The Best American Essays 2014

by John Jeremiah Sullivan

  This is a good time in my life. To say otherwise would be rank ingratitude. I’ve finally worked free of the agitation and misery of youth, which in my case extended well into middle age. I’ve learned better how to live, to do my part in maintaining my marriage, to master impulse and cultivate self-respect. If only, I find myself thinking, I can manage to keep it up for a while, I can shape the end of my life in a way that justifies and redeems what came before. But I’m suspicious of that ambition: it puts me in mind of some heresy I read about once—I forget its name.

  I can’t know, of course, how long I’ll be able to keep it up. I can’t know where I stand in relation to the end. What I do know is that a lot can happen during the time I have. It’s a happening time: the late years are an avalanche of contingency. All the ways of going, all the ways that lead up to going—the ischemic episodes, embolisms, syncopes, infarctions, -omas! I could have a bad fall, drift into dementia, develop diabetes or pulmonary obstruction or heart disease or all three at once, discover I have cancer. I could lose my sight, my hearing, my colon, my husband. A sinister home health aide could steal my electronics and credit cards and disappear, leaving me without food for days. The state could take away my driver’s license.

  Any of these things, or any combination of them, could happen, and soon. Or not: I could continue moving along the gently tilted plateau I’ve been negotiating for years now, though the angle has been growing a little steeper. I could continue to write, to take walks and cook and travel and drink (moderately) and have lunch with friends and talk to my husband. Whatever happens, I continue to have a future. What will that future consist of? As always, I don’t know, though the range of possibility has narrowed considerably. I don’t know, and the reason I’m tempted to carry on as if I did is that I’m trying to bargain, in some primitive way, with my unknown fate. But there’s no bargaining, no knowing the worst, no protecting myself from the shocks of age.

  “Lord,” says the psalmist, “make me to know mine end, and the measure of my days, what it is; that I may know how frail I am.” The Lord, if I read the psalm correctly, gives no response. In the psalm’s last line, the psalmist-petitioner drops his demand for knowledge in favor of a plea for an extension: “O spare me, that I may recover strength, before I go hence and be no more.”

  MARY GORDON

  On Enmity

  FROM Salmagundi

  1—Trying for a Definition

  The word enemy comes to my mind, and suddenly I hear it everywhere. It is a strong word, not only strong but powerful. To use it can have consequences, and those consequences can be and have been grave.

  I am trying to understand the meaning of enemy, to consider what it might mean. I am trying, before anything else, to reach a definition.

  What can be said of the word enemy? Can we at least begin by saying these things:

  The enemy is one who does me harm.

  My enemy is one who desires my harm.

  I know my enemy because she is the one who desires to harm me.

  Is everyone who has done me harm my enemy?

  But then, there must be other questions.

  Who defines the enemy, who is it that names him?

  Is it the one harmed by him? Is the one harmed always right in his naming?

  Is it possible to misname someone an enemy, because one feels harmed, feels that the harming is deliberate, personal, though in fact the one called the enemy had no desire to harm any particular person? Had only an unfocused, unformed impulse to harm? Perhaps felt a duty to do some sort of harm?

  The enemy of my enemy is my friend.

  The friend of my enemy is my enemy.

  2—On Hearing of the Death of an Enemy

  She wished me harm. She wanted to harm me. I never knew why. Others said that she was jealous, or that perhaps she loved me, and that her love was blocked, balked. She said that I had stolen her life. That I wanted too much of her, wanted us to be best friends, assumed that we were equals and we were not: she was a professor, I a graduate student, and by insisting that she link herself with me I was destroying her possibilities for professional advancement. It was the early seventies. We both had dogs. I phoned her one night to ask her to take care of my dog because I wanted to spend the night with someone I had just met. She agreed; it didn’t occur to me that this would be a problem.

  A few days later, I left for a three-week holiday. When I returned my mailbox was full: twenty-five letters, in which she told me how I had destroyed her life. In the three weeks that I was gone, she told everyone everything I had said about them. Repeated all the gossip we’d bred and stored in a year of being what I had thought was best friends. Many people felt betrayed by the things she told them and no longer wanted to see me. Others took her side because they felt that she was mentally fragile and I was strong, that she was a professor and deserved, therefore, their allegiance, and anyway I would be leaving soon. She told me that, as Haldeman or Ehrlichman said to John Dean (this was the time of Watergate), if I said anything to anyone she would “blast me out of the water.”

  Thirty-five years later, at lunch with mutual friends, I discover that she died, young, of breast cancer.

  I think of all the hours I spent in torment connected to her.

  At the table, a phrase comes to me:

  Wasted sorrow.

