FROM GARDNER TO JOHNSON TO GUTERSON

E.Ethelbert Miller asks, "John Gardner had a tremendous influence on your life. But who have you been 'Gardner' to?  What successful writer has been influenced by your teaching and claims you as their key mentor?"

This question is almost too easy to answer.

DAVID GUTERSON

A few nights ago, on June 7, I had the great pleasure of attending the showing of a new, very funny film entitled "Old Goats." It was created by a talented, young film-maker named Taylor Guterson, the son of writer David Guterson, who was my former student in the late 1970s and '80s, and sometimes kindly refers to me as his mentor. His son's film was presented as part of the Seattle International Film Festival. The Egyptian Theater on Capitol Hill where it played was packed. The story, a character study of sorts about three, comic old men who live on Bainbridge Island (which is home for the Guterson family), was a hilarious and compassionate crowd-pleaser. And it certainly pleased me to see my erstwhile writing student's son following in the steps of his successful father, author of the record-breaking best-selling novel Snow Falling on Cedars; and more recent novels such as The Other, Our Lady of the Forest, and East of the Mountains; Family Matters: Why Homeschooling Makes Sense, a work of non-fiction; and the short story collection, The Country Ahead of Us, the Country Behind. (And, I should add, one of his other sons recently founded a brewery in Portland, Oregon.)

Among the hundreds (if not thousands) of students I worked with at the University of Washington and elsewhere between 1976 and 2009, David Guterson was the most hard-working, talented, and dedicated to his craft night and day. We have the same literary agent, Georges Borchardt, who once said jokingly to me, "Gardner begat Johnson who begat Guterson." This was funny, but not entirely true insofar as every writer at the end of the day (or after years of long hours working alone) is the only one responsible for creating his or her own distinctive, literary vision. At best, a mentor can only give different forms of support and encouragement until the younger writer finds his or her enthusiastic readers. (And make no mistake, when a writer "shows up" with a commercially and critically successful book, that person didn't start writing yesterday; he or she has most likely been laboring for at least a decade in workshops and on their own.) But, yes, if memory serves, writer Stanley Elkin introduced Gardner to the literary agency of Georges and Anne Borchardt, often called the "Cadillac" of literary agencies because---well, because it is classy, and Georges has been knighted and honored often by the French government for his contributions to literature. Gardner did the same for me as Elkin did for him, and I introduced the agency to Guterson.

It feels a little odd for me to write about David Guterson  because I've known him for so long, and seen the arc of his career, from UW student to brand-name literary writer. From his earliest college years, he was serious, mature, and skillfully met head-on the challenge of any writing assignment. Even back then, he was a practicing grown-up. I attribute his being the ideal student to, in part, his total devotion to not only his craft but also to his family, which is first and foremost among his priorities. As the title of his non-fiction book indicates, he and his wife Robin home-schooled their children, i.e., they took the business of educating their young so seriously (David for some time taught high school) that they were willing to invest their time and energy every day in the task of integrating learning with the love a child experiences in the home. 

We both have a long-standing interest in Buddhism and, I guess, a special affection for our daughters. He once said, memorably, "Having a daughter is like falling in love for a second time." I think he's fallen in love again because he and his lovely wife adopted a few years ago a beautiful girl from Ethiopia.

Every teacher who feels indebted to the men and women who taught and helped him hopes one day to have a student who establishes himself (or herself) in the discipline they share, and maintains daily the highest professional and personal standards. Such a student liberates his teachers, I believe, for his success says that what the teacher tried to offer in and outside the classroom, however large or small that may be, was not in vain. 

Indeed, after Snow Falling on Cedars was published, I think I said to David that I was finally free---in terms of a teacher's obligation to transmit what he has received to a member of the next generation--and so I really didn't need to teach any more. In other words, one of my favorite students was on his way. And since then he has built---and continues to build---his own many-roomed mansion of creative gifts for the enjoyment and edification of others.

These days he is publishing poetry, and in October his new novel Ed King will be published by Knopf. This is, as a reviewer once said of another book, "shoes-in-the-dirt," realistic fiction in the grand tradition of, say, a Sinclair Lewis: a meticulously researched, suspenseful story that puts contemporary flesh on Sophocles' Oedipus Rex. I was so engaged when I started the galley, that I read the first 143 pages in a single sitting, for it is also a powerful comment on the way we live today. If I were you, I would pre-order a copy right now.

