Some days my words are too self-indulgent. They probably shouldn't see the light of day—today or maybe ever. At the very least, the lines of writing need to steep longer in the soupiness of thought, where more time in the cooker, so to speak, and some stirring of the pot might render flavor and texture worthwhile for consumption in the wider world. Today is one of those days when the words need to simmer.
I began this morning by writing about the exhilaration of the past couple of months. Challenging, economically and emotionally? Of course. Felt within the maw of widespread death and suffering? Yes, I’m fully aware. But even the most familiar vistas, literal or figurative, have been transformed. They bristle with consequence, with an intensity that I haven’t felt in years.
How to describe, though, the deeply felt, the raw, personal vitality of the moment, while being mindful of others’ loss, whether of income, or life, or flexibility in their day, which might now be severely constrained because of kids or illness or eviction?
Free of that self-consciousness, I wrote that these days are made for travelers—not simply those able to contend with the newness of a place but those who thrive within the mystery and unknown that unfolds over a path never before taken. Emily Dickinson captured it:
Exultation is the going
Of an inland soul to sea -
Past the Houses -
Past the Headlands -
Into deep Eternity -
Bred as we, among the mountains,
Can the sailor understand
The divine intoxication
Of the first league out from Land?
Yes, stepping from early March, when the first cases were reported in New York City, into April under stay-at-home orders felt like I was a land-bound person taking to sea for the first time. The parade of sirens and daily headlines about the epidemic cast a morbid shadow. January felt like a cul de sac, though, so I appreciated whatever steered me out of the suburbia of my soul. The first league out from Land was most definitely divine intoxication.
I empathize with the anxiety of those bristling at the closures and desperately grasping for a return to normal. What I’m feeling as exhilaration—the newfangledness, the uncertainty—sits, I suspect, like bricks on the minds and shoulders of many others. I’m not talking of the Koch-funded gun-nuts converging on state capitol buildings, demanding haircuts and the right to spread disease. I’m talking about the workers denied unemployment benefits, the parents working from home while caring for bored or curious children, those that feel the new, the unknown, as the precipice of potential demise. I feel exhilarated; I suspect they may not.
And in writing that paragraph, perhaps, I found a way out of my morning impasse, my self-indulgence. My exhilaration arises, in part, from my material conditions, which are relatively sound—I say relatively because I’m a writer, after all.
I can pay my rent and bills—for now. I can afford booze—for now—on the days when I need to take the edge off of my anxiety or to turn the volume up on these feelings of relative enchantment with the world. I may not have a long-term future—who does working in journalism—but for the moment, I’m not on the precipice of material neglect. I have the means and the mental bandwidth, in other words, to feel exhilarated.
An all-too-frequent misinterpretation of that very fine and often-cantankerous 19th-century visionary Karl Marx suggests that he was unconcerned with the needs and desires of the individual. It’s simply not true. He focused on the broad context of society in order to understand the conditions that constrain individuals and limit the possibility of achieving personal liberty.
“The human being,” he wrote, “is in the most literal sense a [political animal], not merely a gregarious animal, but an animal which can individuate itself only in the midst of society.”
Society shapes, constrains the individual. It can also set the conditions for individual flourishing. The realm of freedom comes, Marx described, when the realm of necessity and the mundane is left behind.
I’m hardly free of society’s material constraints—and I certainly have to navigate the mundane all too often. But I’m doing okay enough to feel some exhilaration.
So I've spent most of my day considering the need to destroy the impediments to achieving the divine intoxication described by Dickinson. Imagining a universal right to exhilaration still doesn't feel selfless enough.
Perhaps, though, the thoughts need more time to simmer.
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