  3—A Story About a Baby

  I heard this story many years ago, but it is a story no one can forget. I didn’t know either the man or the woman, but I know people who knew them, knew them very well. They were poets. He was older. He had been her teacher, and established, successful, whereas she was only starting out. They had a child. The child was two years old. I don’t know if they were married, but whatever their legal situation, she had understood, or perhaps it is better to say misunderstood, that he would be her partner, living beside her, involved with the rearing of the child. As it turns out, this was not his understanding. She was happy that they were both being offered jobs in the same city. A minor city in one of the less desirable (certainly for a poet) places in America. Then he was offered a better job in a more desirable city. There was no job there for her. She found herself abandoned, although he did not think of it as abandonment, though he left her in an undesirable city with a two-year-old child. She took a knife and stabbed her baby, whom everyone says was a beautiful boy, and then herself. His last sight on earth was of his mother coming at him with a knife. Was his last thought, My mother is my enemy?

  4—Jerusalem

  I am in Kennedy airport, waiting for a flight to Tel Aviv. A blond American couple complain about the extent of the security. An Orthodox boy, in yarmulke and tallit, says, “We have a lot of enemies.” The American man says, “You’ve made a lot of enemies.” Across the aisle from me, the American couple, and the Orthodox boy are a man and wife. The man, his hair in long side curls, seems to be dressed in a costume from the nineteenth century: black suit, black overcoat trailing the floor, black fedora. His wife is dressed in floor-length black as well; her hair is covered by a black wool scarf. During the exchange between the boy and the American couple, they seemed to be praying. Silently, they rise and move several rows away. I can no longer see them.

  5—My Husband Tells Me a Story About the War

  My husband tells me this story, which took place in an army hospital in Paris at the end of the Second World War. There was a hideous colonel in charge of the hospital. The French workers who had worked, in turn, for the French, the Germans, and the Americans said he was worse than any of the Nazis they’d worked for. Inspecting the hospital with my husband, a young corporal, in tow, the colonel sees a broom leaning against the wall of a corridor. Enraged, he asks who left it there. My husband knows it is a little French cleaner whose husband or lover has just been killed in the war. He knows she is very poor. And so he says, “I left it there.” The colonel knows that he is lying and storms off, furious. Then he comes back half an hour later to say he has fired the cleaning woman. Weeping, she says go
odbye to all her friends, and knowing what my husband did for her, she whispers, “I will never forget what you did.”

  It immediately occurs to me that the colonel fired her to punish my husband, to make a point about the folly of his assumptions. My husband is shocked. He never thought of it this way. He wanted to revel in the good feeling of having someone who would never forget him.

  Why did I have to tell him what I thought?

  Does this mean that I am his enemy, or the enemy of his happiness?

  Clearly the colonel was the enemy of the little cleaner. But why? Did he consider her his enemy, one enemy in his larger fight against disorder?

  Who did she think of as her enemy?

  Did she consider herself a person of so little consequence that she thought no one would believe her if she said someone had taken her seriously enough to define himself as her enemy?

  6—Simone Weil and Georges Bernanos

  Simone Weil and Georges Bernanos both, or each, traveled to Spain to cover the Spanish Civil War, Bernanos for the right-wing press, Weil for the left. Each wrote: This war is hopeless, it is impossible to tell good from evil, there is such evil, such cruelty, such barbarity on both sides. Simone Weil wrote to Bernanos, “I thought you were my enemy, but you are my brother.”

  7—Do Animals Have Enemies?

  From watching my dogs, I know that the sight of certain dogs creates in my dogs the impulse to aggression, even though the other dog has done nothing provocative to warrant it. Is it the memory of past conflict that triggers the urge to aggression? Aggression toward themselves? Their ancestors? Do dogs have in their minds the category “enemy,” into which they place an individual who fits the category, even if the individual is entirely innocent? If this is true of animals, what does it say about us? About the possibility for innocence, or reformation?

  8—My Childhood Enemy

  My childhood enemy was not another child. My enemy was an adult, who wished me harm. She wished me harm because I was a child and she was unable to have children. Because she was a polio victim and my mother was as well. She could bear being childless if she could understand that it was a result of her handicap. But my mother’s fecundity made that explanation impossible. Therefore she hated me. She wished to do me harm. The harm: she wished me always to be unhappy. She wished that I would never admire myself. She was determined to kill any love I might feel toward myself. She humiliated me regularly, publically and privately. She accused me of vanity and selfishness. I still fear that she was right.

  When I try to understand regarding a child as your enemy, or considering yourself the enemy of a child, I cannot. But because I walked beneath the magic carapace of my father’s extravagant love, that woman’s enmity could not pierce me. But this was not her desire; her desire was that life should be a misery to me. Perhaps in that way she could convince herself that it was better never to have borne a child.

