Satanic Verses, Vampiric Ideas

A reminder in today’s New York Times about the challenges posed by freedom of speech:

I was surprised to read in Bill Keller’s column this morning that the author Salman Rushdie chose to live in America over other democratic countries because he “reveres … the freedom, not so protected in other Western democracies, to say hateful, racist, blasphemous things.”

He reveres the freedom to say hateful and racist things? “Blasphemous” makes sense, but at first the other two adjectives confused me. I understood the protection of bigoted speech to be an unfortunate but inevitable consequence of speech being free. But Rushdie’s well-worded explanation settled some questions about freedom of speech that I’ve had for a while:

“Terrible ideas, reprehensible ideas, do not disappear if you ban them. They acquire a kind of glamour of taboo. In the harsh light of day, they are out there and, like vampires, they die in the sunlight.”

The American experiment, often not engaged in wholeheartedly, includes a fair amount of Thoreau-style self-government: rather than policing speech, the U.S. system expects an active, conscientious public to decry bad ideas and words. The ideal is a meritocracy of words, of orators. If evil words persist in floating to the top of the public consciousness, seeming to work some mysterious power over people, the only failure is on the part of the citizenry.

There Will Be Time

"There will be time, there will be time

To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;

There will be time to murder and create,

And time for all the works and days of hands

That lift and drop a question on your plate;

Time for you and time for me,

And time yet for a hundred indecisions,

And for a hundred visions and revisions,

Before the taking of a toast and tea."

--T.S. Eliot, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"

A couple days ago, I thought it would be a great idea to write an essay about the composer Dmitri Shostakovich’s famous “Leningrad” symphony—the controversies surrounding its meaning, the thrilling story of its composition, my experiences of it, and my own take on its import. This led to a trip to the local library. I returned with a short biography of Shostakovich, a collection of essays about him, a recording of Symphony No. 7: Leningrad, as well as a CD of the string quartets of Debussy, Faure, and Ravel—for fun.

I got home, sat down at the table with my laptop, plopped the Leningrad Symphony into the CD player, and realized that there was nothing I less wanted to do than write an essay about Shostakovich at the moment. It was like hearing from a friend about a great hiking trail, and going there and finding a charred wasteland of cooled lava under a mountain that may or may not be emanating smoke. What made me think I would enjoy writing an essay on a summer day? Shostakovich stared up at me from the cover of the essay collection. Most photographs you see of the Soviet composer are from his early years, where he appears bespectacled, precocious, even adorably childlike. Here he glared at me through tight wire-rimmed glasses as a middle-aged man, his face flabbier than in his youth, his expression cross and demanding, the survivor of Stalin's purges. “So you’re going to write about me and my symphony, eh?” he seemed to say, as the ‘hero theme’ from the first movement swelled defiantly from the stereo system. “Like to see you try, sobaka.”

For years, most of my unscheduled summer days have gone a little like this: I have a fabulous idea for a short story, essay, poem, invention, experiment, adventure—and then when I actually set out to do it, I end up napping, staring at clouds, or drinking tea and re-reading an old favorite book. A full-time internship interrupted this cycle, but now that it’s over I’m faced with the old dilemma. I make two simultaneous and diametrically opposed demands of my summer days. First, they are to serve as a reservoir of physical and spiritual relaxation, an oasis of calm, the memory of which I can tap into in scarcer, more difficult times during the school year. Second, they are to be the time in which I actually carry out the long list of projects I’ve accumulated over the school year.

I imagine that years from now, when I hopefully have a real job and a family to deal with, I’ll look back on these empty summer days as something from a fairy tale. “Whole days of absolutely nothing?" I will ask my former self incredulously. "Why didn’t you just enjoy that while it lasted?” To which my former self will shrug his shoulders and pour himself a plate of kettlecorn and try to make it a little further into a Robert Frost collection while watching Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1.

