-
The Hand That Grips Us Gets Stronger
- 2025/02/04
- 再生時間： 35 分
- ポッドキャスト
-
サマリー
あらすじ・解説
Don’t ever let anyone tell you that when you read a book there is no way you will see yourself reflected in the words on the page. Because that definitely happened to me this morning.I was reading the novel The Sea, the Sea by Iris Murdoch, and I got to the part where the narrator describes his father, saying, I knew that my father…was some sort of luckless failure before I knew what ‘failure’ meant, before I knew anything about money, status, power, fame or any of those coveted prizes whose myriad forms have led me throughout my life that dervish dance which is now, I trust, over. And of course when I say that my dear father was a failure I mean it only in the grossest worldly sense. He was an intelligent good man, pure in heart.I can’t remember the last time I identified with a paragraph so completely. Let this be all the evidence we need that books are good. Despite how most of the people in government couldn’t make their way through even an accessible but slow-paced novel like The Sea, the Sea from start to finish to save their lives—and I mean just reading one, not writing one—books like it have a lot to offer. Sometimes the author describes a loser in a way that evokes a kind of frisson, a kind of shiver of recognition that’s exactly what you need to get your heart started on a cold Tuesday morning. Do I really think I’m a loser? Not on a cosmic scale. Not when it comes to, like, eternity. Anyway, it took a few days for it to sink in, that the richest man in the world gave a Nazi salute at the president's inauguration. He did it twice, in case you missed it, somehow, once to the crowd and once to the flag behind him. He did it again later, apparently, and now he’s telling Germans to put the Holocaust behind them, and dismantling the federal government.I started to write this last week. At first, all I mentioned here at the start were the Nazi salutes. Every day there’s more stuff I should mention. Like how the richest man in the world has enlisted the help of college boys to destroy the Department of Stuff That Helps People Out. They want to abolish the Department of Education next. I have kids who go to school. I went to schools, once, myself. Is it time to buy a gun? I don't want to have a gun. But the president and his friends, who have more money than the rest of us have air to breathe, want people to get hurt. I might well be someone he wants to hurt. I might be the kind of guy whose life he’ll get around to destroying once he’s done some more ethnic cleansing and ended all taxation for anyone who owns their own boat. I know that American history is soaked with the blood of mostly helpless people. The arc of history may bend toward justice, but the arc of American history will bend you until you break. It will take a long time, it will hurt, and as soon as they’re done with you they’ll start on your children.It’s hard to come to terms with your own helplessness. Arming yourself doesn’t make you any less helpless. I am, at the moment I write this sentence, at the luxury high school, which is not for the rich but is still a luxury. The same twenty or so students have been walking past the classroom where I am substitute teaching. They move in the same direction every time I see them. They have passed this room at least a half-dozen times. There some of them are again. I don't know what is going on.I was listening recently to the podcast The Culture We Deserve. They were discussing the film The Brutalist.I haven't seen The Brutalist. I doubt I ever will. It sound boring, and it's three hours long. I don't have that kind of time on my hands. I haven’t done anything for a consecutive three hours in the last twelve years except work. I would say I have also slept for three consecutive hours in that period of time, but I’m honestly not sure I have.There go the students again. Why is this happening?It wasn't until I heard podcasters discuss The Brutalist that I learned its protagonist's name is Laszlo Toth.I googled that name, and it turns out it belongs to the man who vandalized Michaelangelo's Pietà in 1972. I think he hit it with a hammer. I heard, once, that the founder of the City Museum in St. Louis was present for that event. I heard he helped stop the man from destroying the statue, and died later under strange circumstances.Lazlo Toth is also the name of Don Novello's letter-writing alter ego. Don Novello is a comedy writer, who wrote for SNL, and made appearances on the show and elsewhere as Father Guido Sarducci. As Lazlo Toth, he wrote letters to presidents, corporations, and celebrities. He collected them in books, one of which I used to have.The letters were funny, in the dry way that letters can be.Is Laszlo Toth a common name? Is it the Mike Smith of another part of the world, somewhere? Like Hungary?Am I the only one left who remembers the letter-writing Lazlo Toth?And isn’t it strange, how everything seems to get heavier all the time? ...