Don't Save Anything: The Uncollected Writings of James Salter(81)
Perhaps not. Whether humankind or nations advance or decline is a matter of unimportance to the planets and what lies beyond. If civilizations reach a new zenith or if they founder is a concern only to us and not really much of a concern since individually we can do so little about it.
At the same time it is frightening to think of a glib, soulless, pop culture world. There is the urge toward things that are not meaningless, that will not vanish completely without leaving the slightest ripple. The corollary to this is the desire to be connected to the life that has gone before, to stand in the ancient places, to hear the undying stories. Art is the real history of nations, it has been said. What we call literature, which is really only writing that never stops being read, is part of this. When it relinquishes its place, what is there to substitute for it?
It was Edwin Arlington Robinson, I think, who when he lay dying asked that his bed be taken out beneath the stars. That’s the idea, anyway, not to breathe your last looking at some TV sitcom, but to die in the presence of great things, those riches—the greatest of all riches, in fact—that can be in the reach of anyone.
Writers on Writing, Collected Essays from The New York Times
2002
Words’ Worth When a wrecker’s ball divides the facade of an old building, or a switch is thrown to ignite efficient charges at its core, you see how the physical work of years can be undone instantly. There’s less show to the death of a tradition. It’s hard to fix the moment, or sequence of moments, at which breath goes out of it and decay takes hold of the remains. Yet every so often you do get to watch a tradition disappear almost as expeditiously as a blown building. A report in The Washington Post in October 1995 describes what has happened to literature in post Soviet Russia. “For more than a century,” writes Post reporter David Hoffman, “Russian writers occupied a special place in society. Literature was at the forefront of opposition to power, and in the Soviet era totalitarian rulers went to great lengths to bend writers to their will.” But writers resisted, risked prison and death, and fought back with words. For their words, their alternative prose visions of the society, there was a vast audience.
Now writers in Russia are free, and the good ones seem not to matter at all. The literary journals essential to cultural life a decade ago barely survive, their sales not a tenth of what they were. Capitalism’s triumph has made them beside the point. Television owns the platform now—“Look! Look!” has replaced “Hear! Hear!”—and visual sensation is still so novel to the Russians that they don’t mind if it flickers to the rhythms of an elevator prose as nondescript as elevator music. “There is great literary prose, and there is junk,” says one despondent Russian writer. “It’s only junk that you can earn money from.”
Sound familiar? The displacement of literature, the devaluation of the word, and mass indifference to nuance have been a longer time coming in the United States, and their insurgency can’t be attributed to arriviste capitalism (commerce and literature worked out an arrangement like partners in a cold marriage who stay together for the sake of the furniture). Who can recall the last time the publication of a book that might reasonably be called literature—that aspired to more than an extended author’s tour and a celluloid afterlife—raised the nation’s hackles or lifted its spirits or shook its premises? In a country where Maya Angelou passes for a poet, Tom Clancy for a novelist, and Tony Kushner for a playwright what hope do words have? How do we stay alert to the spark of unwilled pleasure struck by words placed against each other just so, in a line, through a paragraph, over pages? The truth is we are less interested in words’ beauty these days than in their ugliness. The perceived insult to physical condition or sex or race rouses us easily, mechanically. We’re not so conditioned to respond to what is uncommon and miraculous.
It’s not that we lack words, Lord knows, or books for that matter, which can be bought in spaces the size of hangars. Those aisles of books are mostly for burning, though a whole stack of them alight would not give off the heat of Othello. We don’t expect enough of words anymore, that they be crafted, beautiful, purposeful, careful, true. The edge has gone off discrimination (it’s on its way to becoming the “d” word), and fine judgment has flattened almost to the horizontal. We’re losing the disposition to read closely, listen critically. Why so? An odd lot of suspects seems to have worked at the reduction, but there’s no evidence of a conspiracy, and space to indict only a few.
Start with the media (irresistible: each now wears a neon “kick me” sign), with television, for example, the same television whose glow has enchanted the Russians and whose deeper infection they are yet to feel. On TV news shows, the standard patter is strictly anodyne, and the standard patterers as individual as Pringles. Their words, the means through which tens of millions of citizens get a fix on the world, work like a narcotic on the memory of eloquence and complication. On midafternoon dramas, charmless actors prattle, strip, couple, and scatter farcically, but the truest confusion is often grammatical: “A selfish person who always expects to get their own way better not look to Dawne and I for favors.” On talk shows—circuses that are all freaks and clowns and no acrobats—participants use a common language of sentiments borrowed from psychos and psychotherapists. They have learned this language, these emotions, from the media, and they live for the opportunity to demonstrate what good students they are, to show-and-tell their constricted hopes and blasted dreams in home room. These shows insistently exploit race and class in America, yet there is in them none of the sometimes-fierce poetry of the lived vernacular, flung straight as a weapon or a curse. Borrowed words only, and secondhand passion.