A few months ago, I was given an assignment for which I felt it necessary to self-administer a hefty dose of fresh ideas, pronto. Skimming my dust collection, I found a book entitled The Best American Essays of the Century. It had the aura of something one might have received from an ex-boyfriend’s mom as a Christmas gift. I certainly had never cracked it.
I took it down and began reading. It was a collection of essays, selected by Joyce Carol Oates, written during the 20th century by various and sundry citizens of the USA. It began with Mark Twain and ended with Saul Bellow but was not exclusively dead white guys.
I had what I needed to complete my assignment within the first 30 pages (the book contains 596), but I couldn’t stop reading. I felt like I was being permitted to snoop around in the diary of America, eavesdropping on the thoughts and feelings of eloquent and insightful people grappling with issues that directly set the stage for my life on this planet. It was riveting.
I was expecting a history lesson but, as someone who perhaps hasn’t had enough history lessons, was surprised to find instead an illumination of the present. Essay after essay read like a continuation of a discussion I’d just heard on NPR, with a few choice words swapped out here and there.
In theory, this will shock no one. “History repeats itself.” “There is nothing new under the sun.” “The age-old question.” Why, then, is our discourse peppered with such mindless phrases as, “in this current political climate” and “these days” and “especially now”, as if our problems were unique to us? We’ve convinced ourselves that we are looking at this (our) moment objectively, as if we weren’t completely absorbed in it.
I finished reading the book yesterday, and the hefty dose has entered my bloodstream. More than anything, I gained a sense that we (meaning, everyone alive on the planet right now), are not alone. We are accompanied by the observations, the confessions, and the revelations of our predecessors. We can scratch our heads all we want, but we don’t need to throw up our hands.
For those who are interested, I’ve listed each essay along with an excerpt from it. If you couldn’t tell, I highly recommend reading the whole collection, but my hope is that your appetite will be whetted for at least one.
It took me all summer to read this book, so I estimate it should only take you three weeks to read this post. (eye roll emoji)
Mark Twain: Corn-pone Opinions (1901) We all do no end of feeling, and we mistake it for thinking. And out of it we get an aggregation which we consider a boon. Its name is Public Opinion. It is held in reverence. It settles everything. Some think it is the Voice of God.
W.E.B. Du Bois: Of the Coming of John (1903) He grew slowly to feel almost for the first time the Veil that lay between him and the white world; he first noticed now the oppression that had not seemed oppression before, differences that erstwhile seemed natural, restraints and slights that in his boyhood days had gone unnoticed or been greeted with a laugh.
Henry Adams: A Law of Acceleration (1906) During a million or two of years, every generation in turn had toiled with endless agony to attain and apply power, all the while betraying the deepest alarm and horror at the power they created.
John Muir: Stickeen (1909) I never have held death in contempt, though in the course of my explorations I have oftentimes felt that to meet one’s fate on a noble mountain, or in the heart of a glacier, would be blessed as compared with death from disease, or from some shabby lowland accident. But the best death, quick and crystal-pure, set so glaringly open before us, is hard enough to face, even though we feel gratefully sure that we have already had happiness enough for a dozen lives.
William James: The Moral Equivalent of War (1910) When the contemporary man steps from the street, of clamorous insincere advertisement, push, adulteration, underselling and intermittent employment, into the barrack-yard, he steps on to a higher social plane, into an atmosphere of service and co-operation and of infinitely more honourable emulations . . . Here at least a man is supposed to win promotion by self-forgetfulness and not by self-seeking.
Randolph Bourne: The Handicapped (1911) And if he feels that there were times when he should have been able to count upon the help and kindly counsel of relatives and acquaintances who remained dumb and uninterested, he will not put their behavior down as proof of the depravity of human nature, but as due to an unfortunate blindness which it will be his work to avoid in himself by looking out for others when he has the power.
John Jay Chapman: Coatesville (1912) Religious fanaticism has sometimes lifted men to the frenzy of such cruelty, political passion has sometimes done it, personal hatred might do it, the excitement of the amphitheater in the degenerate days of Roman luxury could do it. But here an audience chosen by chance in America has stood spellbound through an improvised auto-da-fé, irregular, illegal, having no religious significance, not sanctioned by custom, having no immediate provocation, the audience standing by merely in cold dislike.
Jane Addams: The Devil Baby at Hull-House (1916) She was so triumphantly unconscious of the incongruity of a sturdy son in bed while his mother earned his food, that her auditors said never a word, and in silence we saw a hero evolved before our eyes: a defender of the oppressed, the best beloved of his mother, who was losing his high spirits and eating his heart out behind prison bars. He could well defy the world even there, surrounded as he was by that invincible affection which assures both the fortunate and unfortunate alike that we are loved, not according to our deserts, but in response to some profounder law.
