NOVEMBER 16, 2012
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A PERSON IN PAIN is a pariah. Misfortune always strikes twice: there is the calamity itself, and there is the marginalization that comes in the aftermath of the calamity, as the rest of society, all the lucky people who were untouched by the flood or the fire, the war or the famine, continue to live according to the customs of the normal world, and are disinclined to have the satisfactions of normality complicated or disrupted by the adjacent misery. They are not mean or selfish. They are merely creatures of their mild experience. They have no natural understanding of its opposite, of the terrible things that typically happen to other people. They are not indifferent, they are ignorant; and when the ignorance ends, when the news gets out that there are people in need of help, they sometimes help. But the ones to whom the terrible things have happened, the wounded ones, are hardly ignorant of the life from which they have been expelled: after all, it was just yesterday. They know the before and they know the after. The world has not stopped—only their world has stopped; and in their fear and their impotence they wait, wondering when they will be re-attached to the otherwise persisting world. Its proximity reassures them and it tortures them. They may note ruefully the expansion of their own understanding: so this is what the affliction is like, the one they heard about before they were themselves afflicted. Adversity enlarges consciousness, though the benefit in awareness does not come with heat and light and food and water, and man does not live by consciousness alone. As a taxi brought me from Kennedy through Manhattan to Brooklyn, a few days after Hurricane Sandy attacked the city, I witnessed two New Yorks: one in light, one in darkness. They were blocks away from each other, and universes. The lifelessness of those streets was shocking, but there was worse to come. One occupies only one’s own position, I thought, and so one must correct for the exclusiveness of that position, for the solipsism of situatedness. Such a correction can be achieved only by the imagination, without which sympathy is provincial, a prisoner of circumstances. It is fine for morality to appeal to memory (“for you were once a slave in Egypt”), but we must prepare ourselves to grasp also enormities that we have never endured. If we do not practice the imagination of suffering, the wretched will truly be alone.
FOR MY FAMILY, the imagination of at least one variety of suffering will no longer be necessary. We now have memory as a foundation for compassion: memory, and a FEMA number. This time the other people to whom terrible things typically happen included us. In Manhattan Beach, a halcyon archipelago of bourgeois contentment, the waters of the bay to the north and the sea to the south rose angrily and, like armies of pillaging invaders, met to destroy. The flooding was vicious. The waters climbed six feet, eight feet, ten feet. They smashed in doors and knocked down walls. Brick and cement crumbled before them. As the waters began to attack our mother’s house, my sister phoned me, and I do not believe I will ever shake the sound of her terror. Our impossibly frail mother was upstairs, sweetly oblivious to the danger. The SUV was underwater and carried off into the garden. The phones were dead, except for the antiquated land line. The power went out. The live wires brought low by the wind started sparking, which threatened to ignite the fuel in the floodwater from the bay’s broken boats. As the waters began to recede—they came to kill and then fled—the extent of the devastation was revealed. The nights were cold and black; we lived in dread of sunsets. The police created a checkpoint at the entrance to the neighborhood because looting was feared. We kept our mother warm with propane heaters and then with a gas generator, which also restored her hospital bed, though it required heroic dead-of-night searches for canisters of gas. We felt ruined, helpless, indignant, severed, confused. Our spirits were smashed. I smiled twice that week: the first time when I heard about some of my old books, Goethe and Croce and Strawson, floating serenely through the wreckage, the second time when a plumber reported that “Nathan’s frankfurters are floating down Surf Avenue.” For purposes of resistance and escape I read by flashlight, and was mordantly comforted to learn that the ancient philosopher Chrysippus wrote a work called On Things Not Worth Choosing for Their Own Sakes.
AFTER TWELVE DAYS the power came on. This was not the case in the Rockaways, in Breezy Point, in Staten Island, in New Jersey. Doctors Without Borders in Staten Island: that’s globalization! I marveled at the mayor’s skill in evading any accountability for the city’s lack of preparedness and quickly wearied of his cashmere swagger. How can anybody named Bloomberg be so utterly lacking in the common touch? The class analysis of the city’s ordeal, this latest and most extreme illustration of Manhattanism, was hard to refute. The center was dining and damn the peripheries. Perhaps there was a risk analysis somewhere, a cost-benefit cleverness, that justified the city’s lack of precaution and the pace of the recovery. There were policy considerations—banalities, really, but now endowed with a crushing force—that suggested themselves even to those of us who have no way to know whether sea walls will work. The first is the primary character of infrastructure. Is there a less glamorous subject in America? We do not like to dwell on our roads and our rails; they are so expensive, and so not digital. As if catastrophes are not expensive, too. Our non-physical environment ripens, our physical environment rots. The second is the incontrovertible reality of climate change, and the historical meretriciousness of its denial.
After Sandy, and it is only the most recent of the devastating proofs, the repudiation of climate science deserves to be universally regarded as intellectually and socially disreputable, the ravings of cranks and the schemings of capitalists at their most contemptible. From the rubble in Brooklyn in early November, I watched America have its sense of reality tested by an election and a hurricane: it was a week in which we were asked to recognize the actually existing country and the actually existing planet. The proper description of reality is not always an easy task. But the new America is here, and so is the new Earth.
Leon Wieseltier is the literary editor of The New Republic. This article appeared in the December 6, 2012 issue of the magazine under the headline “Who By Water.”
15 comments
No, we aren't safe from calamity, the next calamity for prior generations an ever-present danger. Small pox that would decimate half the population, leaving dead and dying in the street like discarded garbage. Conflicts that would escalate into carnage beyond comprehension, leaving millions homeless, fatherless, and penniless, and with permanent physical and emotional scars. Security, or the illusion of security, is what we have sought for the past 75 years. Health care expenditures escalating faster than the ability to pay for them, "preventive" diagnostic tests for most every possible disease, subdivisions that resemble prisons, an incarceration rate higher than the literacy rate, weapons intended to assure everybody would die rather than to defend, preemptive wars to avoid real ones. Then calamity strikes, and the reaction is that our elected public servants have failed us, haven't provided sufficient security against this calamity, as if all the other calamities never existed and all the resources devoted to avoid all other calamities were never spent. Humans are not good at assessing risk, the only risk being the one that has befallen them. Even our war heroes can't assess risk. I don't know LW or his mother, but I am pleased they are safe. Safe for now.
- rayward
November 17, 2012 at 7:54am
I appreciate the article but disagree with the premise. My neighbors lost power, had trees knocked down, etc. and my house only had 16 hours of no power and I have a generator on top of it. But I spent time helping clean up, I offered my fridge for storage of essentials. And this perspective is age dependent. When I was young I literally lost everything I owned when in the process of moving my Hyundai caught fire and burned down, taking all my clothes and everything else I stuffed into my car, but I shrugged it off. As long as my family is unharmed I don't care about things. And after living in China and Mexico where power outages are very common you learn to deal right quick. My wife grew up in China without heat, classrooms there in the winter have no heat and kids are bundled up in many layers. Yet people still live long because they are a tough people.
- blackton
November 17, 2012 at 11:40am
What to make of this; why does it rub me so wrong? ..A PERSON IN PAIN is a pariah. Misfortune always strikes twice: there is the calamity itself, and there is the marginalization that comes in the aftermath of the calamity, as the rest of society, all the lucky people who were untouched by the flood or the fire, the war or the famine, continue to live according to the customs of the normal world, and are disinclined to have the satisfactions of normality complicated or disrupted by the adjacent misery... ...They are not mean or selfish. They are merely creatures of their mild experience. They have no natural understanding of its opposite, of the terrible things that typically happen to other people. They are not indifferent, they are ignorant; and when the ignorance ends, when the news gets out that there are people in need of help, they sometimes help. But the ones to whom the terrible things have happened, the wounded ones, are hardly ignorant of the life from which they have been expelled: after all, it was just yesterday... What to a make of this, indeed? A pariah is an outcast. Those who calamitously suffer in a unique way are inherently an obvious kind of other, necessarily different from us in their suffering. That is simply a truth of human nature. One amongst us is dying of cancer. We cannot be him, even if we have cancer ourselves. It is in the nature of out consciousness--"and man does not live by consciousness alone," actually he does in a sense--to be separate and unto ourselves, even with those we feel closest too. Two people never become one and to that extent our consciousness and our necessary subjectivity estrange us from others. Empathy, feeling within one's self another's anguish, always chases after its own ideal. Therefore, whence "pariah?" Whence our outcasting those suffering extraordinarily? Whence the marginalization? How does Wieseltier in his overreach to lay down almost aphoristically insightful large truth know how many different individuals respond to the tragedy of differentiated suffering remote from their own experience? Here, rather than a pregnantly stated truth, we get mordant, gauzy generalization not only unrevelatory but distorting the obviously so into propositions the substance of which Wiesletier cannot sustain. So too is the ascription of "ignorance" to what we, the relatively inexperienced, have not in our experience known. For in its connotative meaning, flowering into ignoramus, "ignorance" is "an insult to describe those who deliberately ignore or disregard important information or facts, just as "ignoramus" is one who' willfully ignorant. There is in these thoughts by Wieseltier a subtextual preening, a special pleading for himself, as one of the accursedly enlightened by the wrecking that has vicariously touched his life via his mother. Unlike him, the rest of are sheep, "creatures" merely "of mild experience." So it's fitting that this patronizing bundle of the obvious distorted into incoherent generalization reaches its own climax with this untrue, clunkily expressed pseudo profundity: ...One occupies only one’s own position, I thought, and so one must correct for the exclusiveness of that position, for the solipsism of situatedness. Such a correction can be achieved only by the imagination... as if in our necessary separateness as the condition of our individuality we cannot, short of great imaginative leaps, understand and feel others' suffering, as if only the exquisite sensibility of a literary editor can show us the way to imagine the suffering of others, as if the rest of us prosaic, ordinary individuals cannot respond to extraordinary suffering without all this grandiloquent guidance.
- basman
November 17, 2012 at 12:26pm
wow. Between Leon W. and basman, I have never read a more literarily view of the Bridge & Tunnel Syndrome that has long defined Manhattan-centric New York City. To clarify, I read maps the way you read literature, so this is a nice stretch for me, plus now I know what StormSandy wrought in Manhattan Beach Brooklyn. May Leon and his family be safe. It has been wrenching, and frustrating, to have had no success in offering help through nyc.gov, or anyone else - even New Jersey finally got realtors involved last week, in identifying housing options for those who lost their homes.
- K2K
November 17, 2012 at 5:47pm
I liked reading Wieseltier's essay when he concentrated on the personal. The transition to the public and the political seemed to me to abrupt: First the personal: "I smiled twice that week: the first time when I heard about some of my old books, Goethe and Croce and Strawson, floating serenely through the wreckage, the second time when a plumber reported that “Nathan’s frankfurters are floating down Surf Avenue.” For purposes of resistance and escape I read by flashlight, and was mordantly comforted to learn that the ancient philosopher Chrysippus wrote a work called On Things Not Worth Choosing for Their Own Sakes." Then, the next paragraph shifts to the public and political (globalization?): "AFTER TWELVE DAYS the power came on. This was not the case in the Rockaways, in Breezy Point, in Staten Island, in New Jersey. Doctors Without Borders in Staten Island: that’s globalization! I marveled at the mayor’s skill in evading any accountability for the city’s lack of preparedness and quickly wearied of his cashmere swagger." We never come back to the beautiful exposition of the personal nor is there an attempt to give unity to these two incompatible views of how disaster (literally the breaking up of an "aster" or star) affects our lives: the private and the public spheres of our existence.
- arnon1
November 17, 2012 at 9:57pm
I liked reading Wieseltier's essay when he concentrated on the personal. The transition to the public and the political seemed to me to abrupt: should read: I liked reading Wieseltier's essay when he concentrated on the personal. The transition to the public and the political seemed to me too abrupt:
- arnon1
November 17, 2012 at 9:57pm
Leon's right, about the "new earth", and how climate change will affect some of the most-vulnerable places ... and others, thereafter. The change will affect certain areas, very-gradually ... and others, in a more-pronounced way. The directions are CLEAR, though. ... Thanks, Leon, for trying to understand the "nature" of the future. :)
- JohnBorder
November 18, 2012 at 4:03am
@ Arnon I agree with you that when Wieseltier began the concrete account, after, in my view, his ponderous moralizing, his piece became better. FWIIW, my youngest daughter stayed over at my house last night with the latest entry into the Basman family, Nathan Charlie, one month and a bit old, and she 1. disagreed with my reading of the first part of the piece that bugged me so much-she agreed with the run of his thoughts there and we couldn't persuade each other otherwise; and 2. found it somewhat precious that Wiseltier, seemingly, needed this (vicarious?)experience to alert himself publicly to the dangers of man made contributions to global warming and its havoc.
- basman
November 18, 2012 at 12:21pm
Well my view was hat the two halves of the essay don't mesh very easily.One is personal the other impersonal.
- arnon1
November 18, 2012 at 4:38pm
I understand that. I wasn't bothered by the supposed non meshing. You clearly liked the "second half" and I was agreeing with that insofar as as the personal account was concrete and specific and evocative. I didn't like the first part for the reasons I stated. That's all.
- basman
November 18, 2012 at 7:15pm
It's the other way around, basman, I liked his private musings. The second half would have made an interesting second essay.
- arnon1
November 18, 2012 at 8:17pm
I didn't.
- basman
November 18, 2012 at 8:50pm
I think LW did the best he could at synthesizing the personal and the public in the article. This is too soon after the event to produce something organic in the way of comment. But I didn't understand the author's criticizing Bloomberg for not taking responsibility for the city's lack of preparedness. Parts of NYC, notably the southern tip of Manhattan and the edges around the whole island, were built on land fill as tenuous as ashes from fireplaces and furnaces (I saw this on the first documentary to come out about Sandy--last week). Of course, the waves of the Perfect Storm are going to eat this "land" alive. The residents on it are totally unprepared simply by living there. A great deal of the blame for a disaster like this rests on the shoulders of hubris-filled humans, long dead, who felt they could take on nature and win. Many people have seen nature as an enemy whose ass needed to be kicked. I've thought about the victims of Sandy every day. I hope they get back into the routine of life where they feel safe as soon as possible. Sometimes a boring routine can be sweet.
- magboy47.
November 19, 2012 at 1:13pm
magboy47 "I think LW did the best he could at synthesizing the personal and the public in the article.This is too soon after the event to produce something organic in the way of comment." If "it is too soon" magboy, he should have waited before he decided to publish this piece. LW is too good a writer to allow his emotions guide his work.
- arnon1
November 19, 2012 at 5:43pm
For the most part, good, well stated last post magboy.
- basman
November 19, 2012 at 8:36pm