WRB—June 26, 2024

Digging ditches

It is historically certain that the Managing Editors have read a book, but, if it were not, it could not with certainty be inferred from the Washington Review of Books.

N.B.:

The next D.C. Salon (formerly known as the WRB x Liberties salon) will take place on the evening of July 20. The topic will be “Can nonbelievers pray?” If you would like to attend, please email Chris for more information.

Links:

• In minor literature[s], Tobias Ryan interviews Greg Gerke about his new novel (In the Suavity of the Rock, June 28) [Today’s Upcoming book]:

  In this book, I’m wearing the badge of all the names that are alluded to throughout, like Rilke, Eliot, Yeats, and Cezanne. Because the character is a writer too, he’s exorcizing these years of hearing all these cliches and platitudes about writing, and trying to free himself of them, even though he’s kind of given them up at the end of his life. They still haunt him. I think this is what many writers have to go through, especially in our time. All the platitudes, all the advice that is graffitied over Twitter every day. Then you have someone, like the canceled Peter Handke, saying a real writer doesn’t need advice . . .

  But yes, there has to be something spiritual—therapeutic in a certain way, I guess I would say in my case. My entanglements with Buddhism, or any other kind of religion, have been about that, helping the self. I see a crossover because if you’re developing a spiritual life, you’re changing your life. Not in that you’re going through therapy, but you’re changing the core of your being by following a certain spiritual path.

  [On the one hand, I want to joke that thinking about the novel, which continues to be the art form best suited to depict bourgeois attitudes towards marriage and money, is about as far from a spiritual life as it’s possible to get; on the other hand, writing a good novel requires paying lots of attention to things, and there’s an aspect of devotion to that—like the line from Lady Bird (2017), “Don’t you think maybe they are the same thing? Love and attention?” —Steve]

• In The New Yorker, Cody Delistraty on the history of grief in America:

  Gorer, like Ariès, attributed this shift to “the pursuit of happiness” having been “turned into an obligation”: the challenging aspects of life were now framed as individual burdens, rather than shared setbacks. The quest for happiness has long been baked into the American psyche, but one can see its distortion in quasi-therapeutic concepts such as “putting yourself first” and “emotional bandwidth”—the notion that an uncomfortable emotion is an undesirable one, and that we should set firm limits on certain discussions of hardship, even with intimate friends. Add to that “self-care”—arguably the greatest marketing success of the twenty-first century, in which consumption is repackaged as a path toward well-being—and Ariès’ claim that we live in the era of “forbidden death” continues to resonate. “The choking back of sorrow, the forbidding of its public manifestation, the obligation to suffer alone and secretly, has aggravated the trauma stemming from the loss of a dear one,” Ariès wrote, citing Gorer. “A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty. But one no longer has the right to say so aloud.”

  [I was looking at “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” a little while ago and it struck me, even through the artistry and artificiality of elegy, how removed many of the lines are from my own experience of mourning, either on account of the particular emotional charge or just because of some ritual no longer done. The funerals still have flowers, but I’ve never put any on a coffin. And that might channel the emotion and aid in grieving and processing it, but it also intensifies the emotion by giving it an act to attach itself to. There’s a charge to it. —Steve]

• In Protean, Jared Marcel Pollen on Wittgenstein’s trip to the Soviet Union, where he hoped to do manual labor:

  In his biography of Wittgenstein, Ray Monk writes that “Presumably, for Wittgenstein, the life of a manual laborer in Russia was the epitome of a life without treacle.” This seems to chime with Wittgenstein’s remark that in the West “all our gabble is impotent.” Wittgenstein recognized that most people’s (even the philosopher’s) relationship to the world is not essentially theoretical—otherwise we would never get out of bed in the morning—and he understood that academic inquiry often fails to capture the “sense” of what makes life meaningful to us. He also experienced first-hand the ways in which philosophy can be a kind of elaborate self-deception, by which the philosopher convinces himself of things that would never trouble a “normal” person—say, that consciousness is an illusion, or that we have no free will. Perhaps the idea of working with his hands alongside people who were unburdened by philosophical problems seemed like a respite from the torture of the life of the mind. Indeed, he often encouraged his students to do something “useful” instead of studying philosophy, and he once remarked that he wished he could make himself useful, as Spinoza had grinding lenses.

  [In the glorious future they’re going to make all managing editors dig ditches. We’ll probably be happier. —Steve]

[Behind the paywall: Steve on trendpieces online, swimming, celebrities, Dickinson, baby names, Rachel Cusk, cities in novels, and more links, reviews, news items, and commentary carefully selected for you, just like on Saturdays. If you like what you see, why not sign up for a paid subscription? The WRB is for you, and your support helps keep us going.]