Of the People, Not for the People

"Necessary, sensible and popular reforms, along with more questionable measures that may have been politically expedient, were all being blocked by a small minority of aristocrats. The inertia at the heart of the Republic was alienating many citizens at all levels of society."

This sentence comes not from a history of recent American politics but from Adrian Goldsworthy's 2006 biography of Julius Caesar, which I'm currently reading. Goldsworthy offers a fascinating account of the years of Caesar's rise, years when the Roman Republic saw its institutions begin to unravel in the face of corruption and bitter personal rivalries. It's tempting these days to compare America and Rome, and not in the favorable manner of the Founding Fathers, who deliberately used symbols like the eagle and fasces to invoke the supposed virtue of the ancient Republic when they founded their own. But one thing that Goldsworthy's account makes clear is that the Roman Republic was not nearly as virtuous as its 18th-century champions would have it. It was a place where political disputes were resolved by sword as often as debate, where the government only nominally saw its role as a representative one, and where upstart politicians often ignored the laws to further their own ends. Though it produced some outstanding statesmen like Cicero, it was hardly the marble-columned realm of enlightened debate often depicted in modern imagery. And while America's own past certainly isn't as virtuous as the oblivious rhetoric of tricorn-clad Tea Partiers and Constitutional originalists would have it—doesn't anyone remember the Hamilton-Burr duel from elementary school history? Or Charles Sumner's caning on the Senate floor before the Civil War?—it's difficult to read Goldsworthy's account without feeling grateful that America isn't more like Rome.

Yet there is one aspect of the Republic's demise that is unsettlingly reminiscent of contemporary American politics, and it has little to do with the excesses of Empire or the erosion of virtue that declinists since Gibbon have enjoyed recognizing in their own nations. It's the decline of public institutions, the descent of once vital laws and bodies into sclerotic dysfunction. In Rome, the Senate became not a governing body but a collection of competing individuals, each senator seeking to prevent the others from gaining prestige, a climate unfavorable to reform. Its provincial governors sought personal enrichment over good administration, and ambitious young men like Caesar prosecuted elder statesmen (often on false charges) simply to gain the notoriety they needed to ascend to higher office. Institutions designed to curb rulers' vices and elicit their virtues were perverted into instruments of power.

A similar process is taking place in contemporary America. Everywhere, the Framers' ingenious safeguards against human nature seem to be breaking down. Congress is increasingly unable to pass any legislation, each party blaming the other for sabotaging compromise. The president criticizes congressional inaction while simultaneously using it as an excuse to arrogate more power to himself. The Supreme Court has become a highly politicized body, its members divided along inflexible ideological lines. Everyone claims to be representing "the people," to be opposing the "enemies of the Constitution." And citizens increasingly feel that government no longer works for them, that the only thing senators accomplish while in office is their own enrichment. The budget fight that looms in December and the prospect of another Pyrrhic struggle over the debt limit early next year only threaten to worsen the situation.

This is a perilous juncture that it seems most governments are destined to face. As institutions age and bureaucracies grow and entrench themselves, government at some invisible point becomes more of a burden upon a nation than a source of energy. President Obama campaigned in 2008 as one who would reverse this process; his results have been at best mixed, and understandably so: the task at hand is beyond the power of one man. Certainly Ron Paul's proposal to take a machete to the last 150 years of policy is not the answer, nor is Mitt Romney's belief that government is just another troubled company that needs a dose of private equity. What will really restore America's public institutions to efficacy is the public, though what form such a popular movement would take in these atomized times is unclear. If the driftless Occupy movement is the best the Facebook Age has to offer in the way of mass politics, then we can hardly hope for lawmakers to seriously pursue reform anytime soon.

How to Be Alone

I've got a plan, and it's been making my friends uneasy. In a bid to restore my attention span, I'm going to drop off the grid for the first few weeks of summer. I promise my friends I won't completely disappear, that I'm mainly hoping to avoid Facebook and leave my phone off more than it's on, and that either way, I won't extend my little hermetic experiment much beyond early June, when I begin work. The aim is not to vanish but to re-center, to rebuild some resistance to the constant connection our culture so passionately insists upon.
 
I admit that my reasons for this exercise are mostly selfish: I haven't been able to lose myself in reading for some time, in large part because of the endless tug of one electronic device or another. And I'm hoping to work seriously on a novel next year, which is going to require some focus.

