Here and Now: Letters (2008-2011) (3 page)

I agree too that it is hard to continue to regard someone as a friend once he/she has dishonored him/herself in one’s eyes. Perhaps this helps to explain why codes of honor are kept alive among otherwise amoral criminal bands: the band can hold together only as long as members adhere to the code and do not fall into dishonor in each other’s eyes.

You write about childhood friendships. It has struck me recently how free we feel as parents, particularly as parents of young children, to let our children know how we feel about their friends—whether we approve of a new friend or see the friend as “bad company.” If I had my life as a parent to live again, I would be more circumspect about this. It’s unfair to a child to make him/her try to guess what it is about the new friend that makes the friend unattractive to the parent. Much of the time, what makes the friend unappealing is entirely outside the child’s radar: class snobbery, for instance, or some story going the rounds about the friend’s parents. Sometimes the very quality that makes the new friend alluring—greater savvy about sexual matters, for instance—is what puts the parent off.

As for friendships between men and women, it does strike me as curious that the usual order of events nowadays is for a man and a woman first to become lovers and then later friends, rather than first friends and later lovers. If this generalization is true, are we to think of friendship between a man and a woman as in some sense higher than erotic love, a stage to which they may graduate after mere sexual experience of each other? There are certainly people who think this way: the course of erotic love is unpredictable, they say, it does not endure, it can turn unexpectedly into its opposite; whereas friendship is constant and enduring, can spur the friends to become better people (as you have described).

I think we should be suspicious of accepting too readily this claim, and the consequences that flow from it. For instance, it is conventional wisdom that it is unwise for a man and a woman who have long been friends (“mere” friends) to take the step into physical love. Sleeping with a friend is a tame experience, says conventional wisdom; a good friend does not have the element of mystery that eros demands. Is this in fact true? Surely the allure of incest between brother and sister is precisely that of stepping from the all too well known into the mysterious unknown.

Incest used to be a big topic in literature (Musil, Nabokov) but no longer seems to be. I wonder why. Perhaps because the notion of sex as a quasi-religious experience—and therefore of incest as a challenge to the gods—has evaporated into thin air.

Best wishes,

John

Brooklyn

September 22, 2008

Dear John,

Please tell Dorothy to be more careful. Bronchitis is bad enough, but falling down is terrible. I trust (hope) that no bones were broken. Siri and I are extremely happy that she will be going to Portugal in November.

I have been traveling—and am about to take off again in a couple of days. No time right now to give a full response, but I promise to send one as soon as I return in mid-October.

Curious that you should have mentioned brother-sister incest in your letter. Such a thing happens in my new book (and is dwelled upon at some length)—and indeed, the sex is a quasi-religious experience for the two characters (to use your words). Does that mean I am hopelessly out of date? Probably.

As for admiration, I was referring to friendships between men. But more about that after I return . . .

With a handshake,

Paul

October 28, 2008

Dear John,

I wanted to write sooner but returned to New York suffering from a bad intestinal bug that has kept me on my back until this morning. Fortunately, I managed to get through seventeen days of hectic travels in one piece and became ill only on the final night, after the last of my chores was done. A predictable result, no doubt. You live on pure adrenaline and then, once the adrenaline ebbs out of you, you understand that you’ve pushed yourself too hard. I look forward to Portugal as a respite, a period of calm and composure, the next best thing to a holiday.

In your last letter, you mentioned “athletic sports—activities with no parallel in the rest of creation . . . ,” which reminded me of some brief exchanges about sports while we were driving around France last summer. Would it interest you to delve into this matter? I have read your “[Four] Notes on Rugby” from thirty years ago. Provocative and tightly argued, but if you care to revisit this territory, I would be happy to go there with you. (My own little contribution to the subject is “The Best Substitute for War” in
Collected Prose
, a commission from the
New York Times Magazine
for an issue about the millennium a decade ago. My assignment: Write—very briefly—about the best game of the past thousand years. I chose soccer.)

Possible points to discuss: 1) Sports and aggression; 2) Playing a sport as opposed to watching others play it; 3) The phenomenology—and mysteries—of fandom; 4) Individual sports (tennis, golf, swimming, archery, boxing, track-and-field) as opposed to team sports; 5) The slow and ineluctable decline of boxing. Parallel phenomenon: the universal indifference to track-and-field records. Forty, fifty years ago, the whole world waited eagerly for the first seven-foot high jump, the first sixteen-foot pole vault, the newest sub-four-minute mile. Why the lack of interest now?; 6) Sport as drama, narrative, suspense; 7) Sports ruled by the clock (football, basketball, rugby) as opposed to sports with no time limits (baseball, cricket); 8) Sports and commerce; 9) Sports and nationalism; 10)
Homo ludens
.

With all good thoughts,

Paul

December 6, 2008

Dear Siri,
*

How are you? I am only just recovering from the flu that hit the judging panel in Portugal. It’s been a miserable time. I hope you escaped.

I needn’t tell you how much fun it was to have all that time to spend with you and Paul.

I’m appending a letter which contains the blinding insight I promised you and Paul during our last days in Cascais. Could I ask you to print it out and pass it on to Paul? I thoroughly approve of old-fashioned letters with stamps on them, but in this case I feel I have been out of action so long that I need to harness the energy of the Internet.

Love,

John

LETTER TO P. A.

Dear Paul,

Toward the end of 2008, something happened in the realm of high finance as a result of which, we are informed, most of us are now poorer (poorer in money terms, that is to say) than a few months ago. What exactly it was that happened has not been fully spelled out and is perhaps not known precisely: it is a subject of excited discussion among experts. But no one questions that something happened.

