Dear Friends, Family, Neighbors, and Those of You I Don’t Yet Know —
Welcome back to Odd Company. In the past couple of weeks, I’ve been reading a wonderful novel (The Lincoln Highway, by Amor Towles), an equally wonderful biography (Early Morning, by Kim Stafford, about his father, the poet William Stafford), Mary Oliver’s much-loved essay, “Of Power and Time” from her book Upstream: Selected Essays, plus interviews and articles about cynicism and the short span of our lives, mixed in with further episodes of Robert Sapolsky on neuroendocrinology, Behave. So tonight’s issue is about a lot of stuff that probably sounds random. But lucky you! I have the kind of brain that sees connections in random stuff. There will be a unifying theme, I promise.
Before I begin, I want to mention an observation I got from a reader about the January 18 issue of OC, “Knowing the Tune,” which was mostly about expectations and opinions, and the importance of basing them on honest-to-goodness facts. This reader spent many years working as a government lawyer. He says that, to my advice about news and facts, he’d add that if you’ve received information from anything but your own observations, you should check at least three independent sources before repeating it or relying on it in any way. That’s a high standard, but I couldn’t agree more. It’s good to withhold judgment till we’re sure we know what we’re talking about.
Sometimes in the winter, a mysterious force tugs me toward bleak moods. This force ranges from subtle to definite. I think of it as seasonal grouchiness disorder. It shows up as loss of faith in the basic goodness of my fellow humans. When I’m in one of these moods, I wonder if there’s anyone out there who is not self-serving, self-righteous, and morally pathetic. I can be heard saying the world’s going to hell in a handbasket.
The weather’s not good enough for serious gardening yet, and I’m sick of baking bread and making soup. I seem to be mentioning Groucho Marx a lot lately. He’s just so appropriate for times like this. “I don’t know what they have to say,” he sang in his film Horse Feathers. “It makes no difference anyway.” Here he is singing the whole thing: “Whatever It Is, I’m Against It.” I admit the quality of this clip is terrible, but hey, it was 1932. And it’s only 55 seconds long.
There’s a word for what Groucho is singing about. Cynicism. That is to say, the feeling that too many people are out for themselves. That too many folks will do whatever’s necessary to make things come out in their favor. If the ship is sinking, don’t get in their way and don’t expect to find any room in the lifeboats. Who cares what they have to say? Whatever they’re for, I’m against it.
I’m sure my mood this winter is magnified by the pandemic — two years of living in a strangely distorted version of the world we once knew, and by all the social weirdness that has gone with it. I’m not alone. Our trust in institutions of all kinds — government, corporate, spiritual — has taken quite a beating in the past few years. If you want a glimpse of just how cynical some of us have become, take a look at the new Netflix movie, Don’t Look Up. Or maybe don’t take a look. Trust me (if you dare). It’s a satire, yeah, but it’s also deeply cynical. Astronomers discover a comet headed straight for Earth, and politicians are worried about the optics.
The thing about cynicism is it’s terrible for the cynic. It turns out people who believe the world sucks have higher rates of heart disease, depression, and cancer than their more hopeful fellows. Because we tend to receive from other people whatever we send them, cynics are often treated as disdainfully as they treat others. All of this adds up to lives that are unnecessarily nasty, brutish, and short.1
How do we fall into these psychological traps? So many paths in the modern world lead to those dark places. The constant distractions that keep us too busy to think; the ongoing blast of messages meant to convince us that we can’t possibly be happy without more clothes, a new car, a bigger refrigerator, a different president; and that little gift from social networking sites — addiction to the approval of absolutely everybody.
Which brings me to the small matter of our time, and how we choose to use it. “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild, and precious life,” asks Mary Oliver in her much-loved poem, “The Summer Day.” And a little while later, or maybe earlier, she answers the question in these few, concise lines from a different poem, “Sometimes.”
Instructions for living a life:
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.2
There is so much in the world to astonish and gratify us, if we can quiet our minds long enough to perceive it. I’m telling you, and my grouchy self, about it now! Go up to the woods, out to the ocean, or into your own neighborhood. What do you hear? What do you smell? How do things look in the light, be it sun, moon, or stars? After your breath that is taken away returns to you, tell us about it. :-)
"Live Like the Ancient Cynics,” by Arthur Brooks, The Atlantic, January 2022
"Sometimes," from the book of poetry, Red Bird, by Mary Oliver, Beacon Press, 2008.