But I also conceive an aspect of philanthropy in my mini-withdrawal, and this is the part that's been hardest to explain to others. I was relieved, then, to see this article in today's New York Times. Entitled "The Flight From Conversation," it's M.I.T. psychologist Sherry Turkle's argument that our electronic devices have created little envelopes of isolation around each of us that impoverish our interactions. We text while we walk and listen to music while we work. We're more connected than ever, but these connections tend to exist at a paradoxical remove, with people who are on their own devices, elsewhere. But the stranger at the table next to us, the colleague in the next office over: these interactions suffer, Turkle says, and that's a problem.

Our assumption, she writes, is that the fragmented communications that we send and receive all day in the form of texts and e-mails add up to complete conversations. But there's no substitute for face-to-face interactions, says Turkle, with their emphasis on nuance, attention, and empathy. Technology encourages us to overlook these things. It "provide[s] the illusion of companionship without the demands of relationship."

What does this have to do with turning off my phone and trying to restore my attention span? It goes something like this: I crave solitude. It offers me time for reflection, for consideration of my own life. This, in turn, clarifies my own values and ideals and allows me to see where I live up to them and where I've fallen short. And this makes me a better friend and a more empathetic human being. Being alone, oddly enough, allows me to remind myself that I'm not the center of the universe.

But lately, I haven't handled solitude so well, in large part because my time alone is increasingly colonized by the alluring tug of one device or another. There's always someone to text or e-mail, always some fascinating new pictures of myself to view on Facebook. I feel my brain being wired differently. I'm usually very good at being alone; lately, it just feels lonely, because I can't help but think of all the people I could be texting. Turkle addresses this very phenomenon: "We think constant connection will make us feel less lonely. The opposite is true. If we are unable to be alone, we are far more likely to be lonely." This largely squares with my recent experience. Sitting alone with some of Byron's poetry for class, I get fidgety after a stanza or two and send a text. It's not a meaningful interaction, and I'd be better served by focusing on the task at hand and seeking company later. But lately, I can't seem to muster up enough self-discipline for this, and the result is a version of myself that is often cranky, frequently lonely, and always overstimulated.

I exaggerate a bit. My situation is exacerbated by the fact that it's my last few weeks of college, and I want to be able to run off to the bars at a moment's notice. So I'm surrendering to these last few weeks of total connectivity, against my more curmudgeonly, Luddite instincts. But come summer, when I'm physically separated from most of my friends, I'm going to shut off my iPhone and pick up Anna Karenina. After all, as Jonathan Franzen writes, "The first lesson reading teaches is how to be alone." These days, I'm in need of a refresher.

Take Heart! All is Well!

Many of Traction's few readers have asked me about the scarcity of new posts. Yes, it's been pretty quiet around here lately, folks, but this is because my writing powers have been focused elsewhere, and excitingly so: I've been turning my brain into a pretzel considering Franzo's new essay collection for the wonderful Los Angeles Review of Books, the writing of which has been something akin to a religious experience, and the publication of which will prove (I hope) to be a nice feather in my cap. Also in the works is an essay about National Geographic in the Sixties and Seventies for The Point, a wonderful magazine back at UChicago, my old school.

If all that weren't enough, I'm almost done with a short story that I like (the first one in a while); The Rumpus killed a book review I'd completed (for good reason, no hard feelings); I'm slated to have a very brief review in the May issue of The Believer (baby steps); and I have only a month left of college, a state of affairs that is producing very complicated feelings.

Once these beautiful storms have passed, Traction will find new footing. I appreciate your patience.

And you have to admit, that last post was a doozy.

Remembrances of Clothes Past

My second venture into sartorial writing (the first is here), once again for Penn's fine fashion magazine, The Walk, is a discussion of how memory and clothes can get intertwined, leaving you with more than the shirt on your back. It also got me a nifty mention in the alumni magazine . You can find the essay here (click on the link, proceed to page 36).

Back There

Seen from an airplane two and a half hours after leaving New York, it seems almost obscene to call St. Louis a city. Of course, I've never had any illusions about my hometown's size, but after an aerial view of New York, St. Louis's abbreviated skyline feels almost comic, a lone leaf blown far from its parent tree. New York's omnidirectional sprawl dwarfed my sense of the compass, but St. Louis from the air is very definitely a point on the map, the surrounding flatlands lending it the dogged look of an outpost.

