The Givenness of Things

REALISM

“Grace” is a word without synonyms, a concept without paraphrase. It might seem to have distinct meanings, aesthetic and theological, but these are aspects of one thing — an alleviation, whether of guilt, of self-interest, or of limitation. I have chosen the word “alleviation” with some care. It means the lifting or easing of a burdensome weight. I suppose the moon, when it raises the tide, can be said to alleviate the imponderably burdensome mass of the sea. This is an uncanny phenomenon certainly. I have begun to think of reality, strange and arbitrary as it is, as a kind of parable. Primordial water mantled a young planet — this is true though particulars are lacking. The sun that had made the planet was younger than the water it shone on — also true. In its new light the seas could slide and slap and shine. All very well. Then somehow — again no particulars — a moon appeared, cool and demure but with pull enough to countervail gravity and lift the sea above the constraints of its own vastnesses.

Like most parables this one might as well be called a metaphor. It is meant to suggest the feeling all of us have who try something difficult and find that, for a moment or two perhaps, we succeed beyond our aspirations. The character on the page speaks in her own voice, goes her own way. The paintbrush takes life in the painter’s hand, the violin plays itself. There is no honest answer to the inevitable questions: Where did that idea come from? How did you get that effect? Again, particulars are lacking. We have no language to describe the sense of a second order of reality that comes with these assertions of higher insights and will override even very settled intentions, when we are fortunate.

It might seem pedantic to allude to the classics, or simply arbitrary, though the old convention of invoking the muses is relevant here. The ancient Greek poet Pindar has come down to us only in the many odes he wrote to celebrate victories in athletic competitions, notably the Olympic games. His poems are themselves amazing achievements, so the scholars say, and are therefore basically untranslatable beyond crude approximation. Their subject is always the intervention of the divine in lifting an athlete beyond merely human strength or skill, an experience the poet could claim for himself, mutatis mutandis. Pindar says, “One born to prowess / May be whetted and stirred / To win huge glory / If a god be his helper.” This is another way of describing the kind of experience I am attempting to evoke, which is no doubt encountered across the range of human skill and effort. Our own athletes may deserve a more respectful hearing when they, like Pindar, attribute a magnificent throw or catch to a moment of divine favor. This second order of reality, the feeling that one’s own capacities are somehow transcended in one’s own person, seems to find no expression among us in terms that can be understood as descriptive rather than as merely pietistic. We have YouTube to measure the nation’s pleasure in a spectacular athletic instant or two. In Pindar’s ode, great acts of prowess exalted and sanctified experience on one particular ancient evening “lit / By the lovely light of the fair-faced moon.” And they might well do as much for us, since they can only mean that we are more than we are.

We moderns have defenses against notions like this one, defenses that in effect preclude our looking without prejudice at what we might as well call reality, since so many of us can attest to it. Now that I find myself elderly, I am impatient with the artificial limits we put on our sense of things — in the name of reason, I suppose, or in any case in deference to what consensus will support as reasonable. Out of this rather narrow consensus is extruded from time to time an interest in mysticism or spirituality. By my lights this is a siphoning away of attention, a distraction from a quality intrinsic to brute fact, not to mention the numberless categories of fact available to being described in far gentler terms. Our realism distracts us from reality, that most remarkable phenomenon. I feel that I have been impoverished in the degree that I have allowed myself to be persuaded of the inevitability of a definition of the real that is so arbitrarily exclusive, leaving much of what I intuited and even what I knew in the limbo of the unarticulated and the unacknowledged. I wish I had experienced my earthly life more deeply. It is my fault that I didn’t. I could have been a better scholar of Walt Whitman.

I can’t find excuses in statements that begin “American society” or “American culture,” because in my lifetime there has been a brilliant explosion of knowledge and of access to knowledge. A Martian might think this has been the highest priority of our civilization. And she/he/it might be right. We are groping around on Mars today, piecing together its geology. But if the Martian proposed to an American that all this implied a civilization that is intellectually voracious and highly disciplined, to boot, is there anyone who would not dismiss the notion out of hand? The whole impatience I feel with this constricted awareness I have lived with, and that I see around me, comes from the dazzling universe of contemporary science on one hand and the impressive and moving and terrible record of the deep human past on the other. How many people who have lived on earth could dream of such access? It is a heaven for the pensive and the curious, if they happen to wander into it. (Being who we are, we have an invidious term for all this — we call it information and claim that it somehow displaces knowledge.)

