great biographers make you feel that the story of the life they’ve told has an aesthetic completeness equal to that of plotted fiction. Lesser biographers and memoirists often invent a plot to foist onto their factual story— they don’t trust it to work by itself, so they make it untrustworthy.
Rebecca Skloot, the white woman who wrote The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, spent years researching a vastly complex web of scientific research, thefts, discoveries, mistakes, deceits, cover- ups, exploitations, and reparations, while at the same time trying, with incredible patience and good will, to gain the trust of the people most directly affected by the one human life with which all that research and profit- making began— the family of Henrietta Lacks. These were people who had good reason to feel that they would be endangered or betrayed if they trusted any white person. It took her literally years to win their confidence. Evidently she showed them that she deserved it by her patient willingness to listen and learn, her rigorous honesty, and her compassionate awareness of who and what was and is truly at risk.
It Doesn’t Have to Be the Way It Is
It doesn’t have to be the way it is. That is what fantasy says. It doesn’t say, “Anything goes”— that’s irresponsibility, when two and one make five, or forty- seven, or whuddevva, and the story doesn’t “add up,” as we say. Fantasy doesn’t say, “Nothing is”— that’s nihilism. And it doesn’t say, “It ought to be this way”— that’s utopianism, a different enterprise. Fantasy isn’t meliorative. The happy ending, however enjoyable to the reader, applies to the characters only; this is fiction, not prediction and not prescription.
“Why are things as they are? Must they be as they are? What might they be like if they were otherwise?” To ask these questions is to admit the contingency of reality, or at least to allow that our perception of reality may be incomplete, our interpretation of it arbitrary or mistaken.
There really is nothing to fear in fantasy unless you are afraid of the freedom of uncertainty. This is why it’s hard for me to imagine that anyone who likes science can dislike fantasy. Both are based so profoundly on the admission of uncertainty, the welcoming acceptance of unanswered questions. Of course the scientist seeks to ask how things are the way they are, not to imagine how they might be otherwise. But are the two operations opposed, or related? We can’t question reality directly, only by questioning our conventions, our belief, our orthodoxy, our construction of reality. All Galileo said, all Darwin said, was, “It doesn’t have to be the way we thought it was.”
The Trouble
There is no moral to this story, and no conclusion. Wish me luck with the squirt bottle.
A Band of Brothers, a Stream of Sisters
Can women operate as women in a male institution without becoming imitation men?
Exorcists
The church updated the rite in 1999, advising that “all must be done to avoid the perception that exorcism is magic or superstition.” This seems rather like issuing directions for driving a car while cautioning that all must be done to avoid the perception that a moving vehicle is being guided.
Clinging Desperately to a Metaphor
Unless the people benefit, economic growth is a subsidy for the rich.
IT’S AS SILLY for me to write about economics as it would be for most economists to write about the use of enjambment in iambic pentameter. But they don’t live in a library, and I do live in an economy. Their life can be perfectly poetry- free if they like, but my life is controlled by their stuff whether I like it or not.
Up to a point, growth is a plausible metaphor. Living things need to grow, first to their optimum size, and then to keep replacing what wears out, annually (as with many plants) or continually (as with mammalian skin). A baby grows to adult size, after which growth goes to maintaining stability, homeostasis, balance. Growth much beyond that leads to obesity. For a baby to grow endlessly bigger would be first monstrous, then fatal.
In taking uncontrolled, unlimited, unceasing growth as the only recipe for economic health, we’ve dismissed the ideas of optimum size and keeping the organism in balance.
The competitive techniques of plants and animals are endless in variety and ingenuity. So why are we, clever we, stuck on one and one only?
An organism that settles on a single survival stratagem and ceases to seek and find others— ceases to adapt— is at high risk. And adaptability is our principle and most reliable gift. As a species we are almost endlessly, almost appallingly adaptable. Capitalism thinks it’s adaptable, but if it only has one stratagem, endless growth, the limit of its adaptability is irrevocably set. And we have reached that limit. We are therefore at very high risk.
We have disturbed the homeostasis of the earth, the ocean, and the atmosphere— not fatally to life on the planet; the bacteria will survive the corporation. But perhaps fatally to ourselves.
Lying It All Away
What I’m working hard to imagine or remember is a country whose president asked his people not to eat beef on Tuesdays or chicken on Thursdays because there were people starving in Europe. The Second World War had left the European economy as well as its cities pretty much in ruins, and this president thought Americans would a) see the connection between meat and grain, and b) be willing to forgo a luxury element of their diet in order to give away a more essential food to hungry foreigners on another continent, some of whom we’d been killing, and some of whom had been killing us, two years earlier.
But the success of the New Deal and the socioeconomic network set in place after 1945 allowed a lot of people to assume almost unthinkingly that the American Dream had come to pass and would go on forever. Only now is a whole generation maturing that didn’t grow up in the alluring stability of steady inflation, but has seen growth capitalism return to its origins, providing security for none but the strongest profiteers. In this respect, the experience of my grandchildren is and will be very different from that of their parents, or mine. I wish I could live to see what they’re going to do about it.
