The Best American Essays 2018

by Hilton Als

  Perhaps what ailed Germany has ailed her, which is one reason she went to Eichmann’s trial. Amid the famous German efficiencies—getting trains to concentration camps on time—there is the metaphysical impulse, the belief that thinking can be more than window dressing for prejudice. Questions and problems beg for solutions: Hitler, though not a metaphysician, had a final one. Of course, to impugn philosophy in that regard would be unfair. Philosophy is provisional, part of a Western tradition of thought-work that has striven to be impartial, though not objective. Judgments are crucial to living on earth. Without the judgments bred by conscience human beings are lost. To be objective in matters of heart-feeling is to surrender one’s birthright. It grieves her that so many have been so eager to do so. “Inhumanity” is not an idle word. It means something very exact.

  Juden raus!

  Adolf Eichmann seemed in that glass booth a small, middling person, in his earnest way ridiculous. His certified Jew-hatred—how else had he managed to occupy such an important position?—took a backseat. Time and again over the months of his trial, he spoke not to his zealousness but to his honor and his deportment. He scraped before his betters and looked down on ruffians. He admired Hitler for making something of himself. While extermination was being organized on a scale hitherto unimaginable, he worried and chafed about his career. He confessed himself happy at some times during the war and frustrated at others. He took satisfaction in doing a good job, in being an expert of sorts about Zionism. He relished the tepid oblivion of cliché. This Nazi, he declared, was “brilliant,” that one was “untrustworthy.” As a bureaucrat, officialese gave him great pleasure.

  The deaths—to descend into the world of words—were ghastly but the fact of this man insisting on his career was also ghastly. Hannah Arendt’s tone in her reporting on the Eichmann trial was tinged with exasperation and sometimes with sarcasm. Who could fathom the disproportion between men sitting at their desks with their requisitions and the naked men, women, and children waiting to take their death showers? Who could take the measure of modern times that promoted the genius of machines and machinelike behavior? Who could hold those euphemisms—“resettlement,” “evacuation”—in his or her mouth and not choke? Perhaps what the world needed was not philosophy but a new Bible.

  Despite her doubts—or because of them—she persevered as a free person is supposed to persevere. She touched on the obedience that the Jews were locked into, their filling out the endless paperwork the Nazis required of them, their standing in the lines that took them to their deaths. Many Jews howled at Hannah’s written touch. They felt she was unfair, unfeeling, and little better than a traitor. Despite her intelligence, she was naive. There could be no qualifiers to the hideous, larger truth. But for Hannah, who was trained to consider the whole topography of truth and was steeped in the modern literature of desperation, there were such qualifiers, just as Eichmann had a grotesque, comic side as he sat there and clarified points of order about how he did his job. He was eager to speak and explain. He wanted to set the record straight. He may have been acting, putting on a performance while inwardly baying at the most horrendous of moons. To assert his enthusiasm as a Nazi would have been very bad form. Yet there he was, quite composed, ready to argue some peccadillo about the murderous protocols. He would, as they say in New York, “do anything to save his own skin.” His testimony may have been nothing but lies but it still was testimony. He had been there. No one argued that point.

  She thinks about this Eichmann as a representative of the human race. To assume that any given person has a conscience is a big assumption. To assume that the conscience has some depth and is something more than petty self-righteousness is a bigger assumption. The endeavor of philosophy, her life’s endeavor, is to examine assumptions. Her husband, who is a living representative of the Socratic tradition, does that each day—one of many reasons why she loves him. His conscience is not so much pure as stalwart and restless. Like Jaspers, he grasps how much philosophy’s posing of questions can matter. People need philosophy, its rigor and scope, but they don’t know they need it.

  Sometimes as she sat in that courtroom in Jerusalem she felt that she would explode with irony—a terrible feeling. The man in the dock was, as Americans put it, “a loser.” He could not think; he could only follow directions or register his displeasure with those who didn’t follow directions. He was not the person who should have been sitting there. Despite all the deaths he had orchestrated she felt that he was not the main act but an afterward. The horrific inspiration the Germans had derived did not emanate from this man who seemed in his vacant, responsible way nothing so much as narrowly ambitious. The enormous effort of the trial was spent on a hateful nothing.

