A friend and I were discussing Brooks’ recent column about Anthony Kronman’s new book, “Confessions of a Born-Again Pagan.” I thought I’d share my thoughts here. Full disc: I haven’t read Kronman’s book, only Brooks’ column.
Some good stuff in there. Love the focus on books and writers. (Though Brooks’ [and Kronman’s?] barely-concealed dog-whistle adulation for dead white guys’ books is both predictable and predictably infuriating…)
But this really pissed me off — Kronman, approvingly quoted by Brooks:
“A life without the yearning to reach the everlasting and divine is no longer recognizably human.”
My response to that is: Eff. You. My life is not “recognizably human”?
Obviously: there’s loads of stuff that’s impossible to eff, much less express explicitly using expository language. That’s why we have art! To express that stuff explicitly.
Words like “everlasting,” “divine,” “eternal,” “enchanted,” and “God” do exactly nothing to extricate us from that inescapable human reality.
Those words are just lousy poetry, evading the very explicit expression that makes art spectacular in its expression of the ineffable. Which is better: “God,” or “Ozymandias”? Or the million other names for god(s) that humans have imagined. Words like “god” and “spirit” have some value if they’re used metaphorically, poetically, but only some. Because it’s the universal in the particular that makes art magnificent. They’re trying to bypass the particular, and so as metaphors and poetry they’re just bad art.
I’m only halfway tongue-in-cheek when I say that bad art is the greatest sin. The Barney Show, with its obviously false “I love you, you love me, we’re all one big family,” trains people to wallow in false, facile humanity, rather than wrestling with the deep density of paradoxes that is the collective human experience. Ditto facile words like “enchantment.”
And the aspiration to “conquer death” just seems silly to me. Even my two best efforts in that direction — my wonderful daughters — have virtue and value to me purely in the here and now. I adore them. But once I’m dead, I won’t anymore. Sad.
I do like this and agree with it, but only for me: “if you didn’t throw yourself in some arduous way at the big questions of your moment, you’d live a meager life.”
But:
1. I am again pretty put off by the superciliousness of this assertion. If somebody just lives a simple life, works, raises a family, dies, is that a “meager life”? That’s infuriatingly presumptuous.
2 None of those eff-ing words does anything for me in my efforts to wrestle with those big questions, arduously and rigorously. QTC.
Comments
One response to “David Brooks Tries to Eff the Ineffable Again”
Beauty is the most powerful argument against a determinist universe.
It sounds as if to go further makes you uncomfortable, but it can be done without recourse to the supernatural. Maybe you should cut them some slack.