I have been feeling a bit like John Cheever’s country husband this week, full of melancholy, out of sorts due to the rain, and testy with the news and the blues resulting. The mail is a daily reminder that I’m past my sell-by-date: bills and ads speak entirely to the matter of my age, my infirmities, and the lucky availability of room at a nearby nursing home; the odd letter announces the “passage” of an “old-timer” who is younger than I am, or it invites me to a regimental or school reunion peopled by a diminishing number of cranks on walkers who know all the lyrics to Wild Thing. It’s no better when I have coffee with the boys; each is so absorbed in antagonisms toward the passing of time and the present age that we’d be better off sharing a pack of Camels and a jar of Old Bushmills under a freeway bridge.
The ravening torpor of the moment has been compounded by a New Yorker profile of German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, once upon a time a fierce young Heideggerian rebel, now a doddering middle-class twit focused on the consumption of better cheeses. Or, summarily, infantem boomer genus.
Sloterdijk’s framed paradigms focus on the relative importance of feelings vs. facts. He would, for example, argue that liberal democracy will ultimately fail because people who make money and pay taxes feel resentment toward people who pay less in taxes, yet use services. Conversely, lower earners and users of services resent high wage earners because high wage earners resent them for using services, and for wanting higher wages. Sloterdijk’s grand thesis about why democracy must ultimately fail boils down to: “I feel mad at you because you feel mad at me.”
Cheever’s country husband, Francis Weed, became despondent and ended up in a doctor’s office. The doctor advised him to take up woodworking, and to stay down in the cellar until he finished a coffee table. Good advice it was. A coffee table is all facts, just so wide, so high and so long, with weight and purpose. It’s real, ageless, and without petty feelings, just like democracy.