Now You Know
Today I would like to tell you a story. It is a story I heard second-hand more than a quarter of a century ago, but I hope that will not diminish its impact or reduce its significance too much for you to appreciate it. The story itself is very sad, but the lessons I have learned from it over the years are somehow equally troubling. Let me share it and what it has come to mean to me and then perhaps you’ll have some thoughts. I won’t hear them, because the newsletter medium is, thank God, a one-way platform, but you will probably still have them anyway, and that’s great.
My first adult job in New York City was as an editorial assistant at a publishing company. This involved a large degree of copying and carrying stacks of paper from one office to another and proofreading pages on a green-and-black computer monitor, but given the vagaries of commercial rent back when New York was still an uncertain proposition to everyone who remembered what happened from the Fiscal Crisis of the ’70s to the murder explosion that unfortunately coincided with the Dinkins years—it is difficult to understand now that we live in a world where young people can stumble home drunk in various states of undress and remain for the most part safe and unmolested in areas where once even the most stocky, stout-hearted biker gang affiliate would hesitate to venture, but even into the middle of the ’90s landlords were forced to offer 20-year leases to whichever tenants were willing to take the space, which is why up until a few years ago you would still see no-name delis surrounded by Bottegas Veneta and stores that let you buy bottles of hand soap for $50 a pop. Now that those leases have finally run out and everything is either shops selling expensive French perfume for dogs or my personal favorite, Vast Empty Boutique Featuring Single Brushed Metal Movable Garment Rack With Four Dresses Maximum Hanging From It While Disinterested-Looking Pretty Girl Stares At Her iPhone From Behind Virtually Function-Free Desk, an outlet which originated in Soho but seems to have opened branches all over the city of late, we’ve finally arrived at the apotheosis of real estate absurdity, where spaces will sit vacant for years because eventually some sucker will pony up enough money to make all that unproductive empty time retrospectively profitable, but I don’t want to get sidetracked here, because I know that as elegant and precise as my criticisms of capitalism can be, you’re here for the despair, and, let’s be honest, not the kind that attaches itself to the basic human immiseration that is the inevitable byproduct (or, depending which neo-Marxist theorist you most often quote to show how up you are on the literature, primary and intentional product) of a free-market economy (feel free to put air-quotes in there, lefties, this is as much your newsletter as mine) but the more capital-e Existential dread so prevalent amongst our hyperaware neoteric bourgeoisie in this age of anxiety. So let’s get back to it—the vast amount of office space corporations were able to take meant even the editorial assistants had cubicles back then.
My cubicle was across from a gentleman I’ll call Bob, because that was his name, who seemed impossibly middle-aged back then but I am horrified to realize was clearly no older than I am as I write these words now. He was actually a very nice guy who was remarkably patient with all my idiot young person opinions and questions and spent a lot of time imparting his wisdom about the world of work, most specifically how everyone in it is out to fuck you over and you can’t trust anybody, particularly the people who pretend that they’re on your side, but also about how it is a cruel and unforgiving place, especially for those who have a hard time handling the stress and strife associated with deadlines and production schedules. (This was in an era when there was no Internet to speak of and companies were still vastly overstaffed, so that people spent a lot of their time at work both bored and with very little they could do to alleviate that boredom, because there was no safe harbor on the computer--which was what we used to call desktops in those days, which was what we used to have instead of laptops--until the invention of computer Solitaire, and any supervisor strolling past the vast maze of cubicles always had one eye out for that collection of digital cards arrayed across the screen. In any event, “stress” back then was considerably less intense than stress is now, so if you are a millennial or younger and someone gives you a hard time about what a hard time you’re having with the millions of things you’re expected to do and they tell you that they had no problem with it when they were your age you can tell them to go fuck themselves and use my name as corroboration (unless they seem like someone who would be willing to hire me for some kind of high-level administrative position where you just shout out ideas and then spend the rest of the day offering airy thoughts about life on Twitter or Facebook, which I think is something I would be really good at and for which I am willing to put aside my well-publicized aversion to social media in the event that the right offer is forthcoming, please make that suggestion to your dickheaded boss who keeps telling you how much harder it was for him 25 years ago), but stress, like suffering, is not relative, so the stress we had in the ’90s felt as acute and insoluble as the kind we have now, but back then very few people were under the impression that it was anything other than impolite to talk about their inner pain or how anything affected them so most people kept their turmoil to themselves. It was a much better world in a lot of ways, especially if you weren’t interested in the superficial struggles that everyone will tell you about within seconds of meeting you now yet thankfully stayed silent about then, but it was a lot harder on those who were incapable of coping with it on their own, which is what this story is about.