I am speaking again of an odd sort of doubleness. We are archcapitalists, so we tell ourselves and everyone else at every opportunity. We publish hundreds of thousands of books each year. Being archcapitalists, we must proceed always and only in search of profit. So what are we to conclude, except that there must be a voracious market for books not only to sustain this vast output but to make it profitable? But this can’t be true, since another conviction universal among us is that Americans don’t read books. A conundrum, certainly. The objection will be made that publishing in this country is a risky business, by no means reliably profitable. Then a new problem arises: How does this industry persist on such a scale if there is not a lot of money to be made in it? Is this consistent with the disciplining effects of the profit motive? Unscrutinized comparisons are implied in generalizations about the state of the culture. Was there an era in which publishers did not often struggle and fail? Not that I am aware of. Are things different and better in other countries? I don’t know, and I don’t know anyone who does. Government subsidies should not be allowed to blur the issue. If, as a last-ditch defense of the right to weltschmerz, the argument is made that our literary culture is provincial and middlebrow, Philip Roth recently listed seventy formidable and gifted American writers of postwar fiction and called the list incomplete. Any student of literature knows that this is an extraordinary flourishing of a difficult art. For such a thing to have happened, many people have to have been doing many things right. It is characteristic of Americans that they think of the ideal as the norm, at least among the polished civilizations, and feel their shortfall relative to this imaginary standard as a great humiliation. We are so loyal to these formulae of self-contempt that there is no interest in or tolerance for doubt as to their basis in fact. To question is jingoism. That these good writers are read all over the world is called cultural imperialism, though, if the same were happening in another time or place, we would say without hesitation that people then or there were living in a golden age. Yes, we are struggling in a swamp of dysfunction and malicious factionalism. But by the standards of, let us say, Renaissance England and Europe, we’re really not doing too badly.

I may seem to have strayed from my subject. In fact I am offering another illustration of the difference between what we think we are doing and what we do in fact. On one hand we scold and scorn the mass of the populace for what we choose to see as their intellectual laziness and their borderline illiteracy. On the other hand we have a flourishing literature and an educational system that, at the level of college and above, is unique in the world and also in history. I have traveled widely in undergraduate America, as many of you have, too, and I have found the experience touching and impressive, especially as it is found in little-known institutions that will never be ranked nationally for anything at all, since there is no way to measure good faith or intellectual seriousness. These colleges are supported by taxpayers, sometimes grudgingly, and by donors, sometimes opulently, and they go on about their quiet work for generations, groves of academe.

Our literature and our colleges are only two instances of the fact that, culturally speaking, often to our great good fortune, we don’t know who we are or what we are doing. Something intervenes between cynicism and vulgarism on one hand — these are the two poles of our public discourse at the moment — and, on the other hand, what transpires in the study and in the classroom. This is not to say that the effects of both these postures are not felt and that they are not corrosive. Their impact on our political system is obvious and frightening, and inevitable, according to them both. It is to say that the two of them are equally the consequence of an insistently pejorative tone in our discourse, if it deserves the name, as it interprets, or assumes, the nature and tendencies of our culture. Cynicism and vulgarism are cheek and jowl. One teaches us helplessness in the face of the abuses and atavisms the other encourages us to embrace. And still the civilization as a whole is sounder, smarter, and vastly more interesting than it is itself able to acknowledge. How does this happen? And why does it happen?