  But no—the trial (and she can’t help but think of Kafka) showed what the word “conscience” could be. In that sense those who excoriated her were wrongheaded. To live in a world without conscience was unbearable. To say that one conscience equaled another was foolish. As Eichmann showed too well, one conscience did not equal another. The scales were broken. Or they never worked to begin with. Kafka would have understood.

  To say “This is wrong” is as crucial as anything a human being can do. She gave examples in Eichmann in Jerusalem of people who paid with their lives for having a conscience. It was not complicated: the Third Reich was a nightmare they had to oppose. And yet she understands how easy rationalizing can be. Life is an extenuating habit. One Jew tells another Jew that things will be okay. Not all the rumors are bad. One Nazi tells another Nazi that a job must be done. There is honor. There is duty. There is the Fatherland. There is the Special German Way. Each abstraction is palpable. One German tells another German that the Führer knows what he is doing. “He has a plan.” She thinks of the story about the German woman at the end of the war saying, “The Russians will never get us. The Führer will never permit it. Much sooner he will gas us.” To which Hannah added: “There should have been one more voice, preferably a female one, which, sighing heavily, replied: And now all that good, expensive gas has been wasted on the Jews!”

  Like more than a few of her Jewish brethren, Hannah could have had a career as a comic or a writer of what has been called “black humor.” It comes with the burdensome territory inhabited by Job and Abraham and Sarah and Rachel, but she refuses to stay in that territory, much less indulge it. She is clear about being a Jew first and last but the identity doesn’t buoy her. What buoys her is the patient, and, more likely than not, irritating quest for the truth of any small or large matter. What buoys her are the crowded streets of New York where people jostle each other, exchange greetings, gossip, wrangle, and mutter to themselves in various languages. The republic has no great task. Or its great task is to respect each person walking along Broadway, which is up to each citizen who constitutes the republic.

  Again, she stands outside a record store and listens. Some young men with British voices are shout-singing about love. “Help!” Sweet yet ardent, the word throbs with imploring warmth. She nods as if to acknowledge this most basic of human pleas. Something always is rising from the demiurge’s ashes. You wouldn’t want to live forever—but you would.

  Contributors’ Notes

  Marilyn Abildskov is the author of The Men in My Country. She received her MFA from the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program. Her fiction and essays have appeared in AGNI, The Southern Review, Colorado Review, Prairie Schooner, and other magazines. Her work has received honors and fellowships from the Rona Jaffe Foundation, the Corporation of Yaddo, the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, and the Utah Arts Council. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she teaches in the MFA program at Saint Mary’s College of California.

  Noam Chomsky, considered the founder of modern linguistics, is one of the most cited scholars in modern history. He has written more than one hundred books, his most recent being Requiem for the American Dream: The 10 Principles of Concentration of Wealth & Power. He has received numerous awards, including the Kyot
o Prize in Basic Sciences, the Helmholtz Medal, and the Ben Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science.

  Paul Crenshaw’s essay collection This One Will Hurt You is forthcoming. Other work has appeared in The Best American Nonrequired Reading, The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses and other anthologies, Oxford American, Glimmer Train, Ecotone, North American Review, and Brevity, among others.

  Edwidge Danticat is the author of several books, including Breath, Eyes, Memory, an Oprah Book Club selection; Krik? Krak!, a National Book Award finalist; The Farming of Bones, an American Book Award winner; and the novel-in-stories The Dew Breaker. She is the editor of The Butterfly’s Way: Voices from the Haitian Diaspora in the United States; Haiti Noir and Haiti Noir 2; and The Best American Essays 2011. She has written six books for young adults and children , Anacaona, Behind the Mountains, Eight Days, The Last Mapou, Mama’s Nightingale, and Untwine, as well as a travel narrative, After the Dance: A Walk Through Carnival in Jacmel, Haiti. Her memoir Brother, I’m Dying, was a 2007 finalist for the National Book Award and a 2008 winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography. She is a 2009 MacArthur Fellow. Her latest book, The Art of Death: Writing the Final Story, was published in July 2017.