I was returning from a weekend in New York with my old friend Matt, who would not be coming back home with me, instead going to visit his girlfriend in DC. Matt and I have known each other since we were twelve, and during our weekend in the city, I kept thinking about the strangeness of suddenly finding ourselves ten years older on the East Coast. The first time we hung out, my mom drove us to and from a par three golf course. Now we were nearing graduation, walking around Manhattan without having to call our parents and tell them where we were. Hardly a profound realization, I know. Who hasn't found themselves wondering at the spot where time's conveyor belt has deposited them? But being with Matt underscored that things had changed, that from here on out, things would probably move pretty fast.

Or perhaps not; the first thing I did at home was to go for a run in Forest Park, which underscored the ways in which things hadn't changed. Hours earlier, I'd been speeding along the highway towards LaGuardia. Now, I was running the same loop as always, passing the familiar sight line that goes across the golf course to the art museum on top of its hill. This vista showed me my weekend in New York for what it was: one of those weekends that only college can afford, a weekend of walking the tight rope of adulthood with a net waiting squarely beneath me.

This thought brought a measure of dismay. On the afternoon that I came home last summer, I walked onto my back patio and looked up at the same sky I'd been looking at for a decade, lazily mowed by airplanes, a sky uncluttered by much in the way of buildings or trees. I'd been up there not an hour ago, and back in Philadelphia ninety minutes before that. But I'd traveled farther than an odometer or clock can measure, for suddenly, amidst the whirring insects that one doesn't hear in Philadelphia, I realized that for the first time, my life lay elsewhere. St. Louis was a pleasant pool of memory and family, but the main channel pulsed and flowed back east. It was a sobering and powerful moment, suggesting the separations and risks that would be required of me to pursue that current; even as I experienced the moment, I suspected that I'd look back on it as transformative.

That feeling lasted through my summer in San Francisco and into the fall, when I went to New York for the day to seek career advice from a friend's uncle. I've always enjoyed visiting New York without ever feeling I could live there, its impersonality alternately embracing and ambushing me. But on this day, a beautiful specimen of Indian Summer, the self-sufficiency that had bloomed on my patio in St. Louis found a natural correspondent in New York's ceaseless vibrations. I read in Central Park; I strolled along Madison Avenue; I received an intimation of what my life could be.

Of course, any place to which you don't belong sends you that kind of signal, for good or ill. Even in St. Louis, there's a place where I can endlessly ponder counterfactuals: Washington University, which has become, as I told a friend before spring break, my home away from home at home. "They should give you an honorary diploma," said my friend Dave, a student there.

I won't go so far as that, but I have spent a lot of time there: I worked at the law school after freshman year of college and visited Dave just about every break I had. During my sophomore year at UChicago, my friend Lucas and I traveled to St. Louis to watch Chicago's baseball team play there. A thunderstorm canceled the Maroons' visit, but the track team hadn't been deterred, and we saw a number of friends run and throw before a tornado warning drove us into Dave's dorm for shelter. I started my senior thesis there in August; last week, in the same spot, I brought it to a close with two long days in Olin Library.

There is nothing lonelier than a college campus at 4 pm, Friday, except for a college campus at 4 pm Friday that isn't yours. The Friday in question was Wash U's last day of class before spring break, and so I watched through the windows as a bustling campus turned into a deserted one, the emptiness sharpened by the thought of taxis streaming to the airport, where planes bound for Mexico or the Bahamas waited. I took a break outside, noticing for the first time that Wash U's quadrangle is much wider than Chicago's or, say, Princeton's, the order of campus geometry married to the freedom of Midwestern acreage. The buildings there don't tower above you. Rather, they loom at the periphery, which put me in mind of one of de Chirico's piazzas as the sun set over the abandoned campus.

I've had my share of lonely moments at Wash U. Not unpleasantly lonely; I wouldn't keep returning otherwise. What hanging around the campus affords is communal anonymity, such as can be found in big cities. But Manhattan is always something of a novelty to me, whereas Wash U., like a work of good fiction, offers an alteration of the familiar. I go there and see the same architecture, the same type of student, the same books, the same Greek letters sewn on the same tote bags as I do at my school. And I see a community that I could join fairly seamlessly. To be sure, no one guesses that I'm not a student. Last Friday, entering the library, I was asked to take a survey on the library's services. I gladly obliged.

A day earlier, on Thursday, I had visited my high school, where I'll be teaching English next year. I loved my high school years, and the nostalgia I harbored for them impeded my transition to college. I transferred after my second year at Chicago; unsurprisingly, one of the schools I considered moving to was Washington University. This was a bad idea for a number of reasons, the most salient one being that the reasons I like Wash U. so much would be shattered by enrolling there. I enjoy being part of the bustle of campus without knowing anyone but Dave. I enjoy studying in a beautiful library without hoping a certain girl will text me to meet for coffee. I enjoy everyone thinking I belong there when I don't.