CHARLES JOHNSON TALKS ABOUT STANLEY CROUCH

My first contact with cultural critic Stanley Crouch took the form of a phone call I received in 1982. He was at The Village Voice then, was reviewing my novel Oxherding Tale, and wanted to speak with me about it. As we talked, I immediately felt I was conversing with a kindred spirit, a very original thinker who had read the most accomplished works of fiction, American and foreign, and was as troubled as I was (and as many were, though many kept silent about it) by the way uncritical, prefabricated political ideologies of one sort or another had replaced depth of thought and meaning, breadth of vision, originality and invention, and technical mastery in works by some black writers (No, I'll mention no names) heavily promoted (again for political reasons) in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

I discovered he was a cultural fighter in the class of heavyweights, one not afraid to point out that "The Emperor or Empress isn't wearing any clothes." In this country, we almost never speak honestly about race. As a Buddhist, I view that subject as residing at the white-hot center of Samsara as a lived illusion. And Crouch, being a black American writer and critic, recognized instantly when another black writer---the opportunists and race hustlers---was pulling wool over the eyes of white readers unfamiliar with black American history and culture; or exploiting fashionable trends; or simply lying for personal profit. 

He understood that neither black nationalism nor the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s had a monopoly on black thought in America, indeed, that this separatist, one-dimensional strain of thought was not even dominant among black Americans, although some naive white readers predictably found it to be thrilling. (And many today who are teachers K-12 and in colleges, white and black, prefer to give their students exclusively a diet of such self-pitying material devoted to the idea of victimization.) My own parents and kinfolk, for example, would have listened politely to it, then excused themselves and gone back to the real business of life, i.e., working to create a better future for their children, to honor their own mothers and fathers, to work at their own self improvement in mind, body and spirit, and take advantage of the very tangible opportunities America offered in the post-Civil Rights period, just as African immigrants do today, the ones who say of alienated, bitter, native-born black people that "Where they see walls, we see windows; where they see obstacles, we see opportunities."

Crouch wrote a spot-on, two-page review of Oxherding Tale that led directly to it being leased for a paperback edition by Grove Press.  And so began a spirited, long-distance dialogue, between Seattle and New York City, a friendship of mutual support and collegiality that continues to this day. Along with my literary agents, he was my guest in November, 1990 at the National Book Award ceremony when Middle Passage received that prize, and his description of that night has been read by many people.

Like his mentor, the very distinguished author Albert Murray, like Jerald Walker and James Alan McPherson, Crouch has a heroic vision of black American life and history. To be perfectly honest, it's impossible not to have such a vision if one has studied the way black men and women since the 17th century have overcome simply preposterous obstacles during centuries of slavery (when they were demonized as soulless and less than human) and decades of racial segregation (when that dehumanization continued) in a struggle taken up by each generation of black people until it led to the election of the first black president in 2008. He has no stomach for a "tragic" vision of black life, or one that whines and wallows in pathos and victimization, for those conceptualizations only invoke pity. And close on the heels of pity comes contempt (for black people or anyone seen as unable to pull their own weight). As Crouch has said often, "I'm not on the left wing or the right wing. I'm on the free wing."

He understands---as every generation did before the late 1960s---that black Americans, relentlessly disenfranchised and denied for so long in this nation, became creative grand masters of the art of "making a way out of no way," the agents that forced the United States to live up to the ideals in its sacred, secular documents (the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution), resulting in a more fully realized practice of democracy and freedom, which every oppressed group discriminated against in this country---women, Asians, Hispanics, people of the Jewish persuasion, gays and the trans-gendered---has benefited from for the last fifty years. Crouch, bless him, understood that this was a noble, ennobling, and quintessentially American struggle that liberated everyone from the cage of color; he refused to let us forget that (for we can be a willfully forgetful nation), and he inspired many of us to never back down to bullies, ideologues, bigots, opportunists, and fools when the truth (and the well-being of our children and loved ones) is at stake.

That very old understanding of black life became muddied in the late 1970s and early '80s. It took a cosmopolitan and courageous author like Stanley Crouch to clear the toxic air and, as one of my best friends puts it, "get the room right." But as he always reminds me, our job is not yet done. The infantilization of American culture continues every day. Our job as writers is to relentlessly address this, and with our gloves off, if need be. In fact, we have more work to do in this regard in the decade after 9/11 than we had in the early 1980s. When future historians write about our conflicted, often confused period of American literature and culture, the name Stanley Crouch will stand out boldly as that of a writer who recognized go-nihaara (Sanskrit for bullshit) whenever he saw it, and called it by its proper name. 

