“Are you useless?”
“Yes, relative to an engineer. The humanities! What good has it done for either of us, practically? I’m a caseworker and you’re teaching kids the same things we learned so that they can grow up to do what? At best, they’ll be caseworkers and teachers.”
Loretta nodded her head consideringly. She seemed to be trying to keep from smiling. “But your husband disagrees?”
“Oh, he feels his life has been wasted too.” This time her laughter was genuine.
Loretta, after only a moment more of noncommittal silence, joined her. Then they had coffee, from actual beans that Loretta ground herself, and small hard cookies covered with pignoli. They were imported from South America.
3
Towards the end of his campaign against the Marcomanni, the Emperor Marcus Aurelius wrote: “Consider the past: such great changes of political supremacies. One may foresee as well the things which will be. For they will certainly take the same form. Accordingly, to have contemplated human life for forty years is the same as to have contemplated it for ten thousand years. For what more will you see than you have seen already?”
Dear Ruth—
Alexa wrote in ballpoint (it was after eleven, G. was asleep) in the empty back pages of Tank’s fifth-grade project about the moon. She remembered to stick in the date: April 12, 2025. Now the page balanced. She tried the sounds of various openings in her head but they were all stiff with civility. Her usual Introibo, an apology for being late to reply, was this once not so. (What would Bernie have said? He’d have said, “Clear the air—say what you’re really feeling!”)
First, to clear the air…
The pen moved slowly, forming large upright letters.
… I must say that your p.s. about Tank pissed me off more than somewhat. You and your tone of I Speak for the Human Spirit! You always are so ready to trounce on my values.
It was peanut butter, the very thickest. But she slogged on through it.
As for Tank, his fate still hangs in the balance. Ideally we’d like to send him somewhere (cheap) to be fed orts and crumbs of every art, science, craft, and…
She waited for the last term of the series.
The new Monsanto commercial came roaring through the walclass="underline" YOU LOOK SO PRETTY IN SHOES! YOU LOOK SO NICE IN—
“Turn that down!” she called in to her son, and wrote:
… fashion until he was old enough to decide for himself what he “liked.” But I might as well fill in his Modicum application right now as doom him with that kind of education. I’ll say this much for the Lowen School—it doesn’t graduate a lot of useless Renaissance nincompoops! I know too many of that sort professionally, and the best sweep streets—illegally!
Maybe Stuyvesant is as bad as you say, a kind of institutional Moriah, an altar specially put up for the sacrifice of my only begotten. I sometimes think so. But I also believe—the other half of the time—that some such sacrifice is required. You don’t like G, but it’s G. and those like him who are holding our technological world together. If her son could be trained to be either an actor or a soldier, what choice do you think a Roman matron would have made? That’s a bit overmuch but you know what I mean.
(Don’t you?)
She realized that, probably, Ruth wouldn’t know what she meant. And she wasn’t entirely sure she meant it.
At the very beginning of the First World War, as the Germans advanced towards the Marne and the Austrians pressed northward into Poland, a thirty-four-year-old ex-high school teacher living in a Munich rooming house had just completed the first draft of what was going to be the best-selling book of 1919 throughout Germany. In his introduction he wrote:
We are a civilized people: to us both the springtime pleasures of the 12th Century and the harvests of the 18th have been denied. We must deal with the cold facts of a winter existence, to which the parallel is to be found not in the Athens of Pericles but in the Rome of Augustus. Greatness in painting, in music, in architecture are no longer, for the West, possibilities. For a young man coming of age in late Roman times, a student abubble with all the helter-skelter enthusiasms of youth, it needn’t have been too brutal a disappointment to learn that some of his hopes would, necessarily, come to nothing. And if the hopes that had been blasted were those he held most dear, well, any lad worth his salt will make do, undismayed, with what is possible, and necessary. Say that there is a bridge to be built at Alcantara: then he will build it—and with a Roman’s pride. A lesson can be drawn from this that would be of benefit to coming generations, as showing them what can, and therefore must, be, as well as what is excluded from the spiritual possibilities of their own time. I can only hope that men of the next generation may be moved by this book to devote themselves to engineering instead of poetry, to the sea instead of the paintbrush, to politics instead of epistemology. Better than this they could not do.
Dear Ruth,
she began again, on a fresh sheet.
Each time I write you I’m convinced you don’t understand a word. (In fact, often as not, I don’t even send my finished letter.) It’s not just that I think you’re stupid, though I suppose I do, but that you have so well trained yourself in that difficult form of dishonesty that you call “faith ” that you can’t any longer see the world the way it is.
And yet… (with you there is always that redeeming “and yet”)… I do continue to invite your misunderstanding, just as I keep on inviting Merriam to the villa. Merriam—have I introduced her yet?—is my latest transfigure of “you.” A highly Christian, terribly sexy Jewess who follows heresy the way other women follow the arena. At her worst she can be as sententious as you at yours, but there are other moments when I’m convinced she really does experience… whatever it is … in a different way than I do. Call it her spirituality, though the word makes me squirm. We will be out in the garden, watching hummingbirds or some such, and Merriam will sink into her own thoughts, and they seem to glow inside her like the flame in an alabaster lamp.
Yet I wonder if this isn’t, after all, an illusion. Every lout learns at some point in his life to make his silences seem weighty with unspoken meaning. A single word can extinguish the flame in the lamp. It is, this spirituality of yours and hers, so humorless! “Getting into baskets,” indeed!
And yet… I would—and this is a confession—love to pack a bag and fly out to Idaho and learn to sit still and make baskets or any other dumb thing, so long as I could throw off the weight of my life here. To learn to breathe! Sometimes New York terrifies me and usually it appalls me, and the moments of High Civilization that should compensate for the danger and the pain of living here are less and less frequent as I grow older. Yes, I would love to surrender myself to your way of life (I fancy it would be something like being raped by a huge, mute, and ultimately gentle Nigger), though I know I never will, It’s important to me, therefore, that you are out there in the wilderness, redeeming my urban sins. Like a stylite.
Meanwhile I’ll go on doing what I think is my duty. (We are the daughters, after all, of an Admiral!) The city is sinking, but then the city has always been sinking. The miracle is that it works at all, that it doesn’t just…
The second page of the second letter was filled. Reading it over she realized it could never be mailed to her sister. Their relationship, already rickety, would never support the weight of this much honesty. But she finished the sentence anyhow: