There's a great autobiographical essay by perhaps my favorite writer, Joseph Mitchell, that I copied and pasted onto a word doc that I've been carrying around with me since I first read it almost eleven-and-a-half-years ago. I read it over now and again--probably twice a year. To my old but 20-20 eyes, Mitchell seems to grab a sadness and a feeling, coalesce it and put it on the "page" for the world to consider and think about.
The essay opens this way:
In the fall of 1968, without at first realizing what was happening to me, I began living in the past. These days, when I reflect on this and add up the years that have gone by, I can hardly believe it: I have been living in the past for over twenty years—living mostly in the past, I should say, or living in the past as much as possible.
And now, right away, before I go any further, I must interrupt myself and say that I am not entirely satisfied with the phrase “living in the past” as a description of my way of life—it makes me sound like some kind of sad old recluse—but living in the past is the closest I can come to it; I hope that my meaning will become clearer as I go along.
Before Fred, my closest friend for almost fifty years died around Christmas in 2021, I had shared with him a story by the surpassing writer, I.L. Peretz, called "Bontshe Schweig," or in English, "Bontshe the Silent." Fred was dying and he knew it, but we talked about Peretz's story, which was largely about death anyway.
I suppose today it's rare for men to talk about anything but the current political sump (rhymes with), women, or sports, but the love Fred and I shared for each other was rare. Bontshe ends this way:
Like much of great writing, Mitchell and Peretz, are like those little toys you might have had when you were a kid. They call them lenticulars. When you look at them from one angle, they might show the stars and the moon. Change the plane, and they might reveal the sea and a giant whale. You are involved because you are forced to change your point of view and look again.
We used to get them with our Cracker Jacks.
I had remarked to Fred that Bontshe, when I was 61, was a different story from the Bontshe I read first when I was 21. I think that is the dynamic that Mitchell is writing about in his essay above. The world, if you're watching, isn't just about the here and now, if you can see, it's about all the phases and moments that went before, all the places you've been, the people you've loved and the things you've enjoyed. It's not just about Tay-Tay getting married in the Garden.
It's about the first basketball game you ever saw in that place, sitting high in the rafters with your father and watching "Lew Alcindor" of UCLA take apart the Temple University Owl five and, as an eight year old seeing your father wishing he were out there playing and the game itself.
Today in so much of life we have an amped up way of talking about everything.
Our industry is somewhat responsible for this. As is World War II when America had to turn its halcyon production brilliance quickly from tanks and planes and artillery to refrigerators, TV sets and automobiles lest the 16 million soldiers coming home would come home to no jobs and general economic depression.
So, advertising made everything new and must have.
Over the last 30 years or so, this pitch has become more and more fevered. Every quarter must profit more than the quarter before and the hockey-stick growth chart is all ten of our MBA commandments. There's something that comes out almost every day, a person, a song, a game show, an episode, a book, a pronouncement, a war, a tragedy, a love affair that promises to alter the world and our world views in ways never before seen.
Really.
Is everything really an "experience"? Or is everything merely the victim of hyperbolic hype and frenzied fanfare, because as a people, we are addicted to the rush and can only be sated by an even bigger rush tomorrow, or more accurately, 45-seconds from now?
What I miss most from the world are myriad things I remember from my past. Little things and big things. Things that you can no longer get. Things no one anymore even remembers.
I miss conversations where people weren't scrolling or looking at their phones. I miss Army-Navy stores that smelled of surplus canvas tents and new blue jeans. I miss water coolers with tubes of little paper conical cups next to them, where you could get quenched without sending $5 to the Coca-Cola company and adding yet another plastic bottle to yet another riverbank. I miss bank-books and paystubs that provided a physical-ness to your earnings and the work you worked. I miss seeded rolls and warm rye bread from the bakery down the street. So good that they were half-gone by the time you ran home. I miss events not encumbered by an onslaught of data.
I miss a TV with a dial and five channels or seven. Not one I need to "log into" and pay for three times. Once with my access fees. Once with the data they're stealing. And once with the commercial drivel I'm fed.
I miss a time before everything was an "experience." Where you could eat lunch at a lunch counter and read a good tabloid sports page. I miss the times before I had to "verify" that I'm a human. I could just be one.
Which is what this is all about.
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