Saul Bellow once said that he loved solitude, but especially when company is available. I sympathize. It took a while to admit to this fundamental tension in my character, just as it took me a while to proportion my affection for my high school after I'd left. It was only after transferring, after I'd gotten a whiff of what my life might be like beyond the Midwest, that my high school no longer seemed like the largest place on earth. Suddenly, the students I saw when I visited looked very young, belying my sense that as an 18-year-old I'd arrived at the height of my mental and physical capacities.

As I write, I'm on the verge of teaching where I once learned, and the adjustment to life after high school is about complete, just in time for my college graduation. If there's any lingering doubt about which side of the adulthood divide I belong on, my view from behind the desk next year should put it to rest. Still, it was bewildering to find myself back in St. Louis, back in my high school, just as I've begun to look beyond those places. Is this really what I want? I found myself thinking during my visit. If I've finally solved the problem of high school, I've only begun to tackle the problem of college, which my location in St. Louis next year will only magnify: Instead of trying to quell the feeling that everyone I know is elsewhere on campus having a great time, I'll have to quell the feeling that everyone I know is on one of the coasts, having a great time. The challenge remains: How to reconcile the need for solitude with the need for community? As Bellow well knew, you can't always write in your study while a party unfolds in your living room.

I sat in on several classes at my high school, including one taught by my friend and mentor Steve. He was the last teacher I had on the last day of senior year, and I hadn't seen him lecture since. Watching him speak about Othello in front of a group of sleepy 17-year old boys, passionately making the case for tragedy in an age that increasingly asks us to think that comedy is only an app download or an Amazon purchase away, I thought of how many times Steve had poured himself into a class like this since I'd graduated—how many anonymous March mornings spent trying to get young men to think and feel while the culture told them to play and snooze—and I thought of what I had been doing in the meantime in college, a lot of snoozing that looked like thinking, and a lot of thinking that looked like snoozing. College has been strange and painful and is coming to a close just as I'm making it work, and this is all right with me. Sitting in 201 while many of my friends were waking up from their margarita hangovers on some Caribbean isle, I thought of getting to spend another year around Steve, and around Jim and Chuck and Rich and all my other colleagues-to-be, all of whom I met in the fall of 2004, when I was a boy; I thought of the privilege of returning to one of the formative sites of my youth not as a dreamy tourist, but as an adult; I thought of the challenge of taking a year to stand in front of a group of surly 17-year-olds and try to make the case for literature half as eloquently as Steve was doing now; and I thought of how there was no longer any doubt that next year, I had to come on home.

The Story He Knows

A synopsis: a pair of comic-book artists—Jewish, Brooklyn-born—rise to postwar success, only to deal, decades later, with the strain an exploitative contract places on their relationship, a strain partially eased by an enigmatic gift from beyond the grave. A liberal dose of Jewish lore bejewels the story, and the writer's ease with obscure corners of the dictionary ("emulsified", "emolument", "picayune") makes the language both vivifying and trying.

Sound familiar?

If you have even a slight acquaintance with contemporary American literature, there's a good chance you've identified the author of this story as Michael Chabon—and you'd be correct. But the crude outline offered above does not refer to his incredible 2000 novel, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. Rather, it describes a short story in the current New Yorker entitled "Citizen Conn." I was excited to see Chabon's name in the magazine's table of contents—he's been fairly silent in recent years—but a few paragraphs made me skeptical at the familiarity of it all. The sweeping, discursive paragraphs that bring neophytes up to speed on the Golden Age of American comics; the tandem of misfits who transcend their awkwardness and whose names, when combined, ring as heroically as that of their creations (in this case, Feather and Conn, responsible for series like The New Frontiersmen and Mister Arcane); the thematic linkage of the worship of God with the worship of fictional heroes: All that again? I thought.

All that again, answered the story. And against my English-major instincts, I found these elements as improbably engrossing in short form as they had been across the nearly-700 pages of Kavalier & Clay, one of the finest novels I've read in the last five years. Still, suspicion lingered on my reader's palate; it all seemed too easy. Doesn't Chabon have any other tricks up his sleeve?

