blahg, blahg, blahg…

With yet one more tale of “U.S. Super Treasury” coming to the rescue of yet one more entity, one can’t help but begin to wonder if there is any business sector or industry NOT too big to fail in today’s world. AIG, Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley; Fannie and Freddie and the entire mortgage lending industry; credit card issuers, car loan providers, student loan suppliers; and the latest – the entire automotive manufacturing industry (Ford, Chrysler, GM, you name it). They are all just too big, too important, and too essential to the health and wealth of our economy to not be rescued. Or so the story goes.

Well, fear not fellow tax paying citizens, there are still some small things we can let collapse on their own. We needn’t be concerned that we’re rescuing everyone. Libraries, schools, hospitals, mental health care facilities, and plenty of small businesses are just a few – a few which, in fact, tax payer money once kept alive and well before we had to re-prioritize our priorities and help out all of those “big boys”. Their failures are too big, so we must let them fail. The rest can fend for themselves.

[They mean well, the two advisors to the young writer. Sitting at the next table, I can’t help but overhear what they say to her. “With time – and age – you will discover more of yourself. Look at your family. Study your DNA. This is where you’ll find the things to influence and bolster your writing.” I am not one to judge their qualifications at sharing advice, nor was I privy to the entire conversation. I was tuning them out with a book, my iPod, and my own thoughts. But I did hear this bit and while no one asked me my opinion on the matter, I couldn’t help but jot it down.]

Step away from yourself and tell a story of someone else. Do you think Sinclair Lewis was Elmer Gantry? Was Margaret Mitchell Scarlett O’Hara? Perhaps there was a touch of Twain in Tom and Huck, but surely they stand on their own, apart from their creator.

We are saturated with the “true” tales of poor souls – known and unknown. Everyone feels his memoir is captivating, her life story something worth sharing. But truth be told, the vast and overwhelming majority of us live lives that when put to paper are really quite boring, quite mundane. Even those filled with psychological angst, the journey to hell and back, addiction, victimization, inconceivable and horrid circumstances, survival, fame, fortune and over-the-top eccentricities… too often there is really nothing in them worth cluttering the pages of books and shelves of bookstores. Save it for a private journal, a therapist, or a good friend. Spare the world one more story already told.

Work out your life, for sure, but when putting pen to paper give your audience something else. Give us truly interesting characters; characters all the more interesting because we don’t know them. We don’t recognize them in our daily lives. Introduce these people to us. Tell us stories about their lives. What often makes the “Great American Novel” so great is its novelty, its newness. Strive for that.

[“Lasch (The Culture of Narcissism) believed that all this evasive self-obsession was the result of a narcissistic culture that had two simultaneous effects. It drove people further into themselves, and it created an inner emptiness by exalting the self and cutting it off from reality. Such isolated self-scrutiny, packed with psychiatric clichés, made people so self-conscious that they felt as though they were performing their existence rather than living it. … What Lasch could not have foreseen was the effect commerce and the technology of the Internet would have on the way people present their inner lives in public. … People don’t want their privacy invaded. They now want other people, as many people as possible, to watch them as they carefully craft their privacy into a marketable, public style.” ~ Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob, Lee Siegel (p. 49-50). This happened to be the book I was reading at the nearby table. Maybe it was a little influential in my advice.]

My spouse says to me that she wants to start getting up earlier. Our circadian rhythms dance to different beats. I am a morning person, generally exhausted by the world come 6:30 in the evening. For Lynn though, a rising moon brings a rise in energy and she can stay up late into the night “working on things” as she describes it. The result is that she comes to bed after me and wakes me up every night. And she feels bad about this. So she’s going to get up earlier, exercise, and hopefully wear herself out by a more “reasonable” hour.

I say that I appreciate the gesture, though it’s really not necessary. But it is a kind offer.

“I need to work on things at night”, Lynn tells me, “because I have to spend the day working at the library.” Lynn is an artist in every sense of the word, including the “starving artist” sense. She juggles multiple jobs in an attempt to make some level of income. Her days are filled with the need to be here and there. She spends a great deal of time traveling here and there. She spends a great deal of time going to and doing things that she feels she must do, but that she doesn’t necessarily want to do. Working at the library is not about being an artist. She is an artist and so having to spend her time being in a library and doing work in a library is being and doing that takes away from who she is. “I need to work on things at night” means “this is the only time I have to do what I’m really supposed to be doing.”

But I admit that when Lynn says to me, “I need to work on things at night because I have to spend the day working in the library”, my initial reaction is perturbation. Because I have to spend my day working in the library, too. The difference, of course, is that I’m a librarian. Working in the library is what I chose to do. It is my career. Lynn is an artist, I am a librarian, thus in the logic of our conversation, I am the only one who is supposed to be spending her day in the library. The inference is that I’m doing what I’m supposed to be doing. Lynn is not.

So why am I perturbed by her statement? Because the cynic in me wants to scream,  “How often does anyone get to be and do who they are simultaneously? Life just doesn’t work like that.” Completely and utterly frustrating… it just doesn’t seem to work like that.

But I do think Lynn is on to something.

And she stays up late to find it.

I too often come home exhausted and go to bed early and spend too much time wondering what to do with the day. What to do with all of the days that, when put together, make up one’s life. I always seem to be searching for something too, but unlike Lynn, it’s not as clear to me what it is. 

But I’m grateful for a Sunday morning and time to finish a book and have an extra cup of coffee and think about things. Thinking about things seems to be what I do best and a thinker what I am most. With jobs for thinkers are about as few and far between as jobs for artists, I’ll just enjoy today as a day for thinking. A day not spent at the library.