I usually begin my Fridays downing an Al-Kimia bagel, starting an Al-Kimia coffee, and reading something on paper before firing up Q on CBC internet radio and begining to “work.” Habitually, the words I consume are Sam Lipsyte’s but Q’s a rerun today and I’m wearing khakis instead of jeans so everything’s out the window. I stuck with the bagel (though more tempted than usual by the super-healthy-looking-everything muffin-thing) and coffee is never really a matter of choice, but skipped Venus Drive's mordant offerings, reading instead the work of another artisan of immaculate sentences, Adam Gopnik’s essayon Albert Camus in this week’s New Yorker.
One of my many mini-(day)-dreams involves composing a career-in-review essay of Adam Gopnik’s oeuvre when he enters senescent retirement and I begin to find footing on my first plateau of success.* The Camus piece only pumped more fuel to the fantasy, with its implications for developing post-ideological thinking, the meaning of “history” after the war, and Tony Judt-y kind of stuff on what to make of Sartre. I’ll leave that for later attempts at thought and (likely failed) stabs at composition, though, as I simply wanted to rip a couple of sentences I thought too Gopnikian, too good to leave un-noted.
His best observations, I think, provoke envy for their ability to assert without feeling ungrounded, obviously true but as yet un-noted or un-sayable:
When handsome men or beautiful women take up the work of the intellect, it impresses us because we know they could have chosen other paths to being impressive; that they chose the path of the mind suggests that there is on it something more worthwhile than a circuitous route to the good things that the good-looking get just by showing up.
I’d be terrified to commit those words to paper, let alone LCD, worried that I’d be opening myself to claims of superficiality, of some kind of gender bias, or just plain jerkiness to the academics that surround me. Gopnik can do it, though, without evoking any of that, somehow allowing the veracity of sub-conscious assumptions and the need to not be an asshole through near Gallic use of the semi-colon and a mild celebration of the life of the mind.**
His contemplation of the thinking life, I think, is one his most redeeming traits of all of his work, for its sometimes celebration, sometimes deprecation, and constant rumination on cultural and contextual nuance:
Olivier Todd, the author of the standard biography on French, suggests that Camus might have benefitted by knowing more about his anti-totalitarian Anglo-American contemporaries, Popper and Orwell among them. Yet in truth the big question Camus asked was never the Anglo-American liberal one: How can we make the world a little bit better tomorrow? It was the grander French one: Why not kill yourself tonight?
I don’t know that I necessarily think the approach a “grander” one, but I’d never thought of it that way, nor seen anyone phrase it so clearly. But for the last century at least, it kind of works, and might also explain why many find BHL so grating.
There are other passages I’d hoped to recount, but this short missive has already taken five times longer than it should have to create and I’m struggling over whether it’d be a good idea to get another large coffee. My friday seems to have course-corrected to its normal state so I’m thus tradition-bound to spend the rest of it in nervous non-productivity.
*Forgive the two massive assumptions, the larger being that I ever gain a bigger forum than this blog, the lesser that a compulsive thinker and word-producer (Francophile though he might be) like Adam Gopnik could enter something approaching retirement.
** It reminds me also of Maron’s description of Louis CK’s initial reactions to Jay Mohr’s stand-up: “doesn’t he get that this is for us?”
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