The question is, what is the something that happened? Was it something real, or was it one of those imaginary somethings that have real consequences, like the apparition of the Virgin that turned Lourdes into a flourishing tourist center?

Let me list some real events as a result of which we—as a nation, as a society, not just as scattered individuals here and there—might wake up one day suddenly poorer.

A plague of locusts could devour our crops.

There could be drought, lasting year after year.

A murrain could devastate our herds and flocks.

An earthquake could destroy roads and bridges and factories and homes.

Our country could be invaded by a foreign army, which would pillage our cities, capture our treasure-hoards, cart away our food stores, and turn us into slaves.

We could be drawn into an unending foreign war, to which we would have to send thousands of strong young men while we poured our remaining resources into the purchase of armaments.

A foreign navy could take over mastery of the seas, preventing our colonies from sending us shiploads of food and consignments of precious metals.

By the grace of God, no such calamities befell us in 2008. Our cities stand intact, our farms remain productive, our shops are full of goods.

What then happened to make us poorer?

The answer we are given is that certain numbers changed. Certain numbers that used to be high suddenly became low, and as a result we are poorer.

But the numbers 0, 1, 2, . . . 9 are mere signs, no less than the letters a, b, c, . . . z are mere signs. So it could not have been the drop in the numbers that in itself made us poorer. It must have been something that was signified by the drop in the numbers that did it.

But what exactly was it, signified by the new, lower numbers, that made us poorer? The answer is: another set of numbers. The culpable numbers stood for other numbers, and those other numbers stood for yet other numbers, and so on.

Where does this regression in sets of signifiers end? Where is the thing itself that they signify: the plague of locusts or the foreign invasion? Nowhere that I can see. The world is as it was before. Nothing has changed except for the numbers.

If nothing has really happened, if the numbers reflect no reality but on the contrary simply refer to other numbers, why, I ask, do we have to accept the verdict that we are now poorer and must start behaving as if we are poorer? Why not, I ask, simply throw away this particular set of numbers, numbers that make us unhappy and don’t reflect a reality anyway, and make up new numbers for ourselves, perhaps numbers that show us to be richer than we used to be, though it might be better to make up numbers that show us exactly as we are, with our well-stocked larders and our tight roofs and our hinterland full of productive factories and farms?

The response I receive to this proposal (this “naive” proposal) is a pitying head shake. The numbers that confront us, the numbers we have inherited, I am told, do indeed describe the way things are; the internal logic in the progression of those numbers from higher to lower, from early 2008 to late 2008, describes a real impoverishment that has taken place.

So we have a standoff. On the one hand, people like myself who don’t believe anything real has taken place and demand ostensive proof that it has. On the other hand, those in the know, whose line is: “You plainly don’t understand how the system works.”

In Book 7 of
The Republic
Plato asks us to imagine a society in which people spend their waking hours sitting in rows inside a dark cave, staring at screens on which various flickerings are taking place. None of them have ever been outside the cave, none of them are acquainted with anything beyond the flickerings on their screens. All accept without question that what they see on the screens is all there is to see.

One day one of these people happens to get up and stagger outdoors. His eyes, unused to the light, are blinded, but he does catch glimpses of trees, flowers, and a multiplicity of other forms that do not in the slightest resemble the flickerings he is used to.

Shielding his eyes, he returns to his fellows. This place where we live is actually a cave, he says, and the cave has an outside, and outside the cave it is quite different from inside. There is real life going on out there.

His fellows snigger. You poor fool, they say, don’t you recognize a dream when you see one? This is what is real (they gesture toward the screens).

It is all there in Plato (427–348
BCE
), down to the details of the hunched shoulders, the flickering screens, and the myopia.

All the best,

John

P.S.: I am not unaware that in proposing that we make up a new, “good” set of numbers to take the place of the old, “bad” numbers and install these new numbers in all the world’s computers, I am proposing no less than the discarding of the old, bad economic system and its replacement by a new, good one—in other words, the inauguration of universal economic justice. This is a project which our present leaders have neither the aptitude nor the will nor indeed the desire to carry out.

December 9, 2008

Dear John,

Your “Letter to P. A.” has turned up in Siri’s computer, and she has just printed it out for me. I don’t know when it was written or sent, and if I am days or weeks late in answering, please forgive me.

Before addressing Plato’s cave and the utter collapse of civilization as we know it, I want to tell you and Dorothy what an immense pleasure it was spending those days in Portugal with you. The sun, the conversations, the meals, the unhurried pace of things—all memorable. Yes, we had to sit through some dreadful films, but the chance to see one brilliant film was adequate compensation for our suffering.

LETTER TO J. C.

What we are talking about here, I think, is the power of fiction to affect reality, and the supreme fiction of our world is money. What is money but worthless pieces of paper? If that paper has acquired value, it is only because large numbers of people have chosen to give it value. The system runs on faith. Not truth or reality, but collective belief.

The numbers you refer to are born out of this belief. The numbers represent the paper, and in major financial transactions (stock trading and banking as opposed, say, to buying groceries), the paper has disappeared and been converted into numbers. Numbers talk to numbers, and we are thrust into a realm of pure abstraction. That is why your allusion to Plato’s cave is apt. The numbers are the shadows flickering on the wall. Or, as Siri’s father used to say: There are two kinds of people in the world. The people who work for their money, and the people whose money works for them.

Now we have entered a period in which the numbers have begun to frighten us. I agree with you that the crisis seems unreal, unmoored to any concrete facts. Banks collapsing because of foolish, risky investments in the future cost of mortgages (numbers talking to numbers), multi-billion-dollar bailouts, and suddenly faith in the system (the collective belief in the fiction we have created) is faltering. Yesterday, calm; today, widespread panic.