I thought about that question in the hours after finishing the story. What eventually came to mind was a distantly-remembered quotation, its author forgotten: "Every writer only has one story to tell." It's an axiom that sits uncomfortably alongside the revered notion of the artist-as-genius, but think about it: Wharton and Fitzgerald made careers out of Americans' pursuit of wealth; Bellow never strayed far from the beleaguered modern intellect; Franzen examines upper-middle-class families feeling the tug between heartland conservatism and coastal cosmopolitanism. Even giants like Melville and Tolstoy wove one tapestry; theirs just happened to depict the whole of life. One might say of Borges: "Couldn't he write about anything other than infinity?"

The notion that an author might be penalized for revisiting a favored subject seems laughable when applied to such giants of the past (Franzen excluded), yet it nags us where contemporary literature is concerned. I know as little about whaling as I do about comic books, but the latter raises more doubts about its renewability as a literary resource. True, the ocean brings to the fore issues of man's loneliness and death's imminence and God's distance, and it's proved a fruitful symbol since the author of Exodus parted the Red Sea. Comic books do not boast such a history.

But it's not simply a matter of venerability. A bigger obstacle is that comic books are inherently hermetic, a fixture of the distinctly postwar phenomenon of geek culture. Like a religion, comics are governed by a self-contained system of shibboleths and arcana, breathtaking to the initiate but often off-putting to those on the outside. In Melville's day, whaling was a rarefied pursuit because few people had the mettle necessary to endure two-year voyages in pursuit of leviathans. Comic books, on the other hand, are available to anyone who can read, but it's a certain type of person who takes a deep interest in crime-fighting underwear models. One can be nerdy about an interest in whaling, but an interest in comic books, in this day and age, is nerdy by definition. It's the old high art/low art debate, with a wrinkle: rather than an object of mass attention vying for serious critical consideration, it's an object of narrow and fervent adoration. It's not the rabble that wants to be let in to the canon; it's a whole new set of high priests. Naturally, the old guard are uncomfortable about such things, so that even after Kavalier & Clay won a Pulitzer and near-universal acclaim, Chabon and Jonathan Lethem have each published essay collections that are largely apologies for aestheticizing low culture.

One has to admit that their central defense is fairly commonsensical: who are we to say that there's a considerable difference in the tasks facing Melville and Chabon? Don't they share the task of making the esoteric universal? This is not a question of finding an audience; it's a question of creating works of art rather than encyclopedia entries. From this angle, the teller matters more than the subject, and it's for this reason that I found more to love in a paragraph of "Citizen Conn" than in the entirety of Chad Harbach's Art of Fielding. In that book, baseball, the Great American Pastime, becomes a wooden metaphor for...well, for something, whereas Chabon makes comic books into a repository of national longing; the narrator's husband, we are told, "viewed his life as a perpetual struggle to retain some starry residue of the sense of wonder with which the drawings of Mort Feather had imbued his early adolescence."

Chabon successfully sustained this project throughout Kavalier & Clay, offering not only an infectiously passionate account of the glory days of the American comic book but also a tale of Jewish identity, of mythmaking, of violence in the name of patriotism, and of repressed desire. He once again triumphs in "Citizen Conn," a fact that became more evident as I worked through the story, my early resistance crumbling in the wake of Chabon's indisputable talent. Though similarities to Kavalier & Clay abounded, Chabon was not merely coloring by numbers. Gone was the novel's omniscient third-person narrator, replaced by Rabbi Rebecca Teplitz, whose decency doesn't eclipse her humanity, and whose hinted-at doubts about her marriage demonstrate an almost unnatural degree of authorial control. The glitz of 1940s Manhattan has been erased from the backdrop, painted over with the bleakness of the modern-day Los Angeles nursing home where Teplitz is stationed. While we glimpse Kavalier and Clay in their senescence, we know them mostly as youths. Feather and Conn, by contrast, only gain reprieve from their old age in one tender flashback near the story's end.

To cite more differences would be to disclose the plot; suffice it to say that "Citizen Conn" is worthy on its own terms, for the same reason that made Kavalier & Clay so stunning: because Chabon fulfills the storyteller's first responsibility, which is to tell a story, a fact forgotten with woeful frequency in The New Yorker's fiction pages these days. The comic books and Judaism are rich and powerful symbols, and they will probably serve Chabon well for years to come. But his fluency in these subjects would matter little if it weren't for his skill at telling the story that lies beneath them, the truly important story, the one that gave rise to fiction in the first place. It's the story of human beings learning to live with—and without—one another.

