Faith in the public

Or, how to turn Twilight into Tocqueville

Dear T,

“You reading anything good?”

This is a question I like to ask people because hearing about the NFL draft makes me want to join Al Qaeda. Once I ask this question I get on a track I actually enjoy — and, as a bonus, I find out what kind of a person I’m actually dealing with.

The sad news is, the person I ask is almost always reading a shitty book; but at least we can talk about what’s happening in one. At which point I can derail the whole conversation and turn it into something interesting.

A blip about so-so Kristen Hannah can turn into a conversation about comic genius Nora Ephron**. A comment about Jack Kerouac can turn into a diatribe against hipsters, or bad poetry, or speed. The field is limitless, and if I’m at the top of my game I can turn the most banal and horrible subject into a short chat about something deep or funny or scandalous. There are no books that are bad to talk about: just people who are too boring to talk about books*.

Sometimes I get surprised by these chats. The other day I asked an 18 year-old what he was reading, and he said “Twilight.”

“Vampires and werewolves Twilight?” I said.

“Yep.”

“Really?”

“Third time around.”

“It’s that good?”

“No — god, no. It’s terrible.”

“Then what the hell are you doing reading it a third time?”

“I don’t know. I figured, people really like this, right? And they made all these movies? So I gave it a go and didn’t like it the first time, and every few years I come back to it to see if it’s good and I just wasn’t old enough to get it.”

“And?”

“Still sucks.”

This short chat was pregnant with all kinds of segues — the first of which is whether or not you can trust the public. It reminds me of an old passage from Goldhammer’s translation of Tocqueville (buy it):

When a man who lives in a democratic country compares himself individually to the people around him, he feels with pride that he is equal to each of them, but when he contemplates his fellow men as a group and sees himself in relation to that great body, he is immediately overwhelmed by his own insignificance and weakness. The same equality that makes him independent of each of his fellow citizens in particular leaves him isolated and defenseless against the actions of the majority.

In democratic nations the public therefore possesses a singular power, of which no aristocratic nation can even conceive. Rather than persuade people of its beliefs, it imposes them, it permeates men’s souls with them through the powerful pressure that the mind of all exerts on the intelligence of each.

Whether or not this is true for everybody is beside the point. It was true right there, right then — and Tocqueville’s Democratic Man was manifested right in front of me because of Twilight.

Yours,

-J

*Anyone who knows me really well knows that I'm obsessed with my library — a collection of hundreds of books, at this point, many of which I'm never going to read, but which I pore over, day after day, and stare at, and sift through.

Why, you ask? Why would I hang on to so many books I've already read? And why would I keep so many books I’ll never read? And why spend so much time looking at books instead of just reading them?

I’ll put it this way: like people, each book is an alternate universe. Each of them is a snapshot of a world and a vibe and a soul. When I look at a book I've already read, all kinds of things pop into my mind: a slew of jokes and truths and stories and feelings — a kaleidoscope of moods, shifting from cover to cover. When I haven't read them, they're a dream about what I can learn, or experience, or fall in love with. And more than this, from all of them I can expect a surprise.

How it feels to be me

Not everybody gets to do this, of course. It takes years of reading to feel this good about a shelf; and if you haven’t read books on one, it takes imagination. Which reminds me of a passage in Schopenhauer:

The world in which a man lives shapes itself chiefly by the way in which he looks at it, and so it proves different to different men; to one it is barren, dull, and superficial; to another rich, interesting, and full of meaning. On hearing of the interesting events which have happened in the course of a man's experience, many people will wish that similar things had happened in their lives too, completely forgetting that they should be envious rather of the mental aptitude which lent those events the significance they possess when he describes them; to a man of genius they were interesting adventures; but to the dull perceptions of an ordinary individual they would have been stale, everyday occurrences.

So yes, I consider myself rich because I have my own library. But the deeper reality is more fun: I’m rich because I’m the kind of man who appreciates one.

**How good is Nora Ephron, really?

You can make fun of me all you want, but for a middle-aged godless feminist Jewish Boomer divorcee, Nora Ephron is smart and funny and true. Yeah I saw Sleepless in Seattle — it was corny. Yeah my wife said the movie Heartburn was misery. Of course it is. It’s about a woman being seven months pregnant and her marriage to Jack Nicholson imploding. But my wife never read Heartburn.

Not to sound too cliche, but Nora Ephron’s prose bubbles and sparkles like a good glass of champagne. And she can take the most horrible subject and make it funny. She went into the bitter lonely world of 70’s feminists and made it look like a clown show. She named it Crazy Salad. She wrote about getting older and hating the way she looked. She named it I Feel Bad About My Neck and proved she was worth loving. By the time I got to Heartburn I had no clue what I was getting into, but I didn’t expect this.

[O]ur marriage had a career as a fighter with contractors. First we fought with the Washington contractor, who among other atrocities managed to install our carpet on the sixth floor of a Washington department store; then we fought with the West Virginia contractor, who forgot the front door. “No one uses front doors in the country anyway,” he said when we pointed it out, which was also what he said about the paper-towel rack and the medicine cabinet. Then we hired Laszlo Pump, a Hungarian trouble-shooter, to clean up the mess the other two contractors had made, and that was when the real trouble began. Laszlo ripped out the living room wall and vanished. We called him at home and got his wife. She said his father had died. A week later she said his dog had died. A week later she said his analyst had died. Finally we reached Laszlo. He said he had cancer.

“He has cancer,” I said when I hung up the phone.

“Bullshit,” said Mark.

“People don’t lie about that,” I said.

“Yes they do,” said Mark. “Contractors do. They lie about everything. Look, we’ll go to his house. We’ll see how he looks. If he looks okay I’ll kill him.”

“We can’t go to his house,” I said.

“Why not?” said Mark.

“Because we don’t know where he lives.”

“We’ll look it up,” said Mark.

“We can’t look it up,” I said. “He has an unlisted address.”

“What are you talking about?” said Mark.

“It’s the latest thing,” I said.

“What kind of person has an unlisted address?” Mark said. “I’ll tell you what kind. The kind that doesn’t want to be dead. The kind that people are trying to kill all the time.”

“Why are you angry at me?” I said.

“I’m not angry at you,” said Mark.

“Then why are you shouting at me?” I said.

“Because you’re the only one who’s here,” said Mark.

I burst into tears. “I hate it when you get angry,” I said.

“I’m not angry at you,” said Mark. “I love you. I’m not angry at you.”

“I know,” I said, “but it scares me. It reminds me of my father.”

“I’m not your father,” said Mark. “Repeat after me, ‘Mark Feldman is not my father.’ ”

“Mark Feldman is not my father,” I said.

“Am I fat?” said Mark.

“No,” I said.

“Am I bald?”

“No.”

“Do I smell of Dr. Scholl’s foot pads?”

“No,” I said.

“I rest my case,” said Mark.

P.S. For those of you who got curious:

What does a top-tier library look like? Smaller than you'd think. Pictured here are my favorite (and necessary) shelves.