This pejorative stance bothers me because it is so unreflecting, because it is unshakable in the way of moralistic judgments, because it supplies an adequate intellectual posture in the minds of its many adherents and is therefore doubly unshakable. Uninformed deference to a handful of cultures — all European — is an entirely sufficient definition of sophistication for virtually the whole of our educated class, no matter how much authentic sophistication they should have attained in their own right, no matter how immovably such deference enshrines our prejudices in favor of those who are, in a word, white. Still, our towns and cities build great libraries, love them, and people them. Still, the good and generous work of teaching goes on, much of it unpaid and much, underpaid. There are legislatures and institutions who exploit the willingness of many people to teach despite meager salaries, overwork, and insecurity, and this is disgraceful. But it should not obscure the fact that there are indeed people teaching for the love of it. They are the ones sustaining civilization, not the exploiters of their good faith, or, better, their good grace. Therefore it seems right to me that they should have an important place in any definition of the civilization, though they are invisible to cynicism and to vulgarism. They are, of course, a synecdoche for millions of people who work without recognition or adequate pay and contribute vastly more to the common life than the vulgarians who exploit them or the cynics who dismiss them.

Again, there is the issue of respect for reality. It is odd to treat the country, by which I and commentators in general mean its population, as grasping capitalists on the basis of the fact that 1 percent or fewer control 40 percent of the national wealth. Which is to say that 99 percent, or more, control, per capita, a very small share of it. Why do the 1 percent, rather than the 99 percent, seem to critics and moralists to characterize the culture? Most people don’t participate in the economy of manipulation and financial gimmickry that seems to have produced our dubious elite. Most people know nothing about it. It is an excrescence of computer-assisted globalization whose existence we learned of when it went into crisis and took us all with it. The 99 percent were swept into the capitalist schema by the phrase “class envy”—these people had what all the rest of us wanted, supposedly. Most of us want a reasonable degree of control over the life of the country — that old democratic expectation that the lives of most of us should not be vulnerable to the whims of a self-interested elite. The ethic, for want of a better word, by which this elite has flourished is ethically repulsive by the lights of the population in general. In the ordinary course of life, there are few occasions when one is simply cheated, and I have never heard anyone praised for being a systematic cheat. The whole notion of class is deeply problematic, but insofar as it has any normative value, I think the consensus among the public would be that cheating shows a lack of class, and that this emphatically is no less true when the cheating is done for money. Of course there are candy bar magnates and party favor magnates, and there are fortunes that come with creating things that are useful or beneficial, fortunes that have themselves been put to good use. This has always been true. But the rather abrupt change in the wealth structure of the United States reflects perverse innovation that has had the effect of making most of us poorer. We know what has happened to the wage.

How is this relevant to my subject, to grace? Grace would give the country back to the people by acknowledging the reality of lives lived patiently and honorably. We insist on the word “capitalist,” a word Marx did not apply to us, urging it on ourselves as our defining quality and at the same time deploring it, more on the left, less on the right. It is characteristic of certain terms — capitalist, materialist, consumerist — that their speaker is exempting himself, at least in the sense that any vacancy he feels in his life, any shallowness she feels in her motives, are induced by cultural influences, economic determinism first of all. In this capitalist environment, we can only marvel that we are not quite as grasping as everyone else. Well, not the people we know, really, but those hordes out beyond somewhere who collectively exude this toxic atmosphere. Those nameless wage-fallen others who somehow make Wall Street Wall Street and are overweight besides. Truly, I am sick to death of presumptive contempt of the only human souls most of us will ever have any meaningful relationship with, who offer the only experience of life in the world that most of us will ever have occasion to ponder seriously, that is, respectfully and compassionately, that is, with grace. It is very easy for me to imagine that my life might have gone another way, and that I might be one among those great multitudes about whose inward life nothing is known, upon whom social pathologies can be projected. It really is rather miraculous that someone as ill-suited to the demands of life as I am should have found a niche to flourish in. I have lived long enough to chalk up to age inadequacies that have been with me the whole of my conscious life.

