AmbivaBlog: A**holier Than Thou

This is the classic children's book, Goodenough Gismo, by Richmond I. Kelsey, published in 1948. Nearly unavailable in libraries and the collector's market, it is posted here with love as an "orphan work" so that it may be seen and appreciated -- and perhaps even republished, as it deserves to be. After you read this book, it won't surprise you to learn that Richmond Irwin Kelsey (1905-1987) was an accomplished artist, or that as Dick Kelsey, he was one of the great Disney art directors, breaking your heart with "Pinocchio," "Dumbo," and "Bambi."

I liked this:

“I don’t want to participate.” [Said the trust-fund kid turned cave-dwelling forest hermit in David Guterson's new novel, The Other.] But [his working-class friend] Countryman keeps pressing. “Idiot,” John William finally replies. “You’ve got your whole life in front of you, maybe 50 or 60 years. And what are you going to do with that? Be a hypocrite, entertain yourself, make money and then die?”

Well, yes. “The Other” is [...] a finely observed rumination on the necessary imperfection of life — on how hypocrisy, compromise and acceptance creep into our lives and turn strident idealists into kind, loving, fully human adults. Wisdom isn’t the embrace of everything we rejected at 19. It’s the understanding that absolutes are for dictators and fools. “I’m a hypocrite, of course,” Countryman says, reflecting on his own life and John William’s doomed pursuit of purity. “I live with that, but I live.”

It made a pair in my mind with the Alice Munro story in the new New Yorker. (Yes, you can read the whole thing online, and you should.) Whenever I see that there is a new Alice Munro story, my heart starts to pound in pleasurable anxiety. I know that I am going to be subjected to something abruptly terrible and gropingly yet pitilessly survived; that I'm going to feel the jolting lurches of life, like a train derailing, right up my spine; and that I'm going to see all this with two eyes, one myopic, seeing each event so close up it's completely blurry, and one presbyopic, seeing it set into the shrunken continent of an entire lifetime viewed from an eagle's eye. I don't know if Munro has always done this thing with time -- I haven't read her early work yet, though reading just about everything she ever wrote is chiseled into the tablets of my agenda -- but I don't see how she could have. It's an older person's perspective. It's no coincidence that her last paragraph is

And it was possible, too, that age could become her ally, turning her into somebody she didn’t know yet. She has seen that look of old people, now and then—clear-sighted but content, on islands of their own making.

The story takes up a recurring theme for Munro -- the loss of a child to some spiritual craziness that totally, incomprehensibly (to a mother), and seemingly permanently estranges him or her from family -- that has almost a quality of traumatic reworking in her stories. (IIRC, it was also an element of one of the stories in Runaway.) It made me realize all over again how much I hate absolutism and purity and perfectionism, and how much I adhere to psychologist James Hillman's resolve to protect the lowly but life-wise soul with its stubborn attachments from the Agent Orange arrogance of the spirit.

ADDED: In fairness, though, it has to be said that without spirit, soul would remain trapped in its tarry obsessions. Without spirit there would be no insight, no compassion, no forgiveness, and probably no laughter. They're meant to marry each other, Hillman says; divorce brings out the worst in them both.

Comments

Life presents our imperfections and the foibles of others to us relentlessly. We can choose to embrace ourselves and each other in tolerance, disdain everyone in cynicism, deny our faults and judge others, or more rarely, remain so transfixed by our faults that we barely notice our neighbors.

Posted by: Rod | June 28, 2008 at 05:52 AM