T. S. Eliot: Tradition and the Individual Talent (1919) It is not in his personal emotions, the emotions provoked by particular events in his life, that the poet is in any way remarkable or interesting. His particular emotions may be simple, or crude, or flat. The emotion in his poetry will be a very complex thing, but not with the complexity of the emotions of people who have very complex or unusual emotions in life. One error, in fact, of eccentricity in poetry is to seek for new human emotions to express; and in the search for novelty in the wrong place it discovers the perverse. The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all.
Ernest Hemingway: Pamplona in July (1923) And if you want to keep any conception of yourself as a brave, hard, perfectly balanced, thoroughly competent man in your wife’s mind never take her to a real bull fight.
H. L. Mencken: The Hills of Zion (1925) The Scopes trial had brought them in from all directions. There was a friar wearing a sandwich sign announcing that he was the Bible champion of he world. There was a Seventh Day Adventist arguing that Clarence Darrow was the beast with seven heads and ten horns described in Revelation xiii, and that the end of the world was at hand. There was an evangelist made up like Andy Gump, with the news that atheists in Cincinnati were preparing to descend upon Dayton, hang the eminent Judge Raulston, and burn the town.
Zora Neale Hurston: How It Feels to Be Colored Me (1928) In the abrupt way that jazz orchestras have, this one plunges into a number. It loses no time in circumlocutions, but gets right down to business. It constricts the thorax and splits the heart with its tempo and narcotic harmonies. This orchestra grows rambunctious, rears on its hind legs and attacks the tonal veil with primitive fury, rending it, clawing it until it breaks through to the jungle beyond.
Edmund Wilson: The Old Stone House (1933) Along with the memory of exaltation at the immensity and freedom of that country side, I have memories of horror at its loneliness; houses burning down at night, sometimes with people in them, where there was no fire department to save them, and husbands or wives left alone by death — the dark nights and the prisoning winters.
Gertrude Stein: What Are Master-pieces and Why Are There So Few of Them (1935) Think about how you create if you do create you do not remember yourself as you do create. And yet time and identity is what you tell about as you create only while you create they do not exist.
F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Crack-Up (1936) Now the standard cure for one who is sunk is to consider those in actual destitution or physical suffering–this is an all-weather beatitude for gloom in general and fairly salutory day-time advice for everyone. But at three o’clock in the morning, a forgotten package has the same tragic importance as a death sentence, and the cure doesn’t work–and in a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.
James Thurber: Sex Ex Machina (1937) There goes a man who picked up one of those trick matchboxes that whir in your hands; there goes a woman who tried to change a fuse without turning off the current . . . Every person carries in his consciousness the old scar, or the fresh wound, of some harrowing misadventure with a contraption of some sort.
Richard Wright: The Ethics of Living Jim Crow: An Autobiographical Sketch (1937) One day I stepped into an elevator with my arms full of packages. I was forced to ride with my hat on. Two white men stared at me coldly. Then one of them very kindly lifted my hat and placed it upon my armful of packages. Now the most accepted response for a Negro to make under such circumstance is to look at the white man out of the corner of his eye and grin. To have said: “Thank you!” would have made the white man think that you thought you were receiving from him a personal service. For such an act I have seen Negroes take a blow in the mouth. Finding the first alternative distasteful, and the second dangerous, I hit upon an acceptable course of action which fell safely between these two poles.
James Agee: Knoxville: Summer of 1915 (1938) All my people are larger bodies than mine, quiet, with voices gentle and meaningless like the voices of sleeping birds. . . By some chance, here they are, all on this earth; and who shall ever tell the sorrow of being on this earth, lying, on quilts, on the grass, in a summer evening, among the sounds of night.
Robert Frost: The Figure a Poem Makes (1939) The figure a poem makes. It begins in delight and ends in wisdom. The figure is the same as for love. No one can really hold that the ecstasy should be static and stand still in one place. It begins in delight, it inclines to the impulse, it assumes direction with the first line laid down, it runs a course of lucky events, and ends in a clarification of life–not necessarily a great clarification, such as sects and cults are founded on, but in a momentary stay against confusion.
E. B. White: Once More to the Lake (1941) We stared silently at the tips of our rods, at the dragonflies that came and went. I lowered the tip of mine into the water, tentatively, pensively dislodging the fly, which darted two feet away, poised, darted two feet back, and came to rest again a little farther up the rod. There had been no years between the ducking of this dragonfly, and the other one–the one that was part of memory. I looked at the boy, who was silently watching his fly, and it was my hands that held his rod, my eyes watching. I felt dizzy and didn’t know which rod I was at the end of.