THE WORLD ACCORDING TO JOHN GARDNER

JOHN GARDNER

  In an interview I did with writer John Gardner on January 21, 1973, he made one of the most thought-provoking and prophetic statements in his entire career. He said:

         "I think a certain kind of America is doomed, though something greater may be coming. The novelist and only the novelist thrives on breakdown, because that's the moment when he can analyze the beauty of the values that are falling and rising...The end of a great civilization is always a great moment for fiction. When the old England at the end of the nineteenth century fell, along came Dickens; when Russia fell apart, along came Tolstoy...One looks forward to the fall of great civilizations because it gives us great art."

Gardner delivered this statement in rather general and vague terms that he hoped we would use as a tool for understanding the relationship between        civilizational collapse and great art. But his words concealed more---racially and politically---than they revealed. In 1973, JG was actually talking about what he saw as the "breakdown" of civilization in our time, specifically the way the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant America of his youth was "doomed" because of changes brought about in the late 1960s and early '70s by first the Civil Rights Movement, then the Black Power Movement.

You might not discover any of this from looking at his fiction, for despite his large body of work he never mentions the Civil Rights Movement---not once in his stories, as far as I can see, and I've read everything he wrote---as if that monumental sea-change in American history never took place. His work never mentions Martin Luther King Jr. or any of the black heroes that ended legal segregation in the United States and made it possible for me to study with him at an American university. Furthermore, there are in his novels and stories no black characters, at least no major ones, and the only people of color who appear and are portrayed respectfully, now and then, are native Americans---or rather JG's somewhat romantic idea of native Americans. That omission is striking---or glaring---because, according to figures I've encountered, whites make up only 17% of the world's population and people color account for 83%. 

 Gardner was, it must be said, the product of a farming community in upstate New York in the 1930s and '40s. He didn't know black history which is, of course, synonymous with American history. He said he spoke twelve languages, but he knew little about Far Eastern cultures, and he had an almost visceral aversion to Buddhism, which surfaced when I wrote Oxherding Tale. He once told me he just had to let me know that his farmer father believed that black people could talk to mules. (Why he had to let me know that bit of superstitious ignorance is beyond me.) And I also remember Gardner telling me how upset and baffled he was when he received a letter from a local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan that expressed praise for and approval of his writing.

But Gardner was far from being a racist. Eurocentric, yes, a true Western, Protestant, Republican patriot. But not racist. He told me how he and his first wife fled early from a dinner party hosted by poet James Dickey when that writer launched into an ugly imitation of James Baldwin, using butchered, pidgin speech. I think he saw, nervously, in 1973 what was coming---an America that by the mid-21st century will no longer have a white majority, a once dominant nation that will in this new millennium lose its hegemony and be (at best) "first among equals" when nations that have thrown off colonialism and made rapid progress in modernization---like India, China, South Korea, Japan---assert their new muscle in international affairs.

That sense of the white West being "doomed" (as Malcolm X predicted in the '60s in his published lectures entitled The End of White Supremacy) runs as an undercurrent in Gardner's first bestseller, The Sunlight Dialogues (1972). Read my 2006 introduction for the novel's reissue by New Directions Books, and you'll see Gardner's dramatization of this American decline writ small in the story of the Hodge family on whose land at the novel's end poor Negroes have taken up residence.

To his credit, Gardner worked to better understand the racial, cultural, gender, and gay Other until the end of his life---to increase his empathy for people raised differently from himself, as he demonstrated in his essay "Meditational Fiction" on the Buddhist-flavored stories of Kikuo Itaya in Tengu Child. He was the best, most insightful teacher of the craft of writing in our time. And he was generous, even self-sacrificing toward his students from all backgrounds. Had I not met Gardner, who boldly cleared a path for me into the literary world, I would not be a writer doing these E-Channel posts today.

     

NEW FICTION NOVELISTS

Is there a connection between my work and those writers once described as "New Fiction novelists"? By now I suspect that readers of E-Channel will recognize how much I dislike labels that limit our experience of phenomenon. At their very best, labels can only be provisional; at their worst, they are like the bed of Procrustes. 

