Writing isn’t rocket science. It isn’t even brain surgery. It’s not depth psychology or chaos theory or the hard problem of consciousness. It’s what might be called an easy problem of consciousness, which is to say that if you are willing to spend a couple of days a week thinking hard on a subject, and you know the structure of a language and a thousand or two of its words, you will end up more aware of yourself and the world than you were before you sat down to write.

Joan Didion famously said that she wrote to find out what she thought. That’s true of almost every writer you’ve ever heard of.

People who approach a blank screen knowing exactly what they are thinking don’t surprise their readers, don’t surprise their editors, and don’t surprise themselves. Writing isn’t a doorway into unexplored territory for them. A lot of times their writing dictates what people should do or think, which never inspires people and doesn’t usually make them happy unless they’re already doing or thinking it.

When I sit down to write I’m never sure what I’m going to write about. If I stare at a blