Happy Days Were Here Again Reflections of a Libertarian Journalist

This essay is written on a day in which 300,000 young men and women, their age estimated at between eighteen and twenty-two, have made a most fearful ruckus in the streets of Paris. What is marvelous about the whole thing—to this mature observer—is that although I have read about these riots in the newspapers, and viewed depictions of them on the evening news, I have found it extremely hard to know what it is that the young people are rioting about. There is talk about how this is a right-wing riot, not a left-wing riot. But I swear, if I had to sit down and write a column about what exactly it is that is exercising the young people of France, I would need to call two or three old friends in Paris to ask: “Tell me, what in the hell is going on?” And whereas fifteen years ago this lack of particular knowledge would greatly have vexed me, it no longer does.

There is, in maturity, a crystallization of perspective. The overwhelming majority of those who buy beer and munch hungrily the television news while eating pizzas are—young people. There is a sense in which they bring to the news their theatrical demands for perspective, for apocalyptic confrontations.

Every now and again, we learn from reading history, what seems at first a trivial episode—the charge against the Winter Palace in January 1917—becomes the trigger of a new (in the cited case, new and bloody) epoch. But mostly such phenomena as the French students’ demonstration are trivial historical skirmishes, as remarkable as a grain of brownish sand, moments after it is flicked onto a yellow-white beach: you will need to hover over the area, magnifying glass in hand, in order merely to find it. You have, well, grown up. And the kind of thing that caused freshman riots at college brings now less a concern for the causes of the riots than a concern that the rioters will not cause damage to themselves, to others, or to that membrane of civility that, after all, permits us to call America a community.

In that sense, I think, it is true that we all become more conservative with age. The graduation of perspective. What is good about this graduation is very good: we continue, so to speak, to do our knitting and smile when youth tortures itself over events that —we know, we know—are of no greater historical importance than the flash flood’s cosmic importance, down Mississippi way, last spring (however harsh its impact at the time). In that sense, the conservative is viewed as someone who accepts the day’s news with a sense of history. My favorite of recent genre was the reporting Time magazine did two or three years ago. A journalist was interrogating Frenchmen in portions of France that had been occupied during the war. He asked what was life like under the Nazi occupation. One farmer replied, “Terrible, terrible ... but nothing like what it was under the Spanish.”

The problem of trying to cope with history with the perspective of maturity is that there is the danger that you will pass over not merely the frivolous things but also the weighty things. I found myself recently, writing a book review for The New York Times, asking the question: How many books per year on the subject should I find myself required to read in order to discharge my obligation to those who suffer from the oppressions of the Soviet Union? If you are sixty, and have been alert to the question, you will have read ten?—twenty?—one hundred books describing the tortures of life over there? There is a temptation to think the one hundred and first book, well—redundant. “We know all about that. What more is there to say about it?”

This is the special challenge to the mature. To be able to distinguish between the appropriate smile over the histrionics of those who are merely releasing political energy, and unending indignation over the studied capacity of men and women, young and old, consciously to impose misery on others. A fascinating recent study, the meaning of which is more obvious to older people than younger people, informs us that since the turn of the century, of the 155 million people who have been killed, 120 million have died at the hands not of foreign governments but of their own governments.

These are data that the older generation, reflecting on its experience, is adjured to reflect on. How is it that the state—the protector, in our case, of our Bill of Rights—is so frequently the executioner of its own citizens?

There is no ready answer to the question, none to the problem. But it is safe to say that the older viewer, sifting through his own experience, is better equipped to distinguish between the ephemeral and the scourge; and that a knowledge of the appropriate means to deal with the scourge will, if publicly articulated, commend itself. The Declaration of Independence was a catalytic document in the sense that a letter to the editor is not.

I never fully understood a letter I received when I was a relatively young man (thirty-five) and furiously energetic. I turn to it now, twenty-five years later, because it begins to have meaning for me. The circumstances were these.