 

 

In 1974, the same year I published Faith and the Good Thing, Joe David Bellamy published a collection of interviews entitled The New Fiction (University of Illinois Press). Those young (at the time) writers he interviewed were John Barth, Joyce Carol Oates, William H. Gass, Donald Barthelme, Ronald Sukenick, Tom Wolfe, John Hawkes, Susan Sontag, Ishmael Reed, Jerzy Kosinski, John Gardner, and Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Quite a diverse list, wouldn't you say? Everything from traditionalists to Sur-fictionists, meta-fictionists, and satirists. 

 

 

In his preface, Bellamy said:

 

 

          "Whether the new fiction of the last decade represents a "breakthrough" into fruitful new vistas or the 'exhaustion' of a decadent, spent art form, it is, at least, drastically different from the fiction written immediately before by the great American modernists (as they have come to be called) and is based apparently upon totally revised assumptions about the nature and purpose of art....Concurrent with the outpouring of some remarkable innovative fiction during this period, of course, numbers of writers continued to work skillfully in traditional modes, relying basically on nineteenth-century conventions for journalistic---or other nonfictional---purposes. In other words, amazing, sweeping, and unanticipated as its appearance has proven to be, the new American fiction is by no means monolithic, ubiquitous, or the result of any conspiracy, though it is no less amazing for that."

 

 

In constructing his definition of the "new fiction," Bellamy contrasts it to the literary naturalism that arose in the late 19th century. Think of Stephen Crane's "The Open Boat" (1897) and "Maggie: A Girl of the Streets" (1893), a work so scandalously  "realistic" in depicting the protagonist's sordid world that Crane had to publish it himself and only one bookseller carried it. Crane was known for journalistic authenticity---he knew a "madam" of a brothel, he himself was lost in an open boat, but apparently didn't need to go to war in order to write The Red Badge of Courage. I think at this juncture we need to distinguish between "realism" and "naturalism." You find the former in all sorts of literary traditions dating back thousands of years, even in fantasy writing where, say, a knight's shield may be described with great fidelity to detail and "realism" before he fights a dragon. 

 

 

But literary naturalism is a specific theory of how the world works, physically and psychologically, one that by necessity had to be revised on the basis of new evidence. It arose as a literary movement between the 1880s and 1940, attempting to explain "scientifically" the underlying social and environmental forces that shaped a person or a character. In an important development in philosophy coeval with the rise of literary naturalism, many thinkers saw the flaws and dangers in the scientific sources this literary movement drew from (some Darwin, probably some Freud). For example, phenomenologist Edmund Husserl critiqued the  "Natural Attitude" (Einstellung) as being the everyday unreflective attitude of naive belief in the existence of the world, a rationalism which either presupposes abstract principles or the uncriticized results of science, which is scientism. Most fiction even today, I would say, is written from the standpoint of the Natural Attitude---an attitude, as Buddhist teacher Bhikku Bodhi tells us, that is plastered over with layers of conceptual paint and lacks the radical empiricism involved in "taking stock" of each and every one of our experiences.

 

 

Naturalism as a literary movement, then, is problematic because of the presuppositions in its ontological model of Nature, which generally is Newtonian physics (the classical model) that collapsed due to the work of Einstein and relativity theory, (we do not have "space" and "time", but rather the phenomenon known as space/time), and lead Alfred North Whitehead to publish Process and Reality (1929), a major work of "process philosophy" that attempted to account metaphysically for the discoveries of quantum physics. Interesting, too, is how Whitehead's work offers a defense of theism, though his God has no resemblance to that of traditional religions. (And some commentators find parallels with Buddhist abhidharma or metaphysical writings in his work.) Even earlier, William James in his Gifford Lectures delivered at the University of Edinburgh (1901-02), which became The Varieties of  Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature, chastised the scientists in his audience for their dismissing the value of religion.

 

 

The "New Fiction" that Bellamy sees merging in the 1960s and early '70s is a fiction sensitive to the philosophical and scientific naivety in some exhausted, "decadent, spent" modernist fiction. As so often happens in literary history, it was a reaction by a new generation of American writers to the rules and reasoning they inherited from their predecessors (just as Sherwood Anderson, D.H. Lawrence and others reacted against the definitions of the modern short story as defined by Poe, O'Henry and critic Brander Matthews) and the unquestioned dominance of literary naturalism for three generations. It was sensitive to other, non-western cultures and how they described reality. It questioned the very foundations of the kind of fiction written between the 1880s and 1940s, even its writerly techniques, which embodied an uncritical weltanschauung. Many works by these authors were self-referential or deliberately self-conscious, shattering the illusion that stories were anything other than a linguistic game; some of the writers were anti-realists (in the philosophical sense of that term), acknowledging that a work of fiction is always a deliberately constructed artifice, never a mirror held up to reality. (See William H. Gass's brilliant essays on writing in Fiction and the Figures of Life.) How could it not be thus when in so many ways our understanding of the enveloping physical universe was so radically transformed? The response of, say, a John Gardner was to sometimes return to the pre-naturalistic tale-telling tradition. 

