Two Hundred and Twenty Eight

While reading the latest issue of the NYRB this morning, it occurred to me that the reason why I now read mostly magazines instead of books isn't because I’m old and my mind is failing (although that’s certainly true), so I can’t concentrate long enough to finish a book; it’s because most new books seldom have anything new to say—at least not anything that’s new to me.  Most of the new books I read merely repeat what older books say, and usually not as well. 

Most people nowadays seldom read books, so authors know they must tell them things all educated people used to know, in words of one or two syllables.  Magazine editors—at least editors of the magazines to which I subscribe— know their subscribers read regularly or they wouldn’t be subscribers, and choose their articles accordingly.

On receiving the latest copy of a magazine, I look through it not only to see which articles seem interesting, but also to see how the editor(s) organised the issue.  I understand the art of editing, having done it myself, and admire the skill with which the editor(s) of the magazines to which I subscribe do it.  I like to see how one article refers, en passant, to something that’s the subject of another, and how all the articles refer, however indirectly, to the general theme of the issue.

The general theme of the latest issue of the NYRB is decadence.  But that’s the general theme of everything people write, say and think nowadays.

Cultural survival—how artifacts prized by one generation are scorned as obsolete and abandoned by a later generation, only to be recovered by an even later generation—is the subject of several articles in this issue.  To write about the recovery of the past is also to write about decadence, because more is always lost than recovered.  But it doesn’t matter what we remember and what we forget, because each generation’s wisest people always tell us the same thing—that in order to live a good life, we must love each other—only in different words.  And we never listen, because it isn’t love we want.  It’s revenge. 

Balzac said le secret des grandes fortunes sans cause apparente est un crime oublié, parce qu'il a été proprement fait.   Every society, whatever the laws on which it’s founded, eventually divides into masters and slaves as the antisocial minority plunder the commonwealth.  In order to live together without killing each other, masters and slaves must both forget the crime which created that division and pretend, or try to pretend, they love each other.  

Idque apud imperitos humanitas vocabatur, cum pars servitutis esset.   Whether people pay homage to the laws on which their society was founded, or scorn them as obsolete doesn’t matter, because either way they don’t live by those laws.  Every society is a criminal conspiracy in which the majority resign themselves to being victimized, and the antisocial minority take their surrender as proof they deserve to be victimized.  Not love, but sadomasochism enables us to live together without killing each other.

The artifacts we save, or recover, and used to call civilisation are always ruins, so we’ve learned to love ruins.  All that we build decays, so we memorialize its decay, as in Kafka’s parable leop­ards break in­to the tem­ple and desecrate the holy ritual again and again, until their desecration becomes part of the rit­ual.

We try to build something solid and lasting, but what we used to call civilization is no more than a stage set in a théâtre du Grand Guignol, and history a play in which we’re assigned rôles by the theater’s owner/managers.  Some play their rôles so well they forget who and what they are; but sleepwalkers always wake eventually, and then all that seemed to them solid melts into air.

We all delude ourselves about who and what we are, but none more so than Americans.  This nation, which we claim was founded on the self-evident truth that all men are created equal, was in reality founded on genocide and slavery.  America is not where the dream of democracy we first dreamed in Greece finally became reality, but where we finally woke to the reality that what we used to call civilization was always founded on genocide and slavery.

Black Americans now fill the streets demanding they be finally acknowledged as real Americans, as if the American dream is real for white Americans—as if anything about America is real. 

We can no longer stay asleep, no matter how much we try.  Like Gregor Samsa, we can no longer live knowing who and what we are, so we’ve decided to die.  We have nothing to live for, so we sought something to die for; and being fascists, we found it in war.  Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.

There were several articles in this issue on the USA’s decadence in particular, and the ruins of what we used to call democracy.  The last article I read, and the one most difficult to read, was a history of torture in Chicago.  For decades the Chicago police arrested and routinely tortured mostly, but not only, poor blacks into confessing to crimes they hadn’t committed.  They called it ‘the Vietnamese treatment’ because the commander in charge of the torture program was a Vietnam veteran.

After such knowledge, there can be no forgiveness.