S. J. Perelman: Insert Flap “A” and Throw Away (1944) The theory of the kit was simplicity itself, easily intelligible to Kettering of General Motors, professor Millikan, or any first-rate physicist. Taking as my starting point the only sentence I could comprehend, “Fold down on all the lines marked ‘fold down’; fold up on all lines marked ‘fold up'”, I set the children to work and myself folded up with an album of views of Chili Williams.
Langston Hughes: Bop (1949) “‘A dark man shall see dark days.’ Bop comes out of them dark days. That’s why real Bop is mad, wild frantic, crazy–and not to be dug unless you’ve seen dark days, too. Folks who ain’t suffered much cannot play Bop, neither appreciate it.”
Katherine Anne Porter: The Future is Now (1950) The silence of the spaces between the stars does not affright me, as it did Pascal, because I am unable to imagine it except poetically; and my awe is not for the silence and space of the endless universe but for the inspired imagination of man, who can think and feel so, and turn a phrase like that to communicate it to us.
Mary McCarthy: Artists in Uniform (1953) A dispirited silence followed. I was not one of those liberals who believed that the Jews, alone among people, possessed no characteristics whatever of a distinguishing nature–this would mean they had no history and no culture, a charge which should be leveled against them only by an anti-Semite. Certainly, types of Jews could be noted and patterns of Jewish thought and feeling; Jewish humor, Jewish rationality, and so on, not that every Jew reflected every attribute of Jewish life or history. But somehow, with the colonel, I dared not concede that there was such a thing as a Jew: I saw that sad meaning of the assertion that a Jew was a person whom other people thought was Jewish.
Rachel Carson: The Marginal World (1955) Underlying the beauty of the spectacle there is meaning and significance. It is the elusiveness of that meaning that haunts us, that sends us again and again into the natural worlds where the key to the riddle is hidden. It sends us back to the edge of the sea, where the drama of life played its first scene on earth and perhaps even its prelude; where the forces of evolution are at work today, as they have been since the appearance of what we know as life; and where the spectacle of living creatures faced by the cosmic realities of their world is crystal clear.
James Baldwin: Notes of a Native Son (1955) It was necessary to hold on to the things that mattered. The dead man mattered, the new life mattered; blackness and whiteness did not matter; to believe that they did was to acquiesce in one’s own destruction. Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated and this was an immutable law.
Loren Eiseley: The Brown Wasps (1956) It was obvious I was attached by a thread to a thing that had never been there, or certainly not for long. Something that had to be held in the air, or sustained in the mind, because it was part of my orientation in the universe and I could not survive without it.
Eudora Welty: A Sweet Devouring (1957) Trouble, the backbone of literature, was still to me the original property of the fairy tale, and as long as there was plenty of trouble for everybody and the rewards for it were falling in the right spots, reading was all smooth sailing.
Donald Hall: A Hundred Thousand Straightened Nails (1961) The waste that he hated, I thought, was through him like blood in his veins. He had saved nails and wasted life. He had lived alone, but if he was a hermit he was neither religious nor philosophical. His fanaticism, which might have been creative, were as petulant as his break from the church. I felt that he was intelligent, or it would not have mattered, but I had no evidence to support my conviction.
Martin Luther King, Jr.: Letter from Birmingham Jail (1963) So here we are moving toward the exit of the twentieth century with a religious community largely adjusted to the status quo, standing as a tail light behind other community agencies rather than a headlight leading men to higher levels of justice.
Tom Wolfe: Putting Daddy On (1964) The world has had a good seventy-five years of Freud, Darwin, Pavlov, Max Weber, Sir James Frazer, Dr. Spock, Vance Packard and Rose Franzblau, and everything they have had to say about human motivation has filtered through Parker and all of Parker’s friends in college, at parties, at lunch, in the magazines and novels they read and the conversations they have at home with wives who share the same esoterica. As a result, Parker understands everybody’s motives, including his own, which he has a tendency to talk about and revile.
Susan Sontag: Notes on “Camp” (1964) Detachment is the prerogative of an elite; and as the dandy is the 19th century’s surrogate for the aristocrat in matters of culture, so Camp is the modern dandyism. Camp is the answer to the problem: how to be a dandy in the age of mass culture.
Vladimir Nabokov: Perfect Past (1966) The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour).