 

 

Personally, I have the same great affection for the tale---an obvious fabulation---as a literary form in which aspects of spirituality can be explored without having to justify the presence of the life of the spirit in a story. I feel the same way about science fiction, first because it can address cutting-edge scientific discoveries and, secondly, because sci-fi over the course of its long history often assumes the conventions of the tale. But when a story demands a naturalistic approach (which most readers are conditioned to prefer---I'm thinking of readers who say tedious and tiring things like "Did that really happen? Your character used drugs, do you use drugs?"), like the ones in Soulcatcher and Other Stories, I render the fiction in those familiar naturalistic terms and that in tradition.

 

 

But, yes, some of my early work in the 1970s deliberately exhibits meta-fictional or New Fiction characteristics, Oxherding Tale in particular. Perhaps the best thing to say in 2011 is that we are all, in one way or another, New Fiction writers now.

FICTION AND THE LIBERATION OF PERCEPTION

  We have never lived enough. Our experience is, without fiction, too confined and too parochial. Martha Nussbaum, "Love's Knowledge."

In an article published thirty-one years ago in Obsidian, "Philosophy and Black Fiction" (1980), I argued that "the final concern of serious fiction is the liberation of perception." I also stated in that article that, "our experience as black men and women completely outstrips our perception---black life is ambiguous and a kaleidoscope of meanings rich, multi-sided, and what the authentic black writer does is despoil meaning to pin down the freshest interpretation given to him. This is genuine fiction. It is also hermeneutic philosophy, in the sense that the writer is an archaeologist probing the Real for veiled sense."

A third of a century later, it still seems to me that the greatest literary art has an epistemological mission. By now this position should be uncontroversial. I'm not talking about mere "entertainment" (though great fiction certainly entertains), or the garden-variety novel, escapist literature, or fiction as a form of recreation. Rather, I am referring to fiction (and all Saying and Showing) that deepens our knowledge and refines our ways of seeing and experiencing the world.

MARTHA NUSSBAUM

 In her often-cited work "Love's Knowledge" (1990), philosopher Martha Nussbaum says, "In a sense Proust is right to see the literary text as an 'optical instrument' through which the reader becomes a reader of his or her own heart." A similar understanding of fiction is found in William Faulkner's Nobel prize acceptance speech, and in Saul Bellow's essay "Culture Now." Nussbaum continues, saying, "One obvious answer was suggested by Aristotle: we have never lived enough. Our experience is, without fiction, too confined and too parochial...

 "All living is interpreting; all action requires seeing the world as something. So, in this sense, no life is 'raw"..." (In other words, our experience is already cooked by our conditioning, education, intentionality, prejudices, assumptions and presuppositions.) "The point," says Nussbaum, "is that in the activity of literary imagining we are led to imagine and describe with greater precision, focusing our attention on each word, feeling each event more keenly---whereas much of actual life goes by without that heightened awareness, and is thus, in a sense, not fully or thoroughly lived."    

JOHN GARDNER

The late John Gardner offered a similar vision of fiction in "On Moral Fiction." There, he states, "In fiction we stand back, weigh things as we do not have time to do in life; and the effect of great fiction is to temper real experience, modify prejudice, humanize...When the writer accepts unquestioningly someone else's formulation of how and why people behave, he is not thinking but dramatizing some other man's theory: that of Freud, Adler, Laing, or whomever. But the final judgment must come from the writer's imagination."

And that imagination, according to Percy Shelley in "A Defense of Poetry," is "the great instrument of moral good." Shelley argues further that, "Poetry defeats the curse which binds us to be subjected to the accident of surrounding impressions...It makes us the inhabitants of a world to which the familiar is in chaos. It reproduces the common universe of which we are portions and percipients, and it purges from our inward sight the film of familiarity which obscures from us the wonder of our being."

