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2017: The year ends (a door closes, a window opens)

By Jesse Kornbluth
Published: Dec 21, 2017
Category: editor's letter

Solstice. The shortest day, the longest night: given the headlines this week, that’s metaphorically accurate, and on every level. Under cover of night, under a cloak of secrecy, white men facing the death of the patriarchy turned cruelty into law, then did their version of a victory dance. I pity the families that have to spend the holidays with these men.

I’ve been writing non-stop this year — a movie script, a rewrite of a friend’s book, a novel — so I read less than usual, but the books that mattered to me seemed to matter a lot more than books that knocked me out in recent years. No surprise that they’re serious; as the showrunner of “Homeland” put it, this administration as “much scarier in real life than what we were writing.”

Two writers defined the year for me. One is Mohsin Hamid, who went to Princeton and Harvard Law and worked at McKinsey before turning to credible, intimate, addictive — and disturbing — fiction. “The Reluctant Fundamentalist” tracks a Pakistani who graduates from Princeton and is a rising star at a company like McKinsey; then 9/11 changes everything, and this love story becomes a thriller. “How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia” is an ironic title considering the story he tells in the novel-disguised-as-a-self-help book. Exit West, which is on most smart “ten best” lists this year, is most explicit about Hamid’s ultimate subject. We are all refugees from our childhood, he says. And at any moment we could join the 60 million people who are exiles.

Timothy Snyder is Hamid’s polar opposite. Snyder, a Yale professor, has written two books that chronicle a Holocaust in Eastern Europe that I seem never to have heard about: Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, and Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning. He’s the ideal writer to make comparisons between Germany’s and Russia’s genocidal leaders and our home-grown authoritarian. His new book, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, is a small paperback with a chilling thesis: What keeps madmen from realizing their fascist dreams are strong institutions — the courts, the press, an organized opposition. Especially the courts: “Institutions do not stand up by themselves.”

Do Hamid and Snyder sound like doomsday prophets? They’re not. Snyder has written extensively about people who do great things for others at enormous risk to themselves. Hamid finds beauty in our struggle for love even amid war and chaos. I’m with them: my play and my new script and the novel I’m writing are all adult love stories that start with the idea that what I do in the world comes directly from how I am in a room with one other person.

I get that the cruelty of the white men in our government is non-stop. You’d think that congressional Republicans willing to blow an unfunded $1.5 trillion so rich people can get richer would be able to find $15 billion to fund The Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) for 9 million poor children. Well, no. They can’t. According to Senator Orrin Hatch, whose net worth tops $5 million, “The reason CHIP’s having trouble is that we don’t have money anymore.” Really. He actually said that.

But as I only recently figured out, resistance that’s based on opposition won’t work. For me, anyway, resistance starts with affirmation — loathe something, sure, but only after you’ve planted a flag for decency and sanity, only after you’ve taken a step to reduce what John Green calls “world suck.” That’s tricky here. Even if I grade self-improvement on a curve, I have so far to go.

At every significant marker, the college that wants money from me publishes a thick paperback of class reports. This year marks five decades since graduation; we’re essentially writing our obituaries. I’ve had a writer’s life — I don’t garden, I don’t babysit grandchildren, travel, golf, or do any of the things that happily define many aging grads — so my report was a challenge. But I knew from the start how it would end:

As the 71-year-old father of a 15-year-old who goes to an expensive Manhattan private school and will, if she continues to shine, go on to an even more expensive college, the last thing on my mind is slowing down.
I leap from project to project like Lillian Gish jumping from ice floe to ice floe.
I resist nostalgia.
I try to hold on to a radiant optimism that has no foundation in reality.
And as I tell my daughter, “Pretend the race doesn’t end at the finish line. Don’t slow down. Run through the tape.”

La Rochefoucauld says that “no one can look long at the sun or death.” That’s what I learned — again, more dramatically this time — this year. Run through the tape. Keep going. If 2017 has given you any wisdom that might help the rest of us, please write me and share it.