N. Scott Momaday: The Way to Rainy Mountain (1967) Houses are like sentinels in the plain, old keepers of the weather watch. There, in a very little while, wood takes on the appearance of great age. All colors wear soon away in the wind and rain, and then the wood is burned gray and the grain appears and the nails turn red with rust. . . They stand here and there against the sky, and you approach them for a longer time than you expect. They belong in the distance; it is their domain.
Elizabeth Hardwick: The Apotheosis of Martin Luther King (1968) Here in Memphis it was not the killer, whoever he might be, who was feared, but the killed one and what his death might bring.
Michael Herr: Illumination Rounds (1969) I met this kid form Miles City Montana, who read the Stars and Stripes every day, checking the casualty lists to see if by some chance anybody from his town had been killed. He didn’t even know if there was anyone else from Miles City in Vietnam, but he checked anyway because he knew for sure that if there was someone else and they got killed, he would be all right. “I mean, can you just see two guys from a raggedy-ass town like Miles City getting killed in Vietnam?” he said.
Maya Angelou: I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1970) He must have been tired of being crippled, as prisoners tire of penitentiary bars and the guilty tire of blame. The high-topped shoes, and the cane, his uncontrollable muscles and thick tongue, and the looks he suffered of either contempt or pity had simply worn him out , and for one afternoon, one part of an afternoon, he wanted no part of them.
Lewis Thomas: The Lives of a Cell (1971) We are told that the trouble with Modern Man is that he has been trying to detach himself from nature. He sits in the topmost tiers of polymer, glass, and steel, dangling his pulsing legs, surveying at a distance the writhing life of the planet. In this scenario, Man comes on as a stupendous lethal force, and the earth is pictured as something delicate, like rising bubbles at the the surface of a country pond, or flights of fragile birds.
John McPhee: The Search for Marvin Gardens (1972) In the nineteen-thirties, men visiting Atlantic City went to jail directly to jail, did not pass Go, for appearing in topless bathing suits on the beach. A city statute requiring all men to wear full-length bathing suits was not seriously challenged until 1937, and the first year in which a man could legally go bare-chested on the beach was 1940.
William H. Gass: The Doomed and Their Sinking (1972) The world of the suicidal is, in a certain sense (for all its familiar elements: pain, grief, confusion, failure, loss . . . ), a private and impenetrable one, hence the frustration of those who are trying to help, and whose offers to do so, as raps on the glass disturb fish, often simply insult the suicide immersed in his situation. It is a consciousness trapped, enclosed by a bell jar, in the image which encloses Plath’s novel, and Alvarez’s book should do a great deal to correct the sentimentalist’s happy thought that art is a kind of therapy for the sick, trapped, homeless, and world-weary, and that through it, deep personal problems, get worked benignly out.
Maxine Hong Kingston: No Name Woman (1975) The immigrants I know have loud voices, unmodulated to American tones even after years away from the village where they called their friendships out across the fields. I have not been able to stop my mother’s screams in public libraries or over telephones. Walking erect (knees straight, toes pointed forward, not pigeon-toed, which is Chinese-feminine) and speaking in an inaudible voice, I have tried to turn myself American-feminine.
Alice Walker: Looking for Zora (1975) There are times–and finding Zora Hurston’s grave was one of them–when normal responses of grief, horror, and so on do not make sense because they bear no real relation to the depth of the emotion one feels. It was impossible for me to cry when I saw the field full of weeds where Zora is. Partly this is because I have come to know Zora through her books and she was not a teary sort of person herself; but partly, too, it is because there is a point at which even grief feels absurd. And at this point, laughter gushes up to retrieve sanity.
Adrienne Rich: Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying (1977) Truthfulness anywhere means a heightened complexity. But it is a movement into evolution. Women are only beginning to uncover our own truths; many of us would be grateful for some rest in that struggle, would be glad just to lie down with the sherds we have painfully unearthed, and be satisfied with those. Often I feel this like an exhaustion in my own body. The politics worth having, the relationships worth having, demand that we delve still deeper.
Joan Didion: The White Album (1979) We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the “ideas” with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.
Richard Rodriguez: Aria: A Memoir of a Bilingual Childhood (1980) There was a new silence at home. As we children learned more and more English, we shared fewer and fewer words with our parents. Sentences needed to be spoken slowly when one of us addressed our mother or father. Often the parent wouldn’t understand. The child would need to repeat himself. Still the parent misunderstood. The young voice, frustrated, would end up saying, “Never mind”–the subject was closed.