  9—Rachel Carson

  At a lecture on the environment, a scientist says to the audience, “I am now going to project the face of the person responsible for more deaths in Africa than any political tyrant.” He projects the face of Rachel Carson. He says that as a result of her campaign against DDT, millions of Africans have died of malaria.

  Does that mean that Rachel Carson, friend of our fragile planet, is the enemy of millions of the dead?

  10—Political Enemies

  I grew up believing that Communists were my enemy. Many people would like me to believe that Muslims are my enemy. It is doubtless true that a certain group of Communists desired, in fact worked for, the destruction of America. The same is doubtless true of some Muslims. And I am American, and most of those dear to me, all of those connected by blood, are Americans living in America. Therefore, if those Communists who desired and worked for the destruction of America had achieved their wish, if the Muslims who desire and work for the destruction of America get their wish, I and those I love and have loved would have been in the past, and will be in the future, harmed. The work of my enemies. Though now I question what happens to the mind when it invites and houses the word enemy.

  What harm is done by that commonplace word? What distinctions will not, cannot be drawn where enemy holds sway? Is the concept “enemy” the enemy of clear thought, therefore of justice? What is gained by its invocation? Perhaps as important, what is lost?

  11—Critical Enemies

  I believe that postmodern theorists who say that beauty is a socially constructed category and a threat, who say that there is no such thing as an author and that fiction is an outdated artifact, are my enemy.

  I think the same of a student who believes that all literature must be read in the service of Catholic doctrine. This one wants to read Emily Dickinson as a crypto-Catholic. I tell her that her reading practice must be more open, that she must leave aside her preconceptions when she approaches the text. She is a pretty girl, with full rosy lips, but when she hears my words, her lips thin; her mouth hardens. She will resist me with all her will. I see in the thinness of her lips, the hardness of her mouth a desire to do me harm. I try to tell myself that this is ridiculous; she is very young, quite unsophisticated; she probably isn’t interested enough in me and what I value to want to take any advice from me. Yet I perceive that she wants—should want—to take something from the world, a practice of open reading, and so she stands in my mind for a category of people who want to destroy what I value.

  If I am honest, I have to say that I want to destroy what she values: a practice of reading that insists that the work of art fit into and confirm her own little idea.

  Am I her enemy? Or the enemy of something that could be called a habit of mind? But whose mind? And who is harmed?

  Increasingly, the beautiful things I value seem to me fragile. Susceptible to harm. Harm at the hands of an enemy.

  12—Shock and Awe

  We were told that our military might would inspire in our enemies shock and awe. Shock, yes: this is not difficult to understand. But awe? Doesn’t awe imply admiration? What does it mean to admire your enemy? Isn’t it to understand that your enemy is, in some way you can’t help feeling, desirable? That you understand that submission to him might be, after all, the best, the truest course?

  13—“The Spring Is My Enemy”

  A friend of mine has a son who experiences severe asthmatic crises, requiring hospitalization every spring. Not knowing this, I meet my friend on a beautiful spring day and say, “Isn’t it splendid, isn’t it wonderful.” She says, “Outside my office window there is a beautiful flowering cherry. It signals the arrival of spring. I look at it, and hate it; because of what it brings to my son, the spring is my enemy.”

  14—My Enemy, My Adversary

  In an essay by a psychoanalyst, the following proposition is presented: civilization turns enemies to adversaries. What is the difference? An adversary can change. And is that the only essential difference? For the moment I can think of no other.

  15—Encounters with the Enemy in Sacred Texts

  “You prepare a table for me in the presence of my enemies”: Psalm 23

  “The last enemy to be destroyed is death”: First Epistle to the Corinthians

  VIVIAN GORNICK

  Letter from Greenwich Village

  FROM The Paris Review

  FOR NEARLY TWENTY YEARS NOW Leonard and I have met once a week for a walk, dinner, and a movie, either in his neighborhood or mine. Except for the two hours in the movie, we hardly ever do anything else but talk. One of us is always saying, Let’s get tickets for a play, a concert, a reading, but neither of us ever seems able to arrange an evening in advance of the time we are to meet. The fact is, ours is the most satisfying conversation either of us has, and we can’t bear to give it up even for one week.

  Why then, one might ask, do we not meet more often than once a week? The problem is, we both have a penchant for the negative. Whatever the circumstance, for each of us the glass is perpetually half empty. Either he is registering loss,
failure, defeat, or I am. We cannot help ourselves.

  One night at a party I fell into a disagreement with a friend of ours who is famous for his debating skills. At first I responded nervously to his every challenge, but soon I found my sea legs and then I stood my ground more successfully than he did. People crowded round me. That was wonderful, they said, wonderful. I turned eagerly to Leonard. “You were nervous,” he said.