All this is on my mind because we have just come through Christmas. The clichés about Christmas are so utterly weary and worn that it is difficult to mention them even to attempt to be rid of them. Still. The reality of the phenomenon is this — people mob the stores looking for gifts to give to other people. All this is swept into the broad category of consumption so that we can speak of it as if it were greed and self-indulgence in an artificially heightened state. It is really inflamed generosity. All those people are thinking about what someone else might want, need, look good in, be amused by. This by itself must be a valuable discipline. That Martian, and any competent anthropologist, ought to find this great national potlatch extremely interesting. I call it a potlatch because the economics of it are so perverse, from the point of view of the great public on whom it all depends. Every one of them knows that if they chose to celebrate Epiphany, January 6, the day when the Magi actually, traditionally speaking, brought their gifts, or any day after December 25, which most of them know is a date chosen arbitrarily by the early church, they would save a tremendous amount of money. So the investment they are making is only secondarily in stuff, and primarily in a particular evening or morning that is set apart by this singular ritual of giving and receiving. A Martian might conclude that these evenings and mornings focus benevolent feelings that would otherwise be unexpressed, unacknowledged, or merely routine. Families tend to provide, but Christmas reminds everyone that there is joy in it. A small gift to or from an acquaintance is expressive, a kind of courteous language. If we wanted to, we could find a considerable loveliness in all this, but that is prohibited by the conventions of social critique. We would rather think darkly about those materialists who have emptied the shelves of things we had on our lists, who stand with their carts full of loot between ourselves and the cash register.

Since I have mentioned economics — if we abolished December 25 and the de facto sumptuary tax on ritual giving, everything would simply cost more during the rest of the year, since businesses and corporations will have their profits. And the impact on all sorts of countries who manufacture the strange, decorative excesses that are aesthetically comprehensible only at Christmas would be severe. I suspect that in a year or two the phenomenon would simply shift to the Fourth of July. What economic rationalism cannot justify it also cannot destroy — and again, it is the economic perspective of the overwhelming majority that is the issue here.

I began by speaking about grace and alleviation, and now I have suggested that our refusal to interpret graciously a significant aspect of national culture puts a kind of curse on something that is, in itself, far too interesting to fall into the limbo of facile disparagement, though in fact that void yawns for most of what we do. “We” in this context means “you,” and “they.” It means students who have learned that they are intellectually disabled by the fact of their birth and acculturation and cannot aspire to work of the first order. It means the store clerk who told me in the solemn tone usual when these words are spoken that Americans don’t read books — with the implication that we could respect them more if they did. This is a great psychic burden, much in need of alleviation. The Bible pairs the words “grace” and “truth.” Truth in this case would be felt as grace — the model of cultural determinism is sloppy Marxism, or worse. Much of the language about society and culture derives from European “thought,” so called, in the period leading to Europe’s great disasters, from the early nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth and after. This “thought” was taken up with authenticity, rootedness, ethnic purity, all of which made people profound, as they could not be if they were transplanted, ethnically mixed, speakers of an adopted language. These notions spoke ferociously against all Europeans of whom these things were true, and made a nightmare image of dystopia of this country, from Chateaubriand and Baudelaire forward. I will die never understanding why this should be true, but it is true, that Americans enjoy this kind of thing when it is directed against them, or, perhaps, against everybody else on the continent. No, in fact they, we, persist in thinking that profundity only occurs elsewhere.

That they lack authenticity and will never achieve it, that they lack culture and will never be capable of it, that the admixture of foreign influences, actual or perceived, debases culture and language — this is exactly what German nationalists said about Jews. No one should be able to think in such terms without embarrassment. We reject the particulars, relative to ourselves, or try to, but we accept the conclusion. To adopt such thinking as a constraint on one’s own hopes, on the hopes of one’s society, is a kind of maiming, unforced and inexplicable. We have seen these ideas enact themselves as history, and still they live on in our curricula, notably as botched Marxism — though anyone who has read him knows better than to blame him.