The obvious solution to this problem would be to alternate days of rest and work. But I always want to do both things on the same day, usually at the same time. And when I inevitably fail to either work or relax, I tell myself, like Prufrock, that there will be time for both the next day. Take today, for example. I planned to polish up a couple essays I had been working on that could serve as blog posts. Coffee-fueled optimism at 10 a.m. told me I could do this. Then it got to be 10:30 and I felt that if I did something low-energy, like listening to an episode of This American Life, I would be both rested and rejuvenated in my pursuit of finishing the essays. Then it was 11:30, I had listened to an episode of This American Life from 1997, been informed of the wider world, amused, and intellectually challenged, and I still didn’t want to work on those essays. But after the autobiographical short story by David Sedaris on the episode, I did have this idea for writing a short autobiographical essay that would emphasize ridiculous characterizations in the way he did: things like the photograph of a dead composer on a book cover trash-talking someone. And believe it or not, I actually wrote that essay. Did I feel accomplished at completing a small project, or did I feel mentally rested because I allowed myself to write about something that I found fun to write about? Well, I really felt neither of those things. What I felt like was eating Zebra Cakes and watching shows about shark attacks on the Discovery Channel while reading a Wallace Stegner novel.

I Believe in Small-Scale Anarchy ... Hi, New Classmates!

For our orientation week at Truman University, we freshmen were asked to write "This I Believe" essays. I had never heard of this project before. I started reading and listening to some of the essays, both the recent ones and the ones broadcast on the radio in the 50's, and realized I could probably listen to them all day--it's a bit like "This American Life," fast-food style. Most of the essays are about 500 words and take only about three minutes to read or listen to, but the writers accomplish a lot in that brief time, telling beautiful, painful, or just amusing stories and synthesizing life lessons from them. It's also a bit like the format of my old column for my high school newspaper, which was around 600-700 words and had many of the same goals. I've posted my essay below; I read it to about 100 classmates in a lecture hall. About two dozen others chose to read their essays. It may have been a bit out there for my first essay at Truman, but that's the energy of starting so many things over in a new place, I guess.

I believe in anarchy. Let me explain.

This is not a plug for a stateless society. Maybe I should rephrase and call it small-scale anarchy, because that is all that is usually possible in this world. The kind of anarchy I am interested in occurs in the smallest imaginable moments, usually when we are most alone—when we encounter a panhandler on the street without a mother or father with us to brush him or her off, when we see a wrapper on the floor in a deserted hallway, when we are alone with another person on a date, when we find ourselves holding the answers to a quiz we have to take next period, when we are faced with a choice and have no one to stop us from making the wrong decision. Situations with no rules, with no authorities, when we are accountable no one and nothing but our own conscience—these are times when we are most free to choose, and therefore have the most potential to do good or evil, to do something truly horrible or beautiful.

Anarchy of this kind is not always small-scale. But it is the only scale I have experience with. And just because these moments seem small does not mean they are not important—extremely important, sometimes the best evidence as to what kind of person we are and often profoundly influential on other people.

I don’t believe in anarchy just because I believe in humanity and our ability to choose the right thing when given the chance. I believe the human spirit is fallen, and that people, including and especially me, face many barriers to choosing good when there is no authority to tell them to do so. Indeed, these moments of anarchy are also the times when the influence of God, and an omnipresent, interventionist God at that, is clearest—a God that somehow pulls humans over high mental barriers and deeply rutted prejudices in order to be able to be merely free to chose the right thing. But these moments are also when the human spirit is at its strongest, because we so often do choose to do good, against all odds.

I have only spent five days at college, but I have already noticed that there is a huge amount of anarchy here. The absence of parents, the ease of access to all sorts of things we know we shouldn’t want, and the sheer number of people and situations makes this a place where students are forced to make many more decisions on their own than they ever have before. My fifth-grade teacher once said that you really only find out what a person is like in college. I think I understand what he meant now. Only when we choose entirely for ourselves do we begin to determine what kind of person we are and will become.