“The world as I understood it, no longer exists!”
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© January 31, 2019
Thus not only does democracy make every man forget his ancestors, but it hides his descendants and separates his contemporaries from him; it throws him back forever upon himself alone and threatens in the end to confine him entirely within the solitude of his own heart.
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America: Volume 2 (1834-1835), p. 106
“I don’t say he’s a great man. Willie Loman never made a lot of money. His name was never in the paper. He’s not the finest character that ever lived. But he’s a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid. He’s not to be allowed to fall in his grave like an old dog. Attention, attention must finally be paid to such a person.”
Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman (a 1949 play). Willie Loman’s wife is admonishing her sons that respect must be paid to their father who first suffered a pay cut and then was fired after 36 years of continuing service to the company at the age of 63.
THE COLLAPSE OF RELEVANCE IN “POST WORLD WAR TWO” SOCIETY
Tocqueville noted the unbounded optimism of Americans who were apt to imagine that their whole destiny was in their own hands. There were no limits to what they could do for themselves. They were programmed to believe anyone could go from rags to riches with the plasticity of promise.
The fact that ninety percent of Americans moved little towards the specter of such a destiny failed to register concern. They were lottery hopefuls, reasoning that although the odds of winning might be a billion to one, somebody always wins, right, so why not them?
Arthur Miller stuck a pin in this illusion in a slight but poignant play in 1949. "The Death of a Salesman" first appeared on Broadway four years after the unconditional surrender of Germany, Japan and their allies to the United States, Great Britain and Russia.
Miller anticipated the mad rush of the upward striving American middle class bringing a little reality into the dutiful plodding of fictitious Willie Loman.
Loman is no longer young, past his prime, the camaraderie and support of colleagues now gone, plagued with self-doubts, while stubbornly denying to himself that he has outlived his corporate usefulness, contemplates suicide as his only option to these intractable circumstances.
This scenario has been repeated ad infinitum over the past seventy years not as fiction but as reality finding many Americans anxious, psychosomatic and cynical.
Fewer people than you might imagine arrive close to where they expect to be. They treat life as a game wearing as many masks as they believe necessary. As one person reflected:
“I have an extraordinary number of masks I can put on or take off. The question always is: is there, or should there be, one face which I should present as my authentic face? I’m not sure there is one, or there should be one. I tend to think a person with many, many faces, as is the case with me, can never appreciate the idea of a home much less happiness.”
Then there is my generation of The Great Depression, people born in the 1930s, who experienced the disruptive reality of economic deprivation, then World War Two in which 100 million people perished, eclipsing the lives of a generation of young people in Germany, Japan and Russia.
That was not the case in the United States. War never came to the continental United States. This has had monumental significance giving rise to the expression that the 20th Century was "The American Century."
Once the world was on the other side of this terrible conflict, Americans appeared to have lost touch with the past, with their essence, faith, ideals, values, limits and control.
Local ties, religious beliefs and a sense of community were now less important. Budd Schulberg's clever little novel asked the question, "What Makes Sammy Run?” (1941). It was a time where anything goes as progress became America's most important product.
Baby Boomers (1946-1964); Generation X & Y (1965-1976); Millennials (1977-1995); and now Centennials (1996 - ) ramble ahead with little sense much less interest in America’s decline. Ergo, little learning has taken hold.
We have become a rootless society of homeless minds living in the aberrations of a past that never existed while looking to a future that clearly doesn’t include us.
It is difficult to assess how an audience might react to the candor of this reader who writes from the bowels of the rootless nihilism into which he was forced at an early age.
His words remind me of the screeching noise I once found unsettling as Sister Mary Cecile moved a piece of white chalk swiftly across the blackboard of our eighth grade class at St. Patrick’s Catholic School.
That teacher and that artifact post-WWII are frozen if disturbing music to my soul. Why? Because they were real as are this reader's words.
Words have lost much of their traction with audiences since that world changing war, but not for a boy who escaped Nazi Germany, or for me whose discomfort was limited to screeching chalk across a blackboard.
The title of this missive is taken from the words of the celebrated American journalist Joan Didion (born in 1934) who chronicles her angst not in anger but in perplexity as an expression of Everyman to the pathos of our times.
The mindset of today's America carries an echo of the 18th century’s “Age of the Enlightenment” when European philosophers dipped their quills into ink and created the mantra of the “inner self.” This was a provisional idea that eventually became holistic and the rationale for the American and French Revolutions, an idea that has reverberated most loudly over the past 70 years with the common cry, “me!”
Citizens of the United States and the European West find delayed gratification intimidating, while existentially desiring to have it now, be it now, experience it now, if not directly, vicariously through entertainers, sport celebrities and other idols, creating a passive society engrossed in escapism and wishful thinking. Is it any wonder the Western world is sliding into irrelevance?
A READER WRITES
I’ve been reading the novels of John Cheever and am currently half way through “ Falconer “ about a drug addict who goes to prison and serves time in prison for the murder of his brother. He was born into a family whose father did not want him to be born. Over time he became a drug addict and goes to prison.
Cheever’s personal life was not a happy one either. The “Falconer “is a depressing book, and it got me to thinking again about the world into which we are all born.
As far as we know we have no choice in our birth, and we are put into a world without any knowledge of why we are here. It’s like a prison from which the final escape is death.
During our existence we either search for an answer of why we are here or we accept someone else’s answer. Many of the people who are in charge are corrupt, and we stumble throughout our existence with no path to anywhere.
In my own life my birth occurred a few months in Germany before the start of WWII created by Hitler a nothing in WWI who became a hater of Jews and destroyer which also destroyed my family. We then came to the US after my mother married an American soldier who was nice in Germany, but changed after we got here.