  Steven Harvey is the author of a memoir, The Book of Knowledge and Wonder, and three books of personal essays: A Geometry of Lilies, Lost in Translation, and Bound for Shady Grove. He is a senior editor at River Teeth magazine and the creator of the Humble Essayist website.

  Leslie Jamison is the author of The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath and The Empathy Exams, both New York Times best sellers, and a contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine. She lives in Brooklyn and directs the graduate nonfiction program at Columbia University.

  Beth Uznis Johnson is a graduate of the MFA program at Queens University of Charlotte. Her writing has appeared in Story Quarterly, Delphi Quarterly, Rumpus Readers Report, Southwest Review, and elsewhere. She is the editor and senior writer of Thrive, the award-winning cancer lifestyle magazine at the University of Michigan Rogel Cancer Center. She lives in suburban Detroit with her husband and two sons.

  Heidi Julavits is the author of four novels and a work of nonfiction, The Folded Clock: A Diary. She is the coeditor of the best-selling Women in Clothes and a founding editor of The Believer magazine. A recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, she teaches at Columbia University.

  Jennifer Kabat has contributed essays to The Believer, BOMB, Frieze, Harper’s Magazine, Virginia Quarterly Review, Granta, The White Review, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among others. Awarded a Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant for her criticism, her work has also been included in exhibitions at Arnolfini in Bristol, England, and Index in Stockholm, Sweden. Her ongoing collaboration with artist Kate Newby was featured at the Poor Farm in Little Wolf, Wisconsin, and research for “Rain Like Cotton” was supported by a grant from the University at Albany Art Museum. She is currently working on a book exploring how progressive values haunt places and history. She teaches at NYU and the New School.

  Suki Kim is the author of the New York Times best seller Without You, There Is No Us: Undercover Among the Sons of North Korean Elite and the novel The Interpreter, which was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award. She is a contributing editor at The New Republic, and her investigative reporting and nonfiction have appeared in Harper’s Magazine, the New York Times, the New York Review of Books, and elsewhere. She has been awarded fellowships in both fiction and nonfiction from the Guggenheim, Fulbright, and George Soros foundations, and a Ferris fellowship at Princeton University. She was one of the last writers to be featured on Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show, and her 2015 TED Talk has been seen by several million viewers. Born and raised in South Korea, she lives in New York and Seoul.

  David Wong Louie is the author of Pangs of Love and The Barbarians Are Coming. He is the recipient of a Lannan Literary Fellowship and awards for a first book of fiction from the Los Angeles Times and Ploughshares. For twenty-three years he taught at UCLA before illness forced him to retire. He is working on a memoir about life with disease and the consequences of its treatment, tentatively titled The Bartered Life: When What Saves Us Takes Away What Makes Us Human. Pangs of Love and Other Writings will be published in 2019. He lives in Venice, California, with his wife and daughter.

  Amit Majmudar’s latest book is Godsong: A Verse Translation of the Bhagavad-Gita, with Commentary (2018). The first poet laureate of Ohio and a diagnostic nuclear radiologist practicing full-time, he is also a widely published poet and fiction writer. His work has appeared in The Best of the Best American Poetry 1988–2012, The O. Henry Prize Stories 2017, and the Norton Introduction to Literature, among other magazines and anthologies.

  Rick Moody is the author, most recently, of the novel Hotels of North America.

  Timothy O’Keefe is the author of You Are the Phenomenology, winner of the 2017 Juniper Prize for poetry, and The Goodbye Town, winner of the 2010 FIELD Poetry Prize. His poems and lyric essays have appeared in the American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Colorado Review, Massachusetts Review, Seneca Review, VOLT, and elsewhere. He teaches writing and literature at Piedmont College, where he directs the creative writing program. He lives in Athens, Georgia.

  Who is Philippe Petit?—A self-taught high-wire artist, magician, and street juggler. Author of ten books, Philippe speaks six languages, has built a barn with eighteenth-century tools, is an accomplished pickpocket and lock picker, gives lectures on creativity, plays chess, and was once sighted bullfighting in Peru. He likes the title “Renaissance man,” will go well out of his way to taste a perfect chocolate mousse, does not suffer French fools gladly, and is a master at interrupting . . . He has been artist-in-residence of the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in New York City for nearly forty years.