Whittaker Chambers, then sixty-one and still a central figure in America (it was he who put the finger on Alger Hiss and exposed a scandalous Soviet spy ring which—it was commonly said —launched the whole age of McCarthyism), had become a close personal and professional friend. He told me one day that he wished to travel in the South with his wife, and I made the arrangements for him. But these arrangements expanded. They began with a simple invitation to sojourn at my mother’s house in Camden, South Carolina. But before long, the whisper that he was about to be in town evolved into the planning of a major dinner party for his admirers, followed by invitations to visit the gardens in Charleston—the whole shebang. Then suddenly, from Chambers, a telegram: “Cancel all plans to visit South. Regards Whittaker.”

I was both dismayed and alarmed—alarmed at the possibility that his delicate health was failing him. I called him, and he said on the phone that he had written to me—I should wait for the letter. It arrived, and began:

“You meant to do something generous and beautiful, and we seemed to dash it back in your face. It was bound to seem that way. Weariness, Bill—you cannot yet know literally what it means. I wish no time would come when you do know, but the balance of experience is against it. One day, long hence, you will know true weariness and will say: ‘That was it.’ ”

The weariness Chambers spoke of was not the kind of thing that brings to mind the immediate need for rectifying sleep, or nutrition, or even companionship. Weariness, for him, was something else: a disposition to do with less and less and abjure that which required physical and social energy. His letter went on, recalling the tribulations of historical and mythical figures; and soon he was explaining, in greater detail, the practical meaning for him of weariness. “One must have got rid of great loads of encumbering nonsense and irrelevance to get there; must have learned to travel quite light—one razor, one change....”

I think now, also, of Bergen Evans, the lexicographer who wrote so authoritatively and entertainingly. Interviewed at age sixty-five (he died at seventy-three), he was asked by a reporter where next he wished to travel. His answer was that he wished to travel nowhere. I have seen, he said, most of what I would wish to see. And I have reached the age when it becomes clear to me what it is that I enjoy doing most.

Mr. Evans concluded his self-examination: he most enjoyed reading, enjoyed reading more than he enjoyed viewing. The imagination, he seemed to be saying, does not dull in later age, but the stimulus to it is more readily self-generated. Bergen Evans could read a book about Venice, and Venice was from that moment on his mind, in his memory. Even the sounds and the smell. He was oh-so-happy with just his books. And then there was Henry David Thoreau, the great ascetic. He said that he tried every day to do with less and less.

Now that is the ambition of the anchorite. For that kind of self-control I have no appetite, nor even a prospective appetite. I respect greatly the contemplative calling. But after all, the monks have to have somebody to pray for, and I am resolutely one of them.

Self-isolation, for me, is not the thing to pursue—not at all. I have long since maintained that television is the greatest boon of the electronic age for elderly people. It is a source of visual distraction and, with the advent of the videocassette, more than just a means of random access to the world. You need not even count on cultivating such an imagination as Bergen Evans’s. If you wish to see Venice, why, you can locate Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice and, for all I know, a dozen documentaries on Venice. The point, however, remains: At a certain age, after a certain amount of experience, Venice can come to you rather than you to Venice.

My late mother-in-law is much quoted by her surviving friends for having at one point extemporized it all to a contemporary suffering from, oh, fallen arches. “After the age of fifty,” she clacked, “why, dear, it’s all patch-patch-patch.” But this essay has nothing to do with physical health, addressing instead psychological positions that crystallize with age, and one of these is what the editor of this journal calls “conservative with a small c.”

You may be old, Father William, and a lot of the abrasions of youth will pass you by, but some of the wisdom of maturity gives abiding comfort, even that which is fatalistic. We may not be able to battle against true weariness, but we can savor some of the true sweetness of a complaisant farewell to the hectic life. We leave it to others. Oh, perhaps with a little nostalgia, but without any wish to relive it. The rocking chair brings different pleasures from the rocking horse, but they are just what one wants, when weariness becomes, gradually, welcome.