We Learn Nothing

I wonder whether this same fear isn’t beneath our twenty-first-century intolerance for waits and downtime and silence. It’s as if, if we all had to stand still and shut up and turn off our machines for one minute, we’d hear the time passing and just start screaming. So instead we keep ourselves perpetually stunned with stimuli, thereby missing out on the very thing we’re so scared of losing. Sterne’s stairway is a perfect metaphor for all those tedious interstitial moments we can’t wait to get through that make up most of our lives; we don’t even think of stairways as places in themselves, only as a means to get somewhere else.

After that, throughout my teen years, we traded book recommendations, like Nabokov’s Pale Fire, a subtler comedy than Return of the Pink Panther but not entirely dissimilar; there are jokes about sodomy and halitosis in Pale Fire, and its fictitious annotator, Charles Kinbote, is no less clueless or deluded of his own greatness than Messrs. Clouseau and Le Pew.

But there’s something off-putting about these hyperrational types; they’re immune to any appeals to common sense or humor, the for fuck’s sake defense. (Think of hard-core libertarians carefully explaining to you why the fire department should be privatized or heroin should be legal or everyone should be allowed to have automatic weapons.) As Kim Stanley Robinson writes, “An excess of reason is in itself a form of madness.”

Also, almost everything in our society is made with petroleum, from aspirin, toothpaste, and tape to eyeglasses, refrigerants, and anesthetics. And food. This is the truly scary part. Global food production—the agricultural equipment, the fertilizers, preservation, and, of course, distribution of food—is completely dependent on petroleum. It’s no puzzle to biologists what happens to any population when its food supply is radically reduced. When it happens to animals it’s called a die-off. But the implications of this equation in human terms are so unimaginably ghastly that most people would prefer to believe it’s impossible rather than think about it at all.

When you’re a child, your best friend in the world is the kid who lives next door. It doesn’t occur to you then that this is a matter of arbitrary circumstance. When you grow up you like to imagine that your friendships have a more substantial basis—common interests, like-mindedness, some genuine affinity. It’s always a sad revelation when a good friend acquires a girlfriend or a husband and disappears. You realize that, for them, your friendship was always only a matter of convenience, a fallback, and they simply don’t need you anymore. There’s nothing especially cynical about this; people are drawn to each other because they’re giving each other something they both need, and they drift apart again when they’ve aren’t getting it or don’t need it anymore. Friendships have natural life spans, like love affairs or favorite songs. It’s just easier to be mature and philosophical about it when you’re the one doing the defriending.

He told me once, after reading an especially vituperative screed I’d written about the cruelty of the church or the cretinous bigotry of the Red States, that I was a better person than my beliefs. This is one of the things we rely on our friends for: to think better of us than we think of ourselves. It makes us feel better, but it also makes us be better; we try to be the person they believe we are. Skelly believed in his friends’ best selves.

I don’t know why we take our worst moods so much more seriously than our best, crediting depression with more clarity than euphoria. We dismiss peak moments and passionate love affairs as an ephemeral chemical buzz, just endorphins or hormones, but accept those 3 A.M. bouts of despair as unsentimental insights into the truth about our lives. It’s easy now to dismiss that year as nothing more than the same sort of shaky, hysterical high you’d feel after getting clipped by a taxi. But you could also try to think of it as a glimpse of reality, being jolted out of a lifelong stupor.

I was not cheered to read about psychological studies suggesting that most people inevitably return to a certain emotional baseline after circumstantial highs and lows.

It’s one of the maddening perversities of human psychology that we only notice we’re alive when we’re reminded we’re going to die, the same way some of us appreciate our girlfriends only after they’ve become exes.