Bob and I were talking one day about the kind of people who gravitate to publishing, which I’m sure now is mainly trust-funders, careerists, members of the family firm or people too dense to do anything in the STEM fields and unwilling to work with their hands but back then consisted of a large number of artsy types who were able to use their facility with language to subsidize their more esoteric creative endeavors, and he told me the tale of a woman he once used to work with when he had been much younger who was, I believe, a dancer or an actress but who certainly fit the profile of someone toiling during the days for Big Word so they could spend their evenings ecstatically gyrating to mallet-and-dulcimer music on the stage of some poorly-ventilated shitbox on the Lower East Side for a take-home share of $37 on a good night when the crowd reached double digits. This woman, the story went, grew more and more addled by whatever mental difficulties she endured until one day she had some sort of psychotic break at the office and began typing various things on her typewriter about how she thought her boss was in love with her until someone noticed and called a relative to come retrieve her.
“So her brother came,” Bob told me, “and he was this total outer-borough type,” (I should pause here to note that, again, it is difficult to comprehend what that word used to mean now that we live in a world where people will casually admit to paying more in one month than my first car cost so that they can live in rented rooms in Queens—Queens!—but it carried with it connotations of ignorance, bigotry and philistinism that were undoubtedly classist but also not necessarily incorrect) “and he said, kind of roughly, ‘Okay, let’s go, I’m taking you home,’ and she said, ‘But wait, I need to bring my books,’ and he looked at her and said, ‘You’ve read enough books already.’” After which, I guess, he pulled her out and that was the last anyone ever heard of her. Or whatever. The story was old when I first heard it and I am old now so the details are unimportant. While I used to focus more on the terrible emotional trauma of which this poor woman was obviously a victim and how awful it was that her family didn’t understand her, the closer I come to the grave the more I think about the part where the brother goes, “You’ve read enough books already.”
I am, and have always been, a voracious reader. If you are someone who has subscribed to this newsletter (and who has made it this far through this story without unsubscribing, which, I should remind you, the people at Substack make it very easy to do) I suspect you are somewhat similar. You, at the very least, are curious about things and always want to learn more. You have a sense that knowledge is valuable for its own sake, and that time spent educating yourself about something is never time wasted.
But is that true?
Think about everything you know right now. Now look around you. Are you happy? Has it helped? Has anything you’ve learned done anything for you than make you more conscious of just how painful, pointless and oh my God endless it all is? Every lesson you’ve learned you’ve either ignored or applied so poorly that you might as well have not paid attention in the first place, because at least if you were unaware of it you wouldn’t keep beating yourself up about the stupid things you obviously knew better than to do but did anyway. When you look back at your life the brief moments of bliss are obviously outweighed by anguish and both of those things are tiny compared to the overflow of tedium and conversations you had to pretend to be interested in because the rules of society say you can’t walk away from another person even if what they are telling you is literally a description of the events that happened on this week’s episode of “The Big Bang Theory” (you have probably guessed that this example is based on an actual event but in case for some reason the culprit somehow comes across this newsletter I am changing the name of the show— which was actually, and even more unforgivably, “Two and a Half Men”— so that he (or she, it could have been a woman) will not recognize him(or her, as implausible the idea of a woman both watching the show in question and then recounting its plot details, such as they were, to someone days after it had aired might seem)self in the telling) but when you focus on the sad parts you can always identify some small part of them that were either fueled or abetted by knowing more than you needed to. Knowing things sucks and it never makes anything better. Think of the most ignorant person you know. Does he seem down? Does he struggle with sorrow? Is he crippled by self-awareness? Of course not! He’s the President of the United States! (A man, I might point out, from Queens. Queens!) There are various other examples of this that are perhaps less extreme but equally telling you can undoubtedly think of off the top of your head. I guess what I’m trying to say is you know that conversation all smart kids have when they’re in high school or so and they look at the less intellectually burdened around them and ask, “Do you think that’s why they’re happier than us?” The answer, I’m sorry to say, is yes. You’ve always known it but tried not to think about it too much, because what good comes from knowing? None. None good. That’s why I’m trying to tell you. Here, as they say in the book, endeth the lesson. Go and learn no more.