A couple of nights ago I was at the library late. I didn't feel like coming right back to the apartment, so I decided to treat myself to a freeze at Dairy Queen, since I had never one there and had yet to find a place in city that could make a decent freeze.
So I drove down there, and of course it was crowded, as it would be on a summer night with the softball teams just down the street at the park. I had to wait, which I did not care to do because I had had my fill of people that day. And, to top it off, the window people were abominably slow. But I waited anyway, in that sort of situation that about the time you've decided waiting is a pain in the ass, you've already waited so long that to get out of line would be a worse instance of stupidity than to stay there.
In front of me was an elderly man (indeterminate age: his face was wrinkled and hair sparse, but he did not seem to be decrepit). He had thick hands, as a life-long worker might, and his pants drooped and he had stubble on his cheeks and his shirt just hung from the shoulder. I imagined paps hanging slightly, the skin slack around his stomach. He ordered three of something; the girl took the money, rang it up, then proceeded to do whatever machinations she did that took her so long to do. The place was crowded, mostly with adolescents. A boyfriend of one of the girls working tapped continually on the glass partition to get her attention; his friends made fun of him. The neon lights buzzed outside, flanked by a million bugs. Cars screamed by on the road. A typical ice-cream joint summer night.
While he waited and waited to get his ice cream, a mosquito landed on his upper lip. I waited for him to brush it off. The place was swarming with mosquitoes, attracted by the lights and the mobile supply of blood. But he didn't. I watched in a kind of sick fascination as the mosquito (I imagined all this, not being able to see the whole operation) sunk his drill into the man's skin and began extracting the crude. I could see the mosquito's abdomen swell visibly, and yet he stood there insensate to the exchange.
I don't know why, but a wave of something like sickened remorse rolled over me. (It stills touches me as I think about the scene.) I didn't want to look at the man, couldn't help but look at him. I wanted to nudge him, tell him to wipe the damn parasite off his lip, wipe the thing off myself. But I couldn't. That sort of intimacy was not available. I felt sorry for a man who couldn't feel in his skin the prick of the insect, who had lost that much feeling. (I speculated as to the life that had made him that way, but that was the novelist talking: how I could I know anything about that?)
Finally the girl came and he went away and saved me. I ordered my drink (which was vile) and went away. But that scene still haunts me. On the one hand I felt remorse, as I said above, just pity for the man. (This is a dangerous thing to do - I can't read into his life.) But, oddly enough, I felt angry at him, at what I saw as his stupidity. In my job I am finding that people who do not have a good grasp of language, who don't know how to manipulate language to their benefit, end up endlessly repeating their woes. So many times as people have outlined to me the major and minor tragedies in their lives, and I hear it for the third or fourth time, I have wanted to just shout at them, "Look, I heard it the first time and I am not interested, beyond a professional interest, in hearing about your lives!" There seems to be a need in people who are not good users of language to repeat what they've just said because they have no other resources to draw on. They can't edge around and see things from another linguistic angle, so they just walk the same path.
I understand the need some people have to make sure that someone in a position of power understands all that they have to put up with. I understand it, but I don't share it, and that makes it hard for me to be patient when someone, for whatever reason, is plying me with tragedy. I do not understand their almost automatic propensity to spill out bits of information that I don't have the slightest interest in, parts of their lives that I just don't care to carry around with me. (Alcoholism is a big thing at our school, especially among the women. They almost wear their former dependency as a badge of honor, and I suppose it is for them, a spiritual and physical test won through as tough, I suppose, as any saint wrestling angels.) I have a hard enough time dealing with the School's propensity to raise personal suffering to tragic dimensions, as if that were the only source of raised consciousness. Marx made the same mistake, believing that oppression would teach the working classes how to be human. (Part of my disinclination here is because I don't think I've suffered all that much in my life, though I too am burdened with a divorce, a race with death I don't comprehend. Why do I not feel an equal urge to trace this out with everyone I meet? Because I don't do it, I expect them not to as well, and they contravene my expectations at every turn.)
But it's the repetitiveness of the talking that gets to me most. It's not even talk, really, if by talk I mean conversation wending its way to a point. It's a tic, a spasm. Don't they hear themselves? It's all I can do sometimes to be polite enough to bear the aural burden. I am finding more and more (and perhaps this is a function of the heat in August and the need for a day off) that the people in our program I like are the ones who actually are like adults. That means no mistaking confession as intimacy, who have a reasonably sound distance on things and a sense of humor. I hate the policemen most because they carry no sense of humor with them. And the lack of sophistication that many of our students have bothers me. I would like them to be more like real college students (or at least college students at Harvard who, when I was there, for the most part were dedicated learners, though there were a good contingent of fuck-offs too). I find in most of our students, who are billed as working class people, no repository of wisdom. Partly this is because I am finding more confidence in myself in doing my job there, which is leading to a kind of snobbishness that feels very comfortable. As I feel stronger about what I do and know, the less I need to turn to their more raw experience for the "low-down." I used to feel that because I was middle-class, white, male I had no lease on life, no knowledge that I could dignify as "real." If anyone had what life was all about, it was people who worked with their hands, who had to go and earn a living and muck about in the lower depths of life and society.
I no longer believe that. Instead of wise, with a kind of folk wisdom or native common sense, I see people with limited minds, stuck with a language made out of the most banal vocabularies our society offers, who have so little perspective on life that they believe their experiences define the entire nature of experience. I am sounding snobbish, but I think I mean to, if only to make clear my anger at these people, an anger not generated by anything other than discovering that they are what they are, and that they are not what I am.