The Inner Life
By ROGER COHEN- NYT
Published: February 25, 2009
I was reading on the crowded subway when a distraught-looking woman stumbled
into me.
“Please, please help me out,” she said. “Please. I’m trying to buy flowers for
a funeral arrangement.”
She was African-American, middle-aged, wide-eyed. Her words were not addressed
to me but to the whole subway car. The slightness of her build belied the
strength of her voice. So many things are dying at the moment — an entire
free-spending epoch is being laid to rest — that I wondered which particular
burial she had in mind.
“My cousin was a good kid,” she said. “Please, please. For the funeral
arrangement, I need flowers.”
People averted their eyes. Early-evening fatigued, city-churned, they did not
want to hear talk of funerals, much less help pay for them. They were headed
home to hear a new president diagnose the state of America. Some shook their
heads, thinking, “She’s crazy!”
I returned to my reading, a profile of the British author Ian McEwan in The New
Yorker. I admire McEwan, enjoy his novels, often read them in a sitting or two,
but do not feel transported by him.
There is something too carefully plotted in his effects that precludes falling
under his spell. His studied brilliance never quite attains greatness. Still,
he takes a scalpel to sexual need and obsessive violence, the dark undertows of
life, in ways that can be utterly compelling.
I read this phrase from McEwan — “Narrative tension is primarily about
withholding information” — and nodded.
Having part of the picture incites an anxiety, the desire to see it whole,
completed. I wondered who the stumbling subway woman’s cousin was, how “the
kid” died, in a knife fight or from withering illness, what flower arrangement
she had in mind (chrysanthemums? gladioli?) — or whether the whole story was
made up, just a scam.
Piecing together fragments is what we do right now as we emerge from the Grand
Illusion, a time when the human herd frolicked in limitless pastures to the
seductive lilt of Ponzi promises.
We are trying to get our bearings, find out where the bottom is in order to put
one foot in front of the other. Bernard Madoff’s investment firm did not buy
any securities for clients in 13 years. And nobody noticed.
You couldn’t make this stuff up. It’s not only narrative tension that withheld
information produces; it’s $50 billion going poof in the night.
As it happened, I’d been reading McEwan that morning on the late John Updike in
The New York Review of Books: the profiled as profiler. He quotes Updike
describing the facts of life as “unbearably heavy, weighted as they are with
our personal death. Writing, in making the world light — in codifying,
distorting, prettifying, verbalizing it — approaches blasphemy.”
But what beautiful, what necessary, blasphemy!
Perhaps the Age of Excess had to end before we could all turn inward just
enough to rediscover the gold standard of the perfectly formed phrase, and make
connections again. McEwan chooses a sentence from Updike’s “Couples” that could
describe his own work: “Nature dangles sex to keep us walking toward the
cliff.”
It dangles chance, too.
In the same New York Review was Anita Desai’s piece on Azar Nafisi, best known
for her much-loved “Reading Lolita in Tehran.” I’d just returned from Tehran
and devoured the review of Nafisi’s new book, “Things I’ve Been Silent About:
Memories.”
“Reading Lolita” was precisely about turning inward, away from desperate events
— in this case a revolution that had betrayed many of its protagonists,
offering veils of repression rather than long-sought freedom — to the
consolation of great Western literature. It was a book of passionate personal
transcendence.
Nafisi’s new book is essentially a family memoir, but in the tumult of Iran,
her story and the nation’s overlap. She alludes to the terrible misconceptions
of Iranian democrats and leftists about Ayatollah Khomeini in the revolutionary
fervor of 1979:
“Too arrogant to think of him as a threat and deliberately ignorant of his
designs, we supported him. We welcomed the vehemence of Khomeini’s rants
against imperialists and the Shah and were willing to overlook the fact that
they were not delivered by a champion of freedom.”
This was truly a tragic illusion for which a heavy price has been paid by
Iranians, their nation now scattered in a diaspora stretching from California
to Australia. Many ache still for their homeland.
By comparison, the cost of American illusions pales. A decimated 401(k) is
painful, but no exile. It is true, as President Obama said in his first address
to a joint session of Congress: “We will rebuild; we will recover.” That, at
least, is what American history suggests.
As the woman proceeded down the car, I could hear that phrase being repeated —
“Please I’m trying to buy flowers for a funeral arrangement” — until at last it
grew muffled in a kind of ruckus and a smooth-voiced recorded announcement
overwhelmed it: “Courtesy is contagious. It begins with you.”
So does change from within.
