Saturday night in Pennsylvania. I haven’t done much today—just odds and ends. Between last night and today, I read Absalom, Absalom. It’s such a difficult book. It’s the second time I’ve read it, and I still have to go back so often. Faulkner has almost persuaded me not to read him, but every time I manage to finish one of his novels, I realize it might just be jealousy—jealousy over his drunken, unself-conscious, preternatural prose: prose that straddles the line between perfect and purple.
I think if I had a whole winter of solitude, I could write two novels, two plays, and a screenplay—something like that (all numbers approximate). I feel like I could.
Even on days like this, when I don’t feel like I’ve accomplished much, and when I don’t have outside work to do, I still manage to tinker with projects. Last night, for instance, I revisited a novel that’s been sitting in my Google Drive for months and realized that I’d actually finished a draft—it just needed some reframing. Space and time away from New York lets me do that.
I sometimes imagine a version of literary life, however, that doesn’t involve hustling in the city. It’s hard for me to conceptualize the genteel or suburban, mid-century John Cheever-style literary career; it’s hard for me to relax, mentally or physically. I’m always in this state of low-level adrenaline, a rapture of sorts. Creative busyness has basically become my religion.
This very moment, in front of the fire, I’m rereading William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience. James is one of the great prose stylists in the history of philosophy and one of the great American stylists in general. I think I was drawn to his free-wheeling, poeticizing, pragmatic American voice after reading Faulkner. There’s something distinctly American about that kind of theorizing, quoting, and philosophizing.
I even saw a tweet today that claimed America is only just beginning to break away from European culture in the 2020s, and I think that’s true, in a way—even if it feels like America is breaking away into a kind of nowhere.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about this election represents a longing to return to the pre-empire Belle Époque or Gilded Age America. Sure, that era gets a bad rap, especially in terms of political economy, but it also had beautiful cities, a massive railway network, booming industry, healthy farms, and an ability to integrate immigrants. Maybe that’s too rosy a picture, but there’s something about 1900 America—William James’s America—that resonates with me, that seems like the Goldilocks of idealized pasts.
And maybe not just in America. Tolstoy and Chekhov’s Russia seems better than today’s Russia, though not necessarily in terms of GDP or ease of life. Yes, there was immense suffering, but I can’t help but think Chekhov’s pessimism about his present—that life would improve in 100 or 200 years—reflected too much optimism about the future.
Similarly, it feels like Rilke’s Germany, Proust’s France, or Hardy’s England were definitively better than what came later….
Like James, I’m fascinated by different kinds of religious experience and belief. But I can’t bring myself to fully invest in one system. I see hints of a universal theory, but like James, I know our civilization doesn’t have the instruments to draw conclusions from those hints. I feel the same way about values and questions of how to live—no mode seems absolutely right. I see value in liberalism and conservatism, in the traditional and the postmodern, in the individualistic and the collective, in the sensual and the chaste.
Because of this, I imagine that people with real, absolute faith in a way of life probably find me off-putting, even dangerous. My pragmatism seems suspicious, and maybe pragmatism itself is suspicious. I’ve always felt that absolute choice—a firm decision—can feel like a straitjacket, a trap. I’d rather roam the labyrinth than pretend that any particular intersection is home.
James called it "the field of experience"—the space where truth has to be confronted and experimented with.
I’ve also been thinking lately about how consumerist modernity offers this strange binary choice: you’re either perpetually young or prematurely old. You can be a 40-year-old club kid—single, promiscuous, and drifting—or a 40-year-old stuck in the grind of work and parenthood, bored, and either watching porn or dreaming of escape. It feels like the in-between—the natural evolution through rich, sensuous life stages—is missing.
It used to be that you didn’t choose a lifestyle. You simply lived. You survived, progressed, grew. Every stage of life had its own mystical quality. Aging wasn’t terrifying because it brought wisdom. Parenthood wasn’t terrifying because it was a natural duty. Sex wasn’t terrifying because it was simply an imperative. Life wasn’t optimized or compartmentalized—it was sacred, from start to finish. It was part of something bigger. You didn’t have the luxury of calculating and optimizing.
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One thing I always liked about Teddy Roosevelt is that William James despised him.
I think Chekhov himself never was as taken with visions of better future, as some of his heroes who always make speeches about it, while dong very liitle in the present. They sound pretty pathetic. They're written to sound like it, too, I think.
Then, I might need to re-read -even though Chekhov is one of my favorite writers ever. One forgets, or misses something, or reads though a certain lense at certain time.
That's why I love to re-read by the way.
Thank you, I don't know what else to say,-thank you, really