4136. “the dread fear of the unemployed that the world needed them no longer”
We were poor indeed, Roosevelt said, if this nation could
not lift from every recess of American life the dread fear of
the unemployed that the world needed them no longer.
Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., The Politics of
Upheaval, vol. 3 of The Age of Roosevelt
When I was a boy, my family lived for a while near a small farm that we could see from our house (at least that’s what I remember—it was probably further than that). One time, my father took me with him to buy corn from the man who made his living by working the farm. (He reminded my brother and me of “Mr. Green Jeans” from Captain Kangaroo.)
It couldn’t have been much of a living. He wasn’t exactly unemployed—I guess “underemployed” is the term we’d use now: whatever he was doing, it probably didn’t amount to what anyone reading this would call a living wage for himself and his family. I probably didn’t pay much heed to this at the time. What I did notice at the time was the neighborly and respectful way my father spoke to him, and then something my father said to me as we drove away: Jeff, I paid him more for the corn than I would have paid at the store, because he’s poor, and he needs the money for his family.
I’m not sure which struck me more—the extra money (knowing my father, I can tell you it probably wasn’t much), or the friendly respect he paid the farmer. But I’m pretty sure I understood that by my father’s calculations (my father, unlike his first son, is good at math), the two things were on the plus side of the same equation.
4154. “the most surprising openness”
[The Stranger] often receives the most surprising
openness—confidences which sometimes have the
character of a confessional and which would be carefully
withheld from a more closely related person.
Georg Simmel, “The Stranger”
—confidences called forth by the foolish foreigner, fumbling for the correct change (in currency, in custom, in conjugation). Confidences that sometimes have the character of a confessional—confessions of kindness, confessions those who have a lot in common to begin with are not disposed to make to one another. These confessions take various forms: the length of time the woman at the register will spend to show you the exact change required for the ice or the book you are trying to buy; the smile (not sinister) the soldier will flash at you (how peculiar you must seem to him, jogging by the high walls of the military headquarters he is charged with guarding); the countless rehearsals the bro at the bar will undertake with you to improve your pronunciation of the sounds of a language as strange to your tongue as they are mother to his.
I think that they must know something, these confessors of kindness. I think they must know that you are too new on the scene, too baffled, too blue in the face or the heart to attempt any show of knowing. I think they know that all you really want is to only connect (E. M. Forster).
Note: Sólo quisiera dártela monda y desnuda, sin el ornato de prólogo, ni de la inumerabilidad y catálogo de los acostumbrados sonetos, epigramas y elogios que al principio de los libros suelen ponerse. [My wish would be simply to present it to you plain and unadorned, without any embellishment of preface or uncountable muster of customary sonnets, epigrams, and eulogies, such as are commonly put at the beginning of books.] (Cervantes, Don Quijote de la Mancha)
4159. “the dimmer but yet eager Titanic life gazing and struggling on walls and ceilings”
Ruins and basilicas, palaces and colossi, set in the midst of
a sordid present, where all that was living and warm-blooded
seemed sunk in … deep degeneracy; … the dimmer but yet eager
Titanic life gazing and struggling on walls and ceilings …
George Eliot, Middlemarch
It feels bad to want something badly: something well within sight but just out of reach. Of course, not to know, or remember knowing, this feeling brings on its own vexations. For those of us who dwell, just now, outside the State of such aching, frenzied, freezing yearning (having not yet known it, or having known it too well), the closer we are to the sight of it, the further we feel from the fact of it. For those of us who dwell, for now, outside this State, to see it up close is like watching a movie with the sound muted.
But then you remember that they used to somehow make movies without sound. And some of those movies were love stories, loud, somehow, with passionate regard. You may have seen one of those movies. Who knows, in your dreams or your own dark age, you may have been in one yourself. And who knows, maybe you’ll actually be cast in one or another such moving picture, sometime, sooner or later, in a theater near you.
It could happen to you. Stranger things have happened. It’s not like the age of miracles is ever really past.
Note: “that roar which lies on the other side of silence” (Middlemarch).
“They are leaning out for love … they will lean that way forever” (Leonard Cohen).
I am ashamed to admit that I am poor in languages that are not my own, and getting poorer all the time. While I do my best to converse in them, it’s been years since I’ve gotten past primitive pleasantries and rudimentary requests.
Still, I love to be around them. Strange to say, the stumbling and solitary feeling that results from nearness to fluencies that will never be mine exhilarates as much as it exhausts and embarrasses me. For one thing, it’s a little thrilling to be near the knowledge that you never really know most of what goes on between other people, and there’s nothing like getting lost in a forest of alien idioms to force this knowledge on you.
And for another, when I am suddenly deprived of my facility for polishing my pressing feelings into punctilious speech, I am suddenly braced to remember how many yearnings are as dumb and dedicated as the foreigner who tries to speak a language well that he knows in his heart he never will.
Note:
The tumult in the heart
keeps asking questions.
(Elizabeth Bishop, “Conversation”)