Dear Joe,
I wanted to thank your for a timely insight: "I am finding that what we experience as a sense of helplessness is actually more of a true understanding of our situation on this planet as individuals."
I had tail-spinned into one of my periodic black moods and -- on crawling out from under my mental rock -- performed my daily ritual of checking your website for new stuff (don't want no emails telling me, I need my rituals). Your advice to Jason the journalism student contained the words I needed to hear. I understand what you mean when you say being heard is no big deal, but believe me when I say that hearing you is important to me!
I've never read Merton (but soon will, thank you Amazon) but I did read Orwell at an early age (and Salinger and Kesey and Ginsberg) thanks to my sister (five years older than I) who was a student at the University of California. Maybe some of them made such a big impression on me because I read them at too early an age, sneaking them out of her room. None of my contemporaries were reading stuff like that, that's for sure.
I think I was 14 when I read One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. I haven't wanted to read it since for fear of being let down. Reading that book at that age at that time (1963) was a violent experience, I seethed with adolescent rage for days. I'm pretty sure that rage lives with me today. But the golden literary spirit for me was Orwell. Down and Out in Paris and London and Homage to Catalonia remain with me to this day. There is no writer I admire as much as Orwell -- and saying that I have to say that the books I like the least are the ones he's best known for: Animal Farm and 1984.
Your comments about journalists and Studs Terkel reminded me of an experience from my childhood, probably the mention of Terkel brought to mind cigars and Chicago and lead me back to this. Consider the following a minor contribution to an aesthetic based on beer and sports.
My Mom and Dad were both physical therapists and for most of my childhood they treated private patients in the evening after work to supplement our income. This was the 50s and they were specialists in polio rehabilitation, so there was no lack of work. Sometimes I got taken along to these patients for one reason or another. I'd be put to play with the kids of parents with polio or polio kids that no one would play with because of the braces on their legs and the stigma of their affliction. The mingling odors of hot packs and steel and leather braces are central to my childhood.
One of my Dad's patients was an old guy who lived alone in one of those pre-World War Two bungalows surrounded by orange groves that used to be so common in Southern California. He smoked stogies constantly and had those rubbery moist lips that heavy cigar smokers often seem to have. A widower, he had reverted to a more comfortable mode of living as men without women often do. He had a fireplace and, rather than chop and stack firewood, he dragged entire logs into his living room sticking one end into the coals. Then he would simply shove the log along as the end slowly burned up.
He regaled me with stories of his hometown Chicago in the first years of the Twentieth Century when he was a young man. He boomed and spluttered, with that long cigar between his fingers, waving his hands around and painting pictures of a world completely foreign to me. He talked about the saloons he drank in, where there were stacks of roast beef and pickle sandwiches for free on the bar. He spoke of the day when they started charging money for a sandwich in the same tones that my Bible teacher used when he talked to us about Adam and Eve sinning in the garden. Paradise lost! The bartenders cried when they had to charge us a nickel, he said.
He described the sawdust on the floor and the beer in tall frosty steins and kids coming in with pails to fetch beer for their fathers who were working on construction sites around the block. Whores and gangsters. Beer and whiskey. For a Seventh Day Adventist kid living in a tract house, this was beyond exotic. Exotic was Ozzie and Harriet and the Mickey Mouse Club, sinful and worldly and exciting. This guy (whose name I sadly can't remember) opened up a world of simple everyday pleasure that had to be sinful, but couldn't possibly be that either. Although it would be another ten years before I sipped my first beer, I wonder if the path to my first sinful mouthful started in that dim living room with the smoky fire place, filled with memories and the stench of cigar smoke and the presence of a man who loved life so much.
Peace,
John in Norway
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John,
Marvelous description! Permit me to I recommend a book:
Drinking, Smoking and Screwing: Great Writers on Good Times
In art and labor,
Joe