  Thomas Powers is the author of The Man Who Kept the Secrets: Richard Helms and the CIA (1979), Heisenberg’s War: The Secret History of the German Bomb (1993), Intelligence Wars: American Secret History from Hitler to al-Qaeda (2002; revised and expanded edition, 2004), and The Confirmation (2000), a novel. He won a Pulitzer Prize for national reporting in 1971 and has contributed to the New York Review of Books, the New York Times Book Review, Harper’s Magazine, The Nation, The Atlantic, and Rolling Stone. His latest book, The Killing of Crazy Horse, won the 2011 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for history. Powers was one of the four founding editors of Steerforth Press, now based in Hanover, New Hampshire, which has been publishing trade books since 1994. He is currently writing a memoir of his father, who once told him that the last time he met Clare Boothe Luce was in the office of Allen Dulles.

  David Salle is a painter living in New York City. His work is represented by Skarstedt Gallery, New York and London. He is a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books.

  Luc Sante’s books include Low Life, Evidence, The Factory of Facts, Kill All Your Darlings, and The Other Paris. He has been a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books since 1981 and has written for a wide variety of other publications. His honors include a Whiting Award, an award in literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Grammy (for album notes), an Infinity Award for writing from the International Center of Photography, and Guggenheim and Cullman fellowships. He teaches writing and the history of photography at Bard College.

  Kathryn Schulz is a staff writer for The New Yorker and winner of both the Pulitzer Prize in feature writing and a National Magazine Award. She is currently expanding “Losing Streak” into Lost & Found, an exploration of disappearance, discovery, grief, and love.

  With “My Father’s Cellar,” John Seabrook ushered in his twenty-fifth year of writing for The New Yorker. He has also published four books: Deeper: My Two-Year Odyssey in Cyberspace; Nobrow: The Culture of Marketing, The Marketing of Culture; Flash of Genius and Other True Stories of Invention; and The Song Machine: Inside the Hit Factory. But this is his first published piece of writing in sobriety.
“Alcohol and writing are intimately entwined in both journalism and literature, but writing sober turns out to be more interesting. I believed I drank because I wrote; it turns out I was managing to write in spite of the limits that daily drinking imposes on a writer’s mind. With this piece I got free of that. We’ll see where it goes.”

  Adam Shatz is a contributing editor at the London Review of Books.

  Sherry Simpson’s most recent book, Dominion of Bears, won the John Burroughs Medal in 2015. She teaches literary nonfiction in the MFA programs at the University of Alaska at Anchorage and the Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University. Her essays appear in numerous journals and anthologies, including Orion, AQR, and Creative Nonfiction. Her first essay collection, The Way Winter Comes, is scheduled to be republished in paperback.

  Clifford Thompson received a Whiting Writers’ Award for nonfiction in 2013 for Love for Sale and Other Essays, and in 2015 published a memoir, Twin of Blackness. His personal essays and writings on books, film, jazz, and American identity have appeared in publications including the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Village Voice, the Times Literary Supplement, The Threepenny Review, Commonweal, Cineaste, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. He is the author of a novel, Signifying Nothing. For over a dozen years he served as the editor of Current Biography, and he has taught creative nonfiction writing at the Bennington Writing Seminars, New York University, Columbia University, Queens College, and Sarah Lawrence College. His book What It Is: Race, Family, and One Thinking Black Man’s Blues, is forthcoming. He lives in Brooklyn.

  Baron Wormser is the author/coauthor of sixteen books and a poetry chapbook. His recent books include Tom o’ Vietnam, a novel set in 1982 about a Vietnam War veteran who is obsessed with King Lear, and Legends of the Slow Explosion: Eleven Modern Lives, biographical pieces about eleven crucial figures from the second half of the twentieth century. Wormser has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. From 2000 to 2005 he served as poet laureate of the state of Maine. He teaches in the Fairfield University MFA program and lives in Montpelier, Vermont.