I love The New Yorker. No, more. I lust for it.
When it arrives in the mail each week I feel tingly. Gazing fondly upon the cover image, I fondle the table of contents, looking forward to that magic moment when I'll fill up our bathtub with hot water, pour a glass of red wine, and slip into the dual liquid sensuousness with a magazine that features marvelous writers.
Such as Adam Gopnik, who wrote a piece in the November 26, 2012 issue that spoke about General Petraeus' affair, and sexual morality in general, in a way that make me think: "that's just how I feel, or would have, if I had been wise enough to feel the feelings that Gopnik expressed so well."
Here's some excerpts from his Military Secrets.
Presumably, it is a bad idea for spies to have embarassing secrets that other spies might learn -- and what goes for the smaller spies should go for the big spy -- and so the resignation of General Petraeus may have been necessary. But the rest really did seem to be nobody's business but the General's and his family's.
If there is a small truth to cherish here, it lies in the reminder that Bill Clinton and Eliot Spitzer and Anthony Weiner and all the other earlier, undecorated sinners were not heated by undignified lusts because they were baby boomers or Democrats, or because they lacked the moral code of real men making real decisions, or because they had spent too much time on Twitter, or whatever the latest explanation for self-destructive sexual behavior is.
The truth is that the force which through the not so green fuse drives all our flowers, and much else besides -- the force of wanting that can cause women of substance to send pestering e-mails, leaving distinguished generals caught in the middle -- is the force of life.
Petraeus, and his defenders and attackers alike, referred to his "poor judgment," but if the affair had had anything to do with judgment it never would have happened. Desire is not subject to the language of judicious choice, or it would not be desire, with a language all its own. The point of lust, not to put too fine a point on it, is that it lures us to do dumb stuff, and the fact that dumb stuff gets done is continuing proof of its power.
...In the meantime, let's recall, from "The Human Stain," the narrator's dream that, at the height of the Clinton imbroglio, someone had hung a banner from the White House reading, "A Human Being Lives Here." The more such banners fly -- from homes, and from tents and barracks and G.H.Q's, too -- the better off we will all be.
Absolutely.
I'd especially like to see that "A Human Being Lives Here" banner hung on the Pope's Vatican residence, and the home of every supposed divine or quasi-divine person on Earth.
Gurus. The Dalai Lama. Yogis. Anyone who claims to talk with God.
We're all just human beings living a human life. We all have human desires, human lusts, human cravings. For sex, for God, for all sorts of things. The force of life drives us at every moment, as it must. Until we're dead.
I'd especially like to see that "A Human Being Lives Here" banner hung on the Pope's Vatican residence, and the home of every supposed divine or quasi-divine person on Earth. Gurus. The Dalai Lama. Yogis. Anyone who claims to talk with God.
We're all just human beings living a human life. We all have human desires, human lusts, human cravings. For sex, for God, for all sorts of things. The force of life drives us at every moment, as it must. Until we're dead.
Even the quasi-divine wannabe is often the first to admit his human-ness and fallibility. But, he/she may counter that "the force of life drives us" only as long as we remain unenlightened. And those mysterious flashes of intuition; those few precious moments of peace and detachment from life's maelstrom; that sense of the surreal about this "too, too solid world" -- all are leakage of something beyond the "surly bonds of earth". And some mystics assert that total enlightenment is possible -- just not with a self-help book or 24-hour fee course. Difficult, long, painfully transformative but nonetheless, not impossible.
No, they can't prove a higher reality or spirit or God. How could you shoehorn proof of the transcendent back down through the wormhole into "reality" as we know it... Even a mystic's metaphor would fall absurdly
short. You'd have to experience this transcendence yourself. The alternative is to remain safely in a cocoon offered by the usual suspects - priests, idealogues, even men in lab coats. However well-meaning, they'll expound the only reality they know; doubt those without "proper" credentials and orthodoxy; inevitably reveal a bias that any other reality is a hoax, a chimera, the refuge of a young child or a scoundrel. They'll insist that there's no exit door from this train "driven by the forces of life".
Posted by: Dungeness | November 27, 2012 at 02:00 PM