Recently, on April 27, I had the very great pleasure of discussing the above aesthetic positions with philosophers Ron Moore and Sara Goering in a special event, entitled "Moral Imagination," sponsored by the Philosophy Department at the University of Washington. If readers would like to view a tape of that rousing evening discussion, the link is:

Moral Imagination: A discussion of literature and moral awareness on Vimeo
 

MICHAEL BOYLAN

Last fall, philosopher Michael Boylan, who is my co-author for the book Philosophy, An Innovative Introduction: Fictive Narrative, Primary Texts, and Responsive Writing (Westview Press, 2010), and I also did an hour-long discussion for Philosophy TV on the relationship between philosophy and literature, on how they are and have always been sister disciplines. The link for viewing this discussion is:

Michael Boylan and Charles Johnson « Philosophy TV

 

 It should be obvious that such perception-liberating art is the antithesis of ideology, cliched thinking, the unimaginative, and works that do no more than recycle pre-established or second-hand meanings and interpretations of our experience. Real fiction makes the familiar unfamiliar. It shakes up calcified ways of seeing. It activates in us a Beginner's Mind, as Buddhists would say. And we can never again think of a subject, event or experience without recalling the work of art---the gift---that caused scales to fall away from our eyes. So yes, I still stand firmly by the position I took in 1980.

THE ONE

I imagine that my being an "only child" shaped my life in more ways than I can coax into consciousness. I've always marveled at people who grew up with brothers and sisters, like my wife (two brothers and three sisters), and my own son and daughter, who have a tight, loving bond from birth. My father came from a big, rural South Carolina family where he had six sisters and five brothers. (I have no dearth of cousins, aunts and uncles.) But my mother, who didn't like the South (she preferred our home in Evanston) was an only child. And her mother, my grandmother, was an only child, too. The matrilineal side of my family tree has, therefore, now vanished with their deaths.

If you do grow up as an only child, you learn early on to enjoy being alone, and to find ways to amuse yourself when your friends---or anyone---aren't around, which can be often. You read a lot, and as the cliche goes, see books as your "friends." And, as with books, it was drawing into which I retreated as a child. 

There was something magical to me about bringing forth images that hitherto existed only in my head where no one could see them. I remember spending whole afternoons in the 1950s blissfully seated before a three-legged blackboard my parents got me for Christmas, drawing and erasing until my knees and the kitchen floor beneath me were covered with layers of chalk and the piece in my hand was reduced to a wafer-thin sliver.

Having only one child to worry about no doubt eased the financial stress on my hard-working father. My mother made sure he paid for me to have the suite of lessons she felt I needed---piano, clarinet, even dancing lessons. (He paid, too, for my lessons when I was 15-years-old with cartoonist Lawrence Lariar and, when I was 19, bought me my first car, a used 1965 Corvair (gold) convertible---that, because I was saving up to buy a motorcycle, which was all I could afford, and my mother was afraid I'd kill myself on it so she pressured Dad into getting me the car.) However, none of those lessons stuck with me because all I really wanted to do was draw. 

Of course, Dad also taught me how to work. I had part-time jobs during high school, but I remember coming home after my freshman year in college with no job lined up for the summer. On my first night back, my father announced to me that I'd better set my clock early---around 6 AM---because he'd already secured a summer job for me: as one of the student garbage men employed by the City of Evanston (where he was a night watchman) during the summer. I did that job for two summers straight, hauling Evanston's waste and trash on my back in a big, plastic tub. After work, I'd come home filthy, smelling from head to toe of sewage-tainted water from the garbage cans, but it was honest work that built muscle, which I needed because that same year (1967) I started training at a Chicago kung-fu school in the evenings.

An only child learns early the meaning of the title for Stephen Batchelor's book Alone With Others: An Existential Approach to Buddhism. Dare I say that an only child learns how to be entertained by his own mind and imagination? That his childhood solitariness is not at all bad preparation for the day when he must sit in formal meditation, concentrating of his breathing and critically watching how his mind works from moment to moment? Or sit for long hours in the library's stacks, doing research on his dissertation? Nor is it bad conditioning for the life of a writer which, as so many have said, is solitary---but not, I would say, "lonely" in any negative sense. Because solitude, for an only child, is as close to him (or her) as a brother or sister. I think only childhood tends to make a person the opposite of gregarious, and perhaps a bit quiet, shy or reserved in social situations, preferring to listen and let others speak. Or at least that's so in my case. Personally, I need time spent alone every day for reflection (away from unwanted external stimuli so I can hear myself think), for study, meditation, or just silently observing Nature (with my dog Nova nearby). But I enjoy people, too, especially intelligent dialogue and experiencing the mystery, the sameness, and the difference in their lives and mine. Alone with others describes the life of this only child (and the human condition) pretty well.

