Digital Barbarism by Mark Helprin (bookreader .TXT) 📗

is so shy that she has actually invented a robot through which she speaks at book events, must nonetheless be virtually present and answer questions—“Do you write with a pencil or a pen?” “Who are your favorite authors?” “Will you write my book about the affair between Golda Meir and Frank Sinatra if I give you twenty-five percent?” There is no escaping the world. This is not to be lamented, in that if you escape the world and its friction you escape education. And you can’t do that, or at least you shouldn’t, because, as much more than half the world is eager to tell you as soon as you manifest the signs of your discomfort, no man is an island. (To which you can reply, “But what about Arnold Taubman? He was Madagascar.”)

Why not soldier on as not-an-island for most of your life, and then, at some blessed point after your obligations have been met and duties fulfilled, finally allow the waters to rush in and dissolve the feeble causeways to the mainland that for decades you have maintained at the cost of a broken heart? I had thought that when I reached sixty (years, not miles per hour, although it did take about six seconds to get there) I might be able to make a partial retreat and exit the controversies in which I have been involved (and which, when the heat of battle maneuvered me into positions I would otherwise have rejected, have pulled me at times beyond where I wanted to go) to spend my last years as I had spent my first: alone except for family, and a few friends one or two at a time; writing descriptively and reflectively rather than combatively; with no thought to reception, position, or victory or defeat in struggles that soon will fade. Not retirement, but a shift in focus to that which is gentle, beautiful, and eternal.

Politicians, businessmen, and actresses there are who struggle mightily to hold back the thick curtains of age. They are so close to the falls of oblivion that they can hear the water’s white sound, and yet they are all-consumed in a fight for position in a boat that is soon to be launched into a world with neither gravity nor time. They will tell you that they work for a cause higher than themselves, but, depending upon who they are, you can quickly separate this chaff from the wheat and know that the cause they espouse is merely the disposable costume of their lust for power, or a distraction from the emptiness they dare not confront after a life in the absence of reflection.

I thought that by not being a politician or actor, and with a deep hunger for privacy, I would have a chance to steer my life into tranquility. This was fundamentally and particularly a mistake. Fundamentally, because neither nature nor human society is tranquil. They do have, however, improbable moments that give rise to villages in war zones that sow and reap as passing armies leave them untouched; centenarians who have had good lives, a minimum of pain, and children who love and will outlive them; healthy billionaires; statesmen who save the West; women who are beautiful into their nineties; skiers who never have had a fall; speedy tortoises; and people born without envy.

But these are rare. Naturally, most everything alive, and even almost everything that isn’t, is subject to change, shock, assault, and cycles of alternation. A rock formation deep within the earth may seem eternally solid, but it was once molten, once a gas, once cosmic dust, and once pure and inexplicable energy, as eventually it will be again. And as for us, the doorbell rings, the snowstorm comes, the package arrives, the crops dry up, children are born, affections arise or are alienated, marauders traipse across horizons more or less distant, and we grow old until no matter what tranquility we have managed to achieve eventually the prospect of lifting a glass to our lips becomes as threatening and difficult as climbing the north face of the Eiger.

There is no escaping into permanent tranquility similar to what pacifists mistakenly imagine to be permanent peace, but only managing the ebb and flow of continually active force. Still, though it is not possible to stop the waves, one can, in riding them masterfully, render them relatively motionless. This is the job of statesmen in ushering their countries through the high waters of history, of parents in bringing up children, and of people in living their lives. You can have tranquility only sometimes and only up to a point: beyond that is the grave. And of course if you are even slightly empathetic you can never be at rest. The pain and suffering of the world is so widespread and exquisite that it makes the peace for which we may long only an illusion.

Nonetheless, and knowing that I would not be able to do what I wanted to do, I wanted to do it, and I tried. It was not just one thing, but many: forgoing various opportunities; not reading from cover to cover every journal that arrives; now and then allowing the grass to grow too high; going to bed early; welcoming silence. In those efforts at management, not surprisingly, I met many forms of resistance.

My relations with the New York Times, once excellent and warm, have of late—that is, in the last twenty-five years—been inexcellent and cold, both from differences of opinion and imperfections in conduct, my own included. But as one of the most wonderful things in this life is the lion lying down with the lamb (or, as some small children believe, the lamp), I was pleased when in the spring of 2007 the Times, after a long hiatus but in the most friendly manner, asked me to write an op-ed piece. Having resolved to live less combatively in my remaining years, I thought, Why raise fur when it has been rubbed up against me