Maybe it is quaint, after all. “My fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you— ask what you can do for your country.” Yeah, uh- huh. Oh boy! That one did some fancy lying too. Still, he talked to us as adults, citizens capable of asking difficult questions and deciding what to do about them— not as mere consumers capable of hearing only what we want to hear, incapable of judgment, indifferent to fact.
The Inner Child and the Nude Politician
I looked at the sentence and thought, Did I write that sentence? I think I wrote something like it. But I hope not that sentence. Creative is not a word I use much since it was taken over by corporationthink.
that’s all part of what I like least about the Internet. A “blah blah blah, who cares, information is what I want it to be” attitude— a lazy- mindedness that degrades both language and thought.
A very wonderful statement of the necessity, and the difficulty, of maintaining a connection to one’s own child- self is Wordsworth’s “Ode on Intimations of Immortality.”
A Modest Proposal: Vegempathy
But so far what science has to say on the subject fails to justify the convenient belief that plants are insensate. We don’t know what the carrot feels.
Belief in Belief
I don’t believe in Darwin’s theory of evolution. I accept it. It isn’t a matter of faith, but of evidence.
I see no opposition between accepting the theory of evolution and believing in God. The intellectual acceptance of a scientific theory and the belief in a transcendent deity have little or no overlap: neither can support or contradict the other. They rise from profoundly different ways of looking at the same world— different ways of coming at reality: the material and the spiritual. They can and often do coexist in perfect harmony.
Some of the hokum arises from professional jealousy, rivalry, and fear— priest and scientist competing for power and control of human minds.
About Anger
“It sounded so right,” my mother said to me. “But then I thought— was he telling me to hit a kid when I’m not angry?”
An Unfinished Education, Continued
A cat with a mouse— the cliché example of cruelty. I want to say clearly that I do not believe any animal is capable of being cruel. Cruelty implies consciousness of another’s pain and the intent to cause it. Cruelty is a human specialty, which human beings continue to practice, and perfect, and institutionalize, though we seldom boast about it. We prefer to disown it, calling it “inhumanity,” ascribing it to animals. We don’t want to admit the innocence of the animals, which reveals our guilt.
Someone Named Delores
It’s in the first person, but I don’t know whether it’s fiction or memoir. Many people don’t even make the distinction, now that memoir takes the liberties of fiction without taking the imaginative risks, and fiction claims the authority of history without assuming the factual responsibilities. To my mind the I of a memoir or “personal essay” is a very different matter from the I of a story or novel, but I don’t know if Zadie Smith sees it that way.
I silenced the meddling reptile, but the sentence continued to bother me. “These days I hire someone to do that.” What’s wrong with that? Well, I guess it’s the “someone.” Someone is no one. The nameless nobody hired to answer the mail of a somebody with a name.
Envy, of course, in the first place. I am envious of people who hire a servant with perfect assurance of righteousness. I envy self- confidence even as I dislike it. Envy coexists only too easily with righteous disapproval. Indeed perhaps the two nasty creatures live off each other.
I always had trouble calling Delores my secretary, it sounded so pompous (echoes of “my housekeeper . . .”). If I had to speak of her to strangers I said her name, or “my friend who does mail for me.” But I knew that this latter phrase was one of the mildly devious devices by which we handle guilt, the ways we try to reintroduce humanity into the relationship of hirer and hired, which inevitably, to whatever slight a degree, involves inequality, the raising up of one and degradation of the other.
As for fan mail, letters from readers have always come to me on paper only, my crude but effective way of keeping the volume down. The letters people write me— often with pen and ink, or in pencil, crayon, glitter, and other media if they’re children— are ever amazing, giving me immense pleasure and reward, but they are also never- ending.
Without Egg
Also, I willfully and needlessly disturbed the order of that waiter’s universe. A very small universe, the Viennese café breakfast, but a stable, orderly, perfected one. Better not change something that has achieved excellence. And it was unkind to demand of a person who spent his working life maintaining that excellence to impair it, to do something he so clearly felt was wrong. After all, I could have let him bring the egg and simply not eaten it. He was far too good at his job to have taken notice, except possibly for a mild, commiserative “Madame doesn’t feel hungry this morning?” To have an egg and not to eat it was my privilege. To refuse to let him bring the egg was to interfere with his privilege, which was to bring me a complete and proper Viennese café breakfast. I still want to laugh when I think about it, and I still feel a twinge of guilt.
Nôtre-Dame de la Faim
This is the Oregon Food Bank. Every box in the great cubical stacks between the aisles, every carton, every can, every bottle, every crate, holds food. Every carton, every can, every pound, every ounce of that food will be given to the people of Oregon who haven’t the money to buy what they need to live on.
The Horsies Upstairs
In this sense, truth to fact, insofar as we know what fact is, must come first. The child has to be able to trust what she’s told. Her belief must be honored by our honesty.
I kept my mouth shut. Incredulity is unlovable. I am opening my mouth now because I am too old to be lovable,
First Contact
“There’s the millionaire up at the end of the road,” said Denys. “I’ve turned several snakes loose up there.”
A pleasing thought. The millionaire was never there, nobody lived on his lovely hilltop. Excellent rattlesnake territory.