TECHNOLOGY AND OUR CHANGING WORLD

A question far more interesting to me than "What do you consider to be the major inventions and discoveries during your lifetime?" is how technology has changed our lives and created an economy far different than the one my parents knew.

  

I recently read on my Kindle a story by Rand B. Lee entitled "Three Leaves of Aloe," which is included in The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Seventh Annual Collection, edited by Gardner Dozois. It opens with the protagonist Amrit Chaudhury, who works the telephones at Mumbai-Astra Telecom, Ltd. in India, joking with her undersupervisor Shradda Singh about the names they give for themselves to Americans they talk to. Maggie Jones. Bobbi Grant.  "'Jane West!' Amrit put her left hand over her heart and fanned her right hand weakly. 'I mean to say, it isn't as though they can't tell by our voices that we're Not From Around These Parts.' She spoke this last in an exaggerated American accent, which set them both off (to giggling) afresh."

Who among us hasn't had that experience when talking to a computer technician half a world away? The term "global village" seems exactly right for our world at the dawn of the 21st century, a planet where the concept of the "nation state" seems obsolete when corporations are multi-national and do not respect artificially drawn geographic borders.

One of our mantras, which I've often repeated, is that today we find ourselves in a "highly competitive, global, knowledge-based economy." Okay, so far so good. But what does that really mean? I sniff a little bit of Darwinian "survival of the fittest" in that description. A new wrinkle on Social Darwinism. The jobs that sustained uneducated---or under-educated---men in my father’s generation are no more. That economy, as we’ve been told repeatedly, has been replaced by a “service economy.” Specialized knowledge and the social as well as language skills (especially foreign languages) women are quite good at trump the “size” and “strength” advantages that formerly helped men find jobs in construction, heavy industry, etc. 

In a sense the playing field has been leveled in terms of race and gender, and that is good. That is progress. But today an American worker is in competition with labor all over the planet. And the preferred, even required, skills that make an individual competitive in this new technology-dominated era, the knowledge essential for America itself to survive in this century is (as President Obama never fails to remind us) summed up in STEM education (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math), which our schools K-12 are trying to implement with a sense of urgency---an urgency nowhere to be found when we talk today about the role of the humanities.

  

I enjoy hugely my Kindle, my Word Processor (Think of what Virgil, Homer, Shakespeare, or Dante would have accomplished with this, the internet, translation engines, and on-line writer’s tools, which are a God-send for a contemporary writer; I recall back in the ‘60s or early ‘70s Amiri Baraka publishing an essay in Black World where he complained that the typewriter was “corny,” and he's been proven right about that), and all manner of gadgets. However, late some nights when the world is quiet---a vision of a new, 21^st century dystopia comes to me: societies here and around the globe where a new caste system arises based, not on race or gender, but instead on learning. On a very specific kind of learning and quantitative skills demanded by the new economic reality. 

The Brahmin class, as I see it in this vision, will have as its avatars people like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and PayPal's Peter Thiel, the young men who invented Google and Facebook, the businesses like Virgin Galactic and Project Enterprise planning on launching tourists into suborbital space, i.e., those who merge the new commerce with a specialist’s knowledge of science and technology that is cutting edge. Those without such knowledge will slip or settle farther down in the economic and social caste system, condemned for a lifetime to low wages; and on the lowest rung will be those unfortunate human beings with no high tech education or skills at all. Perhaps some individuals in my vision of this brave new world that I imagine late at night---indeed, whole groups whose intellectual performance is below the new, required standards----will be considered “obsolete,” and allowed to perish through what the Nixon administration once called “benign neglect.”

Or am I imagining the world as it is today? You tell me.

Yet in the midst of such a gloomy meditation, I read in the newspaper a day or so ago that China and India, the home of Lee’s character Amrit Chaudhury, are vigorously investing in Africa, swapping technology and the tools for modernization in exchange for access to that continent’s natural resources, and educating Africans in their own equivalents to M.I.T. Perhaps the global village has a hopeful future after all.