Gretel Ehrlich: The Solace of Open Spaces (1981) Space has a spiritual equivalent and can heal what is divided and burdensome in us. My grandchildren will probably use space shuttles for a honeymoon trip or to recover from heart attacks, but closer to home we might also learn how to carry space inside ourselves in the effortless way we carry our skins. Space represents sanity, not a life purified, dull, or “spaced out” but one that might accommodate intelligently any idea or situation.
Annie Dillard: Total Eclipse (1982) We teach our children one thing only, as we were taught: to wake up. We teach our children to look alive there, to join by words and activities the life of human culture on the planet’s crust. As adults we are almost all adept at waking up. We have so mastered the transition we have forgotten we ever learned it. Yet it is a transition we make a hundred times a day as, like so many will-less dolphins, we plunge and surface, lapse and emerge. We live half our waking lives and all of our sleeping lives in some private, useless, and insensible waters we never mention or recall. Useless, I say. Valueless, I might add–until someone hauls their wealth up to the surface and into the wide-awake city, in a form that people can use.
Cynthia Ozick: A Drugstore in Winter (1982) A writer is dreamed and transfigured into being by spells, wishes, goldfish, silhouettes of trees, boxes of fairy tales dropped in the mud, uncles’ and cousins’ books, tablets and capsules and powders, papa’s Moscow ache, his drugstore jacket with his special fountain pen in the pocket, his beautiful Hebrew paragraphs, his Talmudist’s rationalism, his Russian-Gymnasium Latin and German, mama’s furnace-heart, her masses of memoirs, her paintings of autumn walks down to the sunny water, her braveries, her reveries, her old, old school hurts.
William Manchester: Okinawa: The Bloodiest Battle of All (1987) Americans still march in Memorial Day parades, but attendance is light. One war has led to another and another and yet another, and the cruel fact is that few men, however they die, are remembered beyond the lifetimes of their closest relatives and friends. In the early 1940s, one of the forces that kept us on the line, under heavy enemy fire, was the conviction that this battle was of immense historical import, and that those of use who survived it would be forever cherished in the hearts of Americans. It was rather diminishing to return in 1945 and discover that your own parents couldn’t even pronounce the names of the islands you had conquered.
Edward Hoagland: Heaven and Nature (1988) Love without a significant sexual component and for people who are unrelated to us serves little practical purpose. It doesn’t help us feed our families, win struggles, thrive and prosper. It distracts us from the ordinary business of sizing people up and making a living, and is not even conducive to intellectual observation, because instead of seeing them, we see right through them to the bewildered child and dreaming adolescent who inhabited their bodies earlier, the now-tired idealist who fell in love and out of love, got hired and quit, hired and fired, bought cars and wore them out, liked black-eyed Susan’s, blueberry muffins, and roosters crowing–liked roosters crowing better than skyscrapers but now likes skyscrapers better than roosters crowing.
Stephen Jay Gould: The Creation Myths of Cooperstown (1989) Still, we must remember–and an intellectual’s most persistent and nagging responsibility lies in making this simple point over and over again, however noxious and bothersome we render ourselves thereby–that truth and desire, fact and comfort, have no necessary, or even preferred, correlation (so rejoice when they do coincide).
Gerald Early: Life with Daughters: Watching the Miss America Pageant (1990) But competition does not produce better people (a myth we have swallowed whole); it does not even produce better candidates; it simply produces more desperately grasping competitors. The “quality” of the average Miss America contestant is not significantly better now than it was twenty-five years ago, although the desires of today’s contestants may meet with our approval (who could possibly disapprove of a black woman who wishes to be a vet in this day of careerism as the expression of independence and political empowerment), but then the women of twenty-five years ago wanted what their audiences approved of as well. That is not necessarily an advance or progress; that is simply a recognition that we are all bound by the mood and temper of our time.
John Updike: The Disposable Rocket (1993) Participating less in nature’s processes than the female body, the male body gives the impression–false–of being exempt from time. Its powers of strength and reach descend in early adolescence, along with acne and sweaty feet, and depart, in imperceptible increments, after thirty or so.
Joyce Carol Oates: They All Just Went Away (1995) A house: a structural arrangement of space, geometrically laid out to provide what are called rooms, these divided from one another by verticals and horizontals called walls, ceilings, floors. The house contains the home but is not identical with it. The house anticipates the home and will very likely survive it, reverting again simply to house when home (that is, life) departs.
Saul Bellow: Graven Images (1997) Such simple, romantic standards of personal dignity and of the respect due to privacy are to be found today only in remote corners of backward countries. Maybe in the Pyrenees or in the forgotten backlands of Corsica–places where I shouldn’t care to live. Everywhere else, the forces of insight are on the lookout.