City Life

I know of no author who can portray today’s big city life more masterfully than Don DeLillo. His words are accurate and loaded with the emotion that city living evokes. The insights he shares didn’t come his way by  majoring in urban studies at some distant university; he got them by pounding the pavement in his native Bronx and the rest of New York City (NYC) before fame ever found him.

In his latest novel, Zero K, he offers a glimpse of modern city life and especially homelessness:

Languages, sirens all the time, beggar in a bundled mass, man, or woman, hard to tell even when I approach and drop a dollar in the dented plastic cup. Two blocks farther on I tell myself that I should have said something, and then I change the subject before it gets too complicated.

«Before it gets too complicated.» These words still give me goosebumps every time I read them. It’s what we have to do in the cities. Find a way to live with the complexities of languages, cultures, religions, mental states and economic disparities. And you have to embrace it too or it will defeat you.

According to U.S. Census data, a total of 192 different languages are spoken in NYC homes, while 156 are spoken in Chicago. And languages reflect cultures; those who speak different languages also have different customs, traditions, moral codes and holidays. At first glance these numbers seem to be cool statistics, but how do you run a city with them? How do you prepare schools and teachers? First responders? Libraries?

Now, despite their relatively harsh winters, both  NYC and Chicago have homeless populations numbering in the tens of thousands. Everyone agrees there is a problem, but agreement on what exactly is the problem is another story. A solution, if their is one, depends on defining the problem(s), identifying the various causes and the level of empathy and tolerance on the part of the overall population when it come to taking actions. Whew!

Chicago Homeless Camp via Chicago Sun Times

I suggest you read the DeLillo quote again. We all feel it to some degree when encountering  a homeless person. Am I being conned? Should I give? If I do, how much? Is he or she drunk? If so, do I help out or not? What about the next person and the next? Should I offer something more —something that may take my time as well as my money? Should I have said something too instead of avoiding eye contact? Is this person critically ill? Should I call an ambulance? . . .

About all any one person can do is change the subject before it gets too complicated.  That and keep the resolve to stay in the city and stay engaged.

The Pleasure of Reading

What’s the point of reading? Is there one? Is it the same for everyone? What follows below is my answer to the first question but, to tone down the suspense, my answers to numbers two and three are simply «yes» and «no», respectively.

To me the most important thing I get from reading is a gradually better understanding of both individual and collective human nature. I get this from reading novels. A good novelist has, above all, a finely tuned sense of what makes the world go round, and what makes the world go round are people in all their individual and affiliated roles. After that what distinguishes a novelist are matters of technique, style and voice. 

A good novelist, in my opinion, begins by drawing the reader into a dream of the author’s creation. Once in that dream, the reader should never be shaken into wakefulness by the author’s own affectations or clumsy writing. The writing must never get in the way of the story. A great novelist does all this and adds to it relevant, intense phrases and observations that call the reader to a newer and clearer understanding of something, usually causing him or her to think: Why couldn’t I have said that?

As an example, I offer a small and powerful quote from Don Delillo’s novel Running Dog, which I finished last week. It is one of his lesser known and studied stories, which, to me, makes this find even more pleasurable.

All conspiracies begin with individual self-repression.

Why couldn’t I have said that?

The more I think about it the more I find it to be true. When you decide to conspire with anyone for any reason, you are forced to repress (give up, at least temporarily) a part of yourself. The conspiracy has to be nurtured and eventually become bigger than all the conspirators put together or they would eventually find it tedious.The original cause(s) may be noble, but the conspiracy de-nobilizes the conspirators. It brings me to a question I haven’t yet found the answer to: Can we ever give up a part of ourselves and still be true to anything?

I have the sense that Delillo’s quote could be rephrased to include conspiracy theorists as well as conspiracies themselves. Running Dog was first printed in 1978, well before the World Trade Center bombing of 1993, the Oklahoma City bombing of  1995 and then 9/11 itself. Conspiracy theories have been raised concerning all three of these events and seem to have grown in number as time passed from one to the next. No doubt the proliferation of Web connections has made it much easier to embellish and foment these theories and the stories behind them; and, let’s not kid ourselves, some relatively small number of them may be true at their core.

So what does a person have to repress in order to promulgate a conspiracy theory? It may be different when different kinds conspiracies are suggested, but in general I would say integrity and a sense of justice are high on the list. We find it easier to blame «outsiders» for just about anything. Just look at all the attempts to connect some level of «foreign power» to the Oklahoma City bombing. Then we had the misguided «Stranger Danger» campaign that effectively took the spotlight of the likely offenders (relatives, neighbors and friends) and turned it full force on «outsiders». Subscribing to unfounded theories can also be an outlet for hatred, prejudice, and fear, mostly of things and people unknown. Whatever value some few of these theories may have, their total can poison a culture, dividing compatriots into factions, and in essence doing the work of an enemy, real or imagined, against ourselves.

«All conspiracies begin with individual self-repression.»

As for reading as pleasure, I’m honored to say that Margaret Atwood has spoken equally for me in her quote found just above the Title. When the reading is pleasurable we learn the most. Strangely enough this quote can be applied across a wide array of readers and readings. I am fully in sync with what Ms. Atwood said, but I can all but guarantee our reading lists are vastly different.