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There are so many advantages to being an old man that I wonder why I put it off for so long . One is that the Proust Reading Group has stopped inviting me to join and another is the number of dreadful stories in the news that for a man my age come under the heading "Not My Problem" such as the shortage of goods due to shipping backlogs, freighters lined up for miles waiting to unload in ports, people unable to find what they need. I have the opposite problem: too much stuff, need a ship to come up the Hudson River to 96th Street and haul it away. We have twenty fancy dinner plates though we live in a two-bedroom apartment and the days of grand dinner parties are far in the past. She and I now form a majority. Four is a family, six is a crowd.
I chose the right parents, evangelicals, so, yes, I am haunted by guilt and regret, but on the other hand, there was no fetal alcohol syndrome and for a kid who aims to be a writer, the King James is excellent tutelage, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon, Isaiah, beat out Disney characters and crime novels. My grandfathers died young, at 73, of hard work and so I avoided hard work and already I'm a decade ahead of them. This is a lucky upbringing. Not privilege, luck. Privilege is having a car and driver waiting for you and luck is when you go down the steps to the subway station and the train comes just as you go through the turnstile and you walk across the platform just as the train stops and the doors open, which makes your entire day up to that point feel perfectly timed. I take the train to the public library reference room and the long tables with the green study lamps and I plug in my laptop and sit among ambitious young men and women, most of them Asian, and my ambition is gone gone gone, praise the Lord, I'm free of it, I'm here for pleasure.
Coming from the Midwest, you learn not to stand out in the crowd but blend in, harmonize, so I gave academia a wide berth, that beehive of brilliance, where nerds don't feel self-conscious: there's always someone nerdier nearby, and if you are the World's Leading Authority on the mating habits of the jabberwock beetle of the Lesser Jujube Archipelago, you can take comfort in knowing that the pinch-faced man next to you is the W.L.A. on 17th-century Huguenot hymnody or a niche of quantum physics that is understood by nobody but him.
Growing up in the Lutheran culture of Minnesota, you learn to be wary of brilliance, having seen geniuses in the throes of deep thought step into potholes and disappear, like the great economist who put Harvard's endowment into the stock market and almost dropped it into bankruptcy, like taking your child's lunch money and putting it on Valiant Fancy to win in the 5th at Churchill Downs. No, Lutheran culture teaches you to be useful, fit in, do your part, harmonize. We go to a party and we're not good at the whooping and guffawing but we stay late and help clean up.
I blame Ralph Waldo Emerson for the brazen foolishness of the elite. He said, "To be great is to be misunderstood," a mouthful of bubble gum that gives arrogant people grounds to imagine their unpopularity is proof of their acumen.
"Dare to live the life you have imagined"? This is the wisdom that encouraged people who could've been excellent janitors to become bold narcissists who created volumes of unreadable poetry and bales of photography similar to bales of other people's photography, seascapes, sunrises, the sensitivity of shadows.
And Emerson's disciple, Henry Thoreau, and his Bible of bachelorhood, Walden. He wrote that he had learned that if you endeavor to live the life you have imagined, you will meet with an unexpected success. Yes, living alone is an achievable goal, but a good woman could've straightened him out. At least gotten him to do something about his hair. I am happy sitting among children of Asian immigrants working hard to fulfil their parents' dreams, and here I am enjoying the freedom to not read these encyclopedias, to poke Ralph and Henry in the snoot, say a good word for Lutherans. To be funny means being understood very well; it just doesn't work without it.
Garrison Keillor is an author and radio personality. His latest book is "Cheerfulness". Buy it at a 38% discount! by clicking here. Sales help fund JWR.