For a year or two during the mid-1970s, living in New York, I was a moviegoer. I was in my early 20s then, working off and on, driving a cab, setting up the stage at rock shows, writing occasional pieces for The Village Voice. But there were also long empty spells. I tried to write some fiction and couldn’t, tried to read and could—but only for so long. I ended up going to the movies.
It was the right decade to be doing that. Martin Scorsese made Mean Streets, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, and Taxi Driver; Paul Schrader wrote and directed Blue Collar; and Robert Altman directed Brewster McCloud, The Long Goodbye, California Split, and Buffalo Bill and the Indians. The Godfather, both I and II, were news then. Woody Allen seemed to be bringing out something good every six months.
I can’t really tell you whether these movies summarized a national mood, but they summarized some moods of mine. Almost all of the movies conveyed a feeling of missed opportunities, of having been tossed out of the garden just before you came to know you’d been living in one. The only paradises, we’re told, are lost paradises, and I had recently left a couple of them. I’d made the mistake of graduating from the small, hyperexpensive college in Vermont that I’d attended on a massive scholarship. Bennington was full of gorgeous, smart, tightly wound women, in the proportion of three to every one male; the teachers were surpassingly hip; the Vermont green was seven versions of pastoral. Most of the students were rich—rich and a little loopy. Many were the youngest children of prosperous, prominent parents. But the kids often had been ignored by mom and dad, who were absorbed in making their dutiful ways through Alex Comfort’s Joy of Sex (second cousin to The Joy of Cooking) with each other and with neighbors and friends, praying that they hadn’t missed all the rapture that the ’60s had had to dispense.
My roommate spent eight years or so at Bennington. He tried six majors, including, if memory serves, musical instrument design. He formed close if temporary conjunctions with many women, among them a princess and a U.S. president’s great-grand niece (one of the solemn, whiskery Ohio presidents, alas). Everyone at Bennington was a show; my roommate was a little more brightly lit and cunningly miked, that’s all. When it became clear that I was voluntarily leaving this earthly paradise after only four years, he wrote me off as mentally ill.
People who need movies, the true moviegoers, go in the afternoon; matinees are therapy for those who can’t afford therapists or don’t know that they should get one. Scraping down the pavement in Manhattan on my way to a matinee, I had to admit that my Bennington roommate probably had it right. New York sent many signs to a young man—it was an empire of signs, to cop a phrase—but one message blared through and over all the rest: This city (state, country, world, cosmos) does not require you at all. No provisions have been made. There is no slot. You’ll have to force your way in, on the off chance that you can get in at all. I sometimes thought, then, of a poem by Stephen Crane that I’d come upon in junior high.
A man said to the universe:
“Sir, I exist!”
“However,” replied the universe,
“The fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation.”
I occasionally thought too of a line that I’d fetched from the commonplace books my roommate crammed with quotations to speed him on his way through life: “If nothing comes, then nothing comes. This isn’t exactly the enchanted forest.” Which was true enough: in the mid-1970s, New York, especially up in Washington Heights, the decayed neighborhood where I lived, was emphatically not the enchanted forest.
One gets used to having a slot, however meager. For 16 years there had been a seat reserved for one M. Edmundson at some center of higher or lower learning. Mark E., who sat behind Kevin Donahue and in front of Joan Ehlrich at Medford High, was present or he was absent. Absence mattered. Inquiries would be made. Now there was neither presence nor absence. There was zip. I had nursed hopes, as the poet says, that pointed to the stars. Now I was a walking superfluity, a flea on New York’s shaggy, often rank-smelling coat.
by Mark Edmundson, American Scholar | Continue reading:
Photo: thisisnthappiness