Here’s to more brightness than blackness in the year ahead. Bless us all, every one.
—-
BONUS: THE BEST STORY I READ THIS YEAR (VIA NEIL GAIMAN)

My friend told me a story he hadn’t told anyone for years. When he used to tell it years ago people would laugh and say, ‘Who’d believe that? How can that be true? That’s daft.’ So he didn’t tell it again for ages. But for some reason, last night, he knew it would be just the kind of story I would love.

When he was a kid, he said, they didn’t use the word autism, they just said ‘shy’, or ‘isn’t very good at being around strangers or lots of people.’ But that’s what he was, and is, and he doesn’t mind telling anyone. It’s just a matter of fact with him, and sometimes it makes him sound a little and act different, but that’s okay.

Anyway, when he was a kid it was the middle of the 1980s and they were still saying ‘shy’ or ‘withdrawn’ rather than ‘autistic’. He went to London with his mother to see a special screening of a new film he really loved. He must have won a competition or something, I think. Some of the details he can’t quite remember, but he thinks it must have been London they went to, and the film…! Well, the film is one of my all-time favourites, too. It’s a dark, mysterious fantasy movie. Every single frame is crammed with puppets and goblins. There are silly songs and a goblin king who wears clingy silver tights and who kidnaps a baby and this is what kickstarts the whole adventure.

It was ‘Labyrinth’, of course, and the star was David Bowie, and he was there to meet the children who had come to see this special screening.

‘I met David Bowie once,’ was the thing that my friend said, that caught my attention.

‘You did? When was this?’ I was amazed, and surprised, too, at the casual way he brought this revelation out. Almost anyone else I know would have told the tale a million times already.

He seemed surprised I would want to know, and he told me the whole thing, all out of order, and I eked the details out of him.

He told the story as if it was he’d been on an adventure back then, and he wasn’t quite allowed to tell the story. Like there was a pact, or a magic spell surrounding it. As if something profound and peculiar would occur if he broke the confidence.

It was thirty years ago and all us kids who’d loved Labyrinth then, and who still love it now, are all middle-aged. Saddest of all, the Goblin King is dead. Does the magic still exist?

I asked him what happened on his adventure.

‘I was withdrawn, more withdrawn than the other kids. We all got a signed poster. Because I was so shy, they put me in a separate room, to one side, and so I got to meet him alone. He’d heard I was shy and it was his idea. He spent thirty minutes with me.

‘He gave me this mask. This one. Look.

‘He said: ‘This is an invisible mask, you see?

‘He took it off his own face and looked around like he was scared and uncomfortable all of a sudden. He passed me his invisible mask. ‘Put it on,’ he told me. ‘It’s magic.’

‘And so I did.

‘Then he told me, ‘I always feel afraid, just the same as you. But I wear this mask every single day. And it doesn’t take the fear away, but it makes it feel a bit better. I feel brave enough then to face the whole world and all the people. And now you will, too.

‘I sat there in his magic mask, looking through the eyes at David Bowie and it was true, I did feel better.

‘Then I watched as he made another magic mask. He spun it out of thin air, out of nothing at all. He finished it and smiled and then he put it on. And he looked so relieved and pleased. He smiled at me.

‘’Now we’ve both got invisible masks. We can both see through them perfectly well and no one would know we’re even wearing them,’ he said.

‘So, I felt incredibly comfortable. It was the first time I felt safe in my whole life.

‘It was magic. He was a wizard. He was a goblin king, grinning at me.

‘I still keep the mask, of course. This is it, now. Look.’

I kept asking my friend questions, amazed by his story. I loved it and wanted all the details. How many other kids? Did they have puppets from the film there, as well? What was David Bowie wearing? I imagined him in his lilac suit from Live Aid. Or maybe he was dressed as the Goblin King in lacy ruffles and cobwebs and glitter.

What was the last thing he said to you, when you had to say goodbye?

‘David Bowie said, ‘I’m always afraid as well. But this is how you can feel brave in the world.’ And then it was over. I’ve never forgotten it. And years later I cried when I heard he had passed.’

My friend was surprised I was delighted by this tale.

‘The normal reaction is: that’s just a stupid story. Fancy believing in an invisible mask.’

But I do. I really believe in it.