APRIL 28, 2024 – It being a Sunday morning, I poured myself a cup of Java, repaired to the reading room, leaned back in my easy(-going) chair, put on some very dead white guy music, and last but best . . . pulled up the Sunday edition of The Times on my laptop screen. Ah-h-h! Life is good, I thought . . . despite the day’s weather forecast calling for a 100% chance of rain all day long. I’d have to meet my daily walking quota of 750 vertical feet by walking up and down the stairs. Oh well. You can’t have everything the way you wish.
After my first read—a column blasting contemporary college curricula—and a couple dozen comments (out of 1067) that excoriated the column, I had to amend my initial assessment that “Life is good.” Life in many quarters, it seems, is not good. In fact, it’s quite bad. And kids are bad and their professors are bad and college is bad and the country is bad and what’s even worse is that whatever you believed was good is actually bad too.
The vitriolic virtual exchange between columnist and critics forced me to re-examine my own education—in honest retrospect, so narrow, disjointed and deficient. The irony of my schooling is that if it were symbolized by a ribbon pinned to my shirt, the little blue strip would be wide enough to accommodate holes through which in-bulk libraries of learning could be tossed by a blindfolded professor—once the silk had been removed from my apparel, holes had been cut, and the ribbon clipped to a clothesline.
The altimeter affixed to my earlier Sunday morning satisfaction was now spinning counterclockwise at an alarming rate. The simple pleasures that had carried my mood aloft—the chair, the setting, the Java, the dead guy music, the prospect of scintillating reading material—were in a nosedive. As unpleasant thoughts darkened my psyche, I instinctively reached to tighten my seatbelt.
But there was none. As in a bad dream, I searched for the exit: “MAYDAY, MAYDAY, WAKE UP!” which in the context of full consciousness translated to “CLOSE THE LAPTOP! CLOSE THE LAPTOP!” This imaginary m’aidez[1], however, didn’t suppress the toxic vitriol of conflicting worldviews. It merely silenced the musical beauty conferred upon this (perpetually) troubled world by the very old white guy. Now I was definitely in dire straits—thoughts burdened by what I’d read but without the placating agency of a white guy who died in 1791.
“What to do?” as my grandpa Holman would ask rhetorically after recounting the long set-up to a war story from his halcyon days as a businessman.
The first thing he did was bump the heel of his hand against the steering wheel, as honking 18-wheelers and impatient sedans roared past on our left and our right, the Cadillac moving at Grandpa speed down the middle of I95. (Those drives between New Jersey and Connecticut were the usual occasions for his monologues.)
The first thing I did this morning after inadvertently robbing myself of consoling 18th century music (written, ironically, contemporaneously with the turmoil of the American Revolution) was . . . laugh.
Note, it wasn’t to think or say or do or search for something funny. It was simply to laugh. Think of it as clapping your hands in applause in an empty auditorium. No performance, no performers. Nothing to applaud, just applause for the sake of applause.
I know it sounds stupid, ridiculous, maybe even a little insane—especially when the only ears to hear it were my own (my wife was out of town for the weekend). But by gosh, the method worked! The magic of this wholly staged laughter was that in my imagination, at least, it produced a stage, splashed with light, filled with the brash, upbeat music of a crazy TV game show, and best of all, a chorus-line featuring . . . that Times columnist and all the indignant authors of those comments. Through my opera glasses, I had a close-up view of their costumes and countenances, their quirks and foibles, their arrogances and shortcomings, their intelligent eyes embedded in dumb looks. If my initial laughter had been wholly feigned, it was now genuinely irrepressible: this was a proverbial cast of characters.
What put things over the top was the performers’ hilarious attempt to mimic the Rockettes in full-kick mode. No two members of the line could coordinate their moves. What ensued was the best slapstick I’d seen since Charlie Chaplin. Before long everyone on stage was rolling and roiling, gripping their shins and thighs in pain from errancy in their poorly rehearsed choreography.
I was now on my feet, in full ovation, clapping, laughing, celebrating the greatest elixir known to humankind: straight up humor. I was effectively free from what seemed to be the free-fall indictment of higher education in America—past and present.
Better yet, I’d found release from my own troubled view of all the deficiencies in my own education; not off the hook, mind you, for “education” should be a lifelong pursuit, but released from guilt and regret.
After regaining my seat and concluding my mirth-filled applause, I took stock of the lessons learned:
- Simply laugh and you’ll find something to laugh about.
- Approach education as an infinite library of texts and tomes; screeds and treatises; the sacred and the sacrilegious; historical records and the spin of historiography; facts and fictions; the arts and the inartful; science and alchemy; wisdom and foolishness. Draw from it what is good but know from it what is evil.
- Don’t sweat the big stuff. It can wreck an otherwise perfectly good life. Stay focused on all manifestations of beauty and kindness.
With that I re-opened my laptop, restored the music of the dead white guy, and discovered that my Java had gone cold. It was time to sweat the small stuff and look to the microwave for salvation.
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© 2024 by Eric Nilsson
[1] French for the formal imperative, “Help me!” the origin of “Mayday!” which is how you pronounce (more or less), “m’aidez!”