We are driven by our environment and our genes and as far as I am concerned we have very little choice in any of it.
In your writing you find the way things are going disturbing, but from my experience and knowledge of history, it has always been like this. There have been moments of seeming progress, but there is always someone or a group trying to upend things. So it goes as we serve our time here in this world.
MY RESPONSE
I find it rather intriguing that you open with reference to John Cheever and one of the few novels he has written. I haven’t read this book but have read “The Letters of John Cheever” (1988), “The Stories of John Cheever” (1978), and a memoir of the Cheever family by his daughter Susan titled “Home Before Dark” (1984), and a novel by his son, Benjamin, titled “The Plagiarist” (1992).
You are correct. The Cheever family was dysfunctional to the extreme, but John Cheever turned that domestic tension into art as few surpass him as a short story writer.
I enjoyed Cheever’s short stories and letters, and his children’s mainly cathartic biographical studies of the family’s turmoil that led to his father’s art. Like F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose family went from some prominence to disgrace and bankruptcy, so did John Cheever’s parents.
Remarkably, Cheever managed to make a living writing for such publications as The New Yorker and The Atlantic Monthly magazine, receiving several honors, which included a stint at my own University of Iowa’s famous Writer’s Workshop. Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. was in residence at the workshop when I was a student at Iowa.
THE MESSAGE IN THE BOTTLE
There is nothing you say here that I can or desire to dispute. I must admit, however, that I smiled to myself remembering some words Cheever once wrote about himself and his writing:
I can’t write without a reader. It’s precisely like a kiss – you can’t do it alone.
This gave me pause as I write from my soul irrespective of whether readers will connect with what I have to say or not. My arrogance is not complicated. I believe that if you write honestly about life as you understand it, such as the honesty you show here in your writing, you will find an audience.
We are a common species. Someone will read this exchange and feel the benefit of connection with your candor because it is an expression of the integrity of your soul. Leastwise, that is my sense of writing as an art form. We are both readers.
A good bit of my reading is of authors, many long dead, whom I hope to learn something of their commitment to this singular and isolated process of putting words together in the hope of generating some meaning to the reader. With so many distractions today, I doubt if it finds many readers who display such curiosity.
You have the temperament of a writer, indeed, of a poet as you have stepped into two supposedly related if not identical cultures, one German, the other American, and have managed to build a productive life by distilling the essence of both into your soul, your life, and your life’s work.
You have a beautiful wife and adoring children and grandchildren and that does not come easy in the best of instances. It only happens when you work with tireless zeal and commitment to that purpose knowing that you have the role as catalyst to that nuclear setting. This is repeated throughout the world many times over to include some seven billion souls. It is the Ozone Shield to our sanity.
Is there purpose to life? Does life have meaning? Or are we simply detritus in a universe of mainly dead matter, the flotsam and jetsam that washes up on shore like the “Red Tide” to stink of dead fish to which no one pays attention? Or does life really matter?
I know the answer to none of these questions. Quite frankly, I’ve never thought about life in such terms.
Are there bad people in the world? Of course. Are there more bad people than good people? Absolutely not!
I grew up in a household in which the great struggle was to avoid bill collectors, and to make it from one week to the next with a roof over our heads, food on the table, and a modicum of love to ride us on through the next crisis, which we knew as a family was always just over (if not on this side of) the horizon.
My da constantly complained while my mother proved a magician at keeping creditors at bay while making wonderful meals out of fruits and vegetables out of the garden, while challenging the forbearance of our Irish family grocer who exhibited the patience of Job.
It was a happy home despite this. My da never had to file for bankruptcy protection existing as he did below the creditor’s radar.
It was also a cheerful home because we relished the company of each other, having reached the status of a family when I was five, my sister three, my brother one with my second sister not to be born for another nine years as the United States entered WWII.
Irish Roman Catholicism, the Chicago Cubs and the Democratic Party were central to our existence if not necessarily in that order.
My da never went to Mass but would die for his faith; my mother said the Rosary every day, and went to Mass and Communion every week. I took after her with regard to these three passions until I was out into the world. While still holding on to my love for the Chicago Cubs and belief in God, my devotion to the Irish Roman Catholic Church and the Democratic Party waned.
Why am I telling you this?
I cannot quench your foreboding, or ease the pain you have endured as a young person. Nor can I answer why human institutions continue to stumble, fumble and bumble into the future as if with blinders on. Every institution known to man since the beginning of time has been so engaged and, sadly, so often falling short of its appointed task.
We sometimes forget "we are society." Society is not something "out there!" It is in our living room.
John Cheever whom you opened your remarks with played to The New Yorker magazine’s Calvinistic crowd of self-conscious achievers who delighted in this author's clever portraits of the in-crowd sophistication of its intellectual elites. Cheever, of course, an outsider to this coterie, was a tortured soul who distilled his art with formula packaging not unlike that delivered to the same audience by John Updike.
Updike was also a wonderful short story writer but a better novelist, especially his Rabbit series. Here he tells the story of an ordinary bloke and great seer of reality through the refracted prism of that character's mundane life.
Updike was a wordsmith of the first order with prose that crackled like exploding firecrackers on the page to Cheever’s Valium.
Alas, the message in the bottle is neither exploding prose nor sedative tranquilizers but the reality of our imagination against the imagination of reality which we use to carve out a life as authors of our own footprints in the sand.
Destiny is not relevant because destiny never happens. We have only the moment; best we enjoy it as long as we can.
You have touched many lives in your many careers including that as an officer in the United States Army, as a teacher and artist, as a father and husband, grandfather and solid citizen.
Your life has been the message in the bottle that gives meaning to life.
Thank you for sharing.