That doubleness again. I have the permission of Emerson and Whitman, both of whom I revere, to contradict myself, though I still can’t even seem to do it without discomfort. I have said we have an extraordinary educational culture, which is true, indisputable. Yet I note the oddness of gathering promising youths at great expense into situations where they will learn prejudices against themselves. The culture is itself full of contradictions. Grace is clearly on the side of the impulse to educate, and the burden it must ease is the secondary message that the education is somehow never the real thing, that the students themselves are not potentially creators of civilization, as truly as any thinker or artist they are given to study and admire. Of course there are schools that communicate special entitlement, but this is subject to the same intellectual limits our culture feels generally. My essay collection Absence of Mind is listed on Amazon as phenomenology. On a good day it ranks at about 75,000 among books in general, but it is often in the top ten in a category that, in fact, doesn’t sell like hotcakes. I’m not sure I’d have thought to call the book phenomenology, but I’m pleased anyway, because I am quite consistently the only woman in the upper reaches of the list and may have made a breakthrough of a kind. More to the point, I’m usually the only American, except for the occasional readers’ guide to someone European. Can this be right? Several things may be reflected in it — what is written, what is published, and what goes into the curriculum, which determines sales for books of this kind. Every one of these factors would be sensitive to the assumption that Americans do not write phenomenology. They do, of course, write distinguished philosophy, and Amazon reflects this fact. But Emerson, Whitman, and Dickinson wrote phenomenology before the word, and Melville did, too. Our own tradition, rightly taught, should instruct us. By grace of their example, we might be able to make this beautiful form of thought welcoming to the pensive among us, as all fruitful modes of thinking should be to anyone disposed to them. The gods and heroes of the cities Pindar’s athletes come from supply him with analogies for their transcendent achievements in competition. It seems to me that, to the extent that we offer one another models of high achievement, we imply at the same time that we can only admire from a distance, and demonstrate our loyalty to the ideal of excellence by deference rather than by emulation.

This is not to say, is very far from being meant to imply, that excellent things are not done in this population all the time. It is to say that this is true enough to demand, if we are to honor the grace that is in truth, that this fact be acknowledged. I am happy to report that many of my recent students are immigrants or the children of immigrants. Some of them come from backgrounds of severe deprivation. They have new things to say, and the gifts and skills to say them, shaped by public schools in American cities. This is exactly what is to be hoped for, in an immigrant culture with an open and expanding literature, in a democracy. When we say dismissive things about Americans, do we mean the new young citizen from Guatemala, who knows absolutely everything about the Supreme Court? Whom do we mean? The brilliant daughter of the Caribbean domestic worker, who describes characters like her mother with Chekhovian delicacy? Is there any subset of the population we really want to characterize in the terms and the tone we use for the population as a whole? Perhaps the old notion that “Americans” are homogeneously white seems to excuse this — no harm in ridiculing a secure and self-satisfied majority. But this notion of homogeneity corresponds to nothing. The Midwest is a congeries of European minorities, many of them not so far from deprivation and immigration themselves, as well as newer immigrant communities from every part of the world, and African American communities differentiated by their various origins in the South. If you have looked at Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street lately, part of the literature that has taught us contempt for the vast center of the country, you will know that the recoil is against the ragged and uncouth Europeans flooding into it. These immigrants settled beside communities with whom they had had homicidal histories in the old country, so amicably that it seems pointless to those passing through to look for any differences among them. The stereotype of the population, in any significant part, as homogeneous enough to justify generalization is basically a version of racism and inverted ethnocentricity. If the census reveals patterns that seem to characterize us generally — Americans are more religious than Europeans, for example — this is certainly a consequence of our being populated in large part by minorities who identify with their communities — by our heterogeneity, in other words. Dutch Calvinists and Libyan Muslims check the same box. This may indeed represent a deep consensus, the benign and ironic consequence of the fact that there is no national religion, no Church of America.

That all the numberless affiliations are swept up into one image of ignorance and haplessness is an aspect of the artificiality and insensitivity that saturate the conversation we have among and about ourselves. We are very given to bad-apple sociology — any pathology that flares anywhere within our borders implicates us all and adumbrates deeper and more general pathology. Those who hate Fox News are as persuaded by its representation of the country as are its truest devotees. Yes, the last election was a blow. Things would have been different if there were not so much in the cultural air to imply that cynicism and passivity are a moral stance — the country being so dull-minded, materialist, and so on.

I suppose I might have been expected to speak about grace more theologically, when it is perhaps the major term in my religious tradition. But by my lights I have spoken theologically, since everything depends on reverence for who we are and what we are, on the sacredness implicit in the human circumstance. We know how deeply we can injure one another by denying fairness. We know how profoundly we can impoverish ourselves by failing to find value in one another. We know that respect is a profound alleviation, which we can offer and too often withhold. That doubleness again. A theology of grace is a higher realism, an ethics of truth. Writers know this.