Nobody's Perfect

A job application recently asked me to discuss how I've grown since high school. This raises interesting and unsettling questions, particularly here in the good ol' U.S. of A, where the assumption is that things just keep on growing and improving and generating ever-higher returns on investment, an assumption seriously challenged (and made slightly ridiculous) by any decent meditation on the extent to which human life is the product of factors like chance, greed, and well-intentioned idiocy. One simultaneously assumes that these factors are not the stuff of a good job application essay, and so one writes about his self as if it were a positive-correlation curve, stretching off towards a perfectible infinity.

One definition of adulthood might be coming to terms with the understanding that the blissful terminus implied by such a graph—the personal apotheosis, the singularly un-flawed self—is a fiction. Theoretically, everyone accepts this fact at a different point; for my part, I grapple with it daily, for I have a particularly staunch opponent in the part of me that still thinks an idealized ur-Jim will someday emerge from a tempering goo of acquired knowledge, instilled morality, and perfected will. This part of me thinks that one fine day I will be able to sit at my computer and write excellent prose for eight hours straight; that I will read Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and F.P. Lock's two-volume, 1,700 page biography of Edmund Burke in blissful rapture; that I will stop slouching and cursing; that I will train myself to be infinitely patient; that no one will ever find cause to dislike me; that I will become good at golf; that I will understand calculus. This part of me assumes a B.C. and A.D. of selfhood; all it needs is its Year Zero, and we're off to the races, he and I.

I have to force this part of me to consider my habit of checking Facebook multiple times a day, despite vows to the contrary; my tendency to set an alarm for 7:30 and then wake up at nine; the half-finished short stories that litter my hard drive; and on and on. And then I haul to the witness stand the old versions of my self that vowed that tomorrow would mark the final day of Facebook, the first day of getting up early to write, the beginning of less sleep and more living. How many of them there are, and how often they keep appearing with their chorus of Tomorrow, tomorrow. And the optimistic part of me is forced to slink off to its corner.

These things are on my mind because that job I spoke of at the beginning of this musing is a one-year post teaching English at my old high school. Now, you have to understand that to the sixteen- and seventeen- and eighteen-year-old version of myself, there was no greater proof of human perfectibility than my English teachers. I saw the guys holding the post that I've just applied for, guys fresh out of college, and thought: surely they've figured it all out. Surely they have left behind vice and laziness, and are on their way to achieving their wildest dreams. I'd get there too, in good time.

Well, I'm happy to report that I was offered aforementioned teaching post, and while on the one hand this made me very happy, on the other hand it delivered a very pointed realization: here I am, on the verge of inhabiting a position I've long admired and respected, and I'm still a schmuck. A polished schmuck with nice glasses, perhaps, but a schmuck nevertheless. I thought of a passage from my favorite essay, the one that made me a writer in the first place, Jonathan Franzen's "Caught" (republished as "Centrally Located" in The Discomfort Zone):

"At forty-five, I feel grateful almost daily to be the adult I wished I could be when I was seventeen. I work on my arm strength at the gym; I've become pretty good with tools. At the same time, almost daily, I lose battles with the seventeen-year-old who's still inside me. I eat half a box of Oreos for lunch, I binge on TV, I make sweeping moral judgments, I run around town in torn jeans, I drink martinis on a Tuesday night, I stare at beer-commercial cleavage, I define as uncool any group to which I can't belong, I feel the urge to key Range Rovers and slash their tires; I pretend I'm never going to die."

I take courage from this passage, because it tells me that even the writer I admire above all others, the most important contemporary American author (face the facts, people), is a schmuck, too. To be human is to be a schmuck: there's liberation in that thought. I want to go around to the haughty girls I know, so self-important, and say, "Hey, you're a schmuck, and so am I." I want to go up to the frat boys who might see me as particularly eligible for a beating and say, "Hey, you're a schmuck and so am I." I want to go to my old friend who has no clue what he's doing next year and say, "Hey, it's okay, we're all schmucks." Don't get me wrong; this is not to say that human beings are not capable of genius or compassion or beauty or any number of other incredible things. But it is to say that we are not perfectible, and our rough edges will never be filed down entirely, no matter how impressive a file we devise. 

One reason I cherish writing is that when done properly, it gives that meliorist part of me a victory. It can point to a finished essay, or the sixty pages of novel I've managed to write since Christmas despite my much-lamented affection for the Internet, or even a blog post like this, and say, "See? You're not a schmuck."