Piecework

If this goes on, escalating by the hour, the country is doomed. It will remain a state, of course, a geographical entity; but it won’t be a nation. We are in the midst of the largest immigration wave since the turn of the last century. If we have already succumbed to our own jagged forms of tribalism, we can’t hope to absorb and assimilate the new arrivals. If we tell the new immigrants that to be an American is to insist on status as a victim, to hate the president and the government, to fear one’s neighbor, to reduce all discourse to the most primitive level, then our twenty-first century will be a horror. E pluribus unum was not intended to be a gigantic mockery. It’s time for all Americans to think about what we’re doing to ourselves. It’s time to ostracize the sectarian swine who, in Yeats’s phrase, multiply through division. It’s time to honor good taste, hard work, and all those men and women who cherish human decency.

The gulags are gone. The concentration camps exist only in memory. Nobody worries much anymore about atom bombs. But fear is a habit like any other. So is the need for an enemy. And as the great cartoonist Walt Kelly said long ago, “We have met the enemy and he is us.” We can’t allow that to replace e pluribus unum as the American national slogan. We have to learn how to pipe down and back off. We have to stop shouting for a little while and learn again how to listen.

Otherwise, it’s black hats and white hats.

Us against Them.

Me against you.

Endgame.

ESQUIRE,

December 1994

PART VII ROLLING THE DICE

These are personal pieces, about living and about not dying. With any luck, they won’t be the last about either subject.

52

I have arrived at last in that peculiar zone where I am no longer young and not yet old. This stage of a human life is called, of course, middle age. Alas, even that familiar phrase is inaccurate; at fifty-two, I am not in the middle of my life, for there is little chance that I will live to 104. But I am certainly in the middle of my adult life, and this sometimes causes personal astonishment. In the course of my time here, I have seen much of the world, loved women, fathered children, worked at several trades, committed cruelties and engaged in folly, had fine meals and good times, drowsed through summer afternoons and heard the chimes at midnight. That is to say, I have lived a life. I am far from finished with that splendid accident, but there is one enormous fact attached to the condition called middle age: I know now that the path is leading inexorably through the evening to the barn. And not far away, up ahead, perhaps over that next lavender hill, lies death.

Above all, the acceptance of certain death is what distinguishes this age of man. For some, the imminence of death creates remorse about the waste of time and opportunities; for others, fear; for a few, relief; for many, a sense of urgency. This is the time of life when men throw over careers to try painting in the South of France; they leave wives for ballerinas; they hole up in mountain cabins to read Proust; they gaze at the shotgun on the wall of the den and see only the quarry of the self. / am going to die, the man whispers to himself. Sooner than later. This dramatic sense of the inevitable doesn’t resemble the fatalism of the combat soldier, who knows that if he lives, he will still be in command of his youth. Nor does the vision of death have the dark romantic glamour it has when you are young. If you have reached middle age, you have already chosen to live. But the warning signs of decline and decay are as unavoidable as sunset. The most obvious are physical.

One summer, after a grueling winter of work, I discovered I had grown a paunch. A bathroom scale told me that I had gained only ten pounds, but the suety paunch, noticed suddenly in the window of a store, made me look like another person, some chunky middle-aged stranger going about his mundane business. The paunch would not go away, and I have been unable to summon the force of my dormant adolescent vanity to work it off. At the same time, white patches appeared in my beard and a few white hairs mysteriously sprouted from my scalp. Because I do not shave, and thus don’t engage in morning ablutions, I see my face less frequently than I did when young; these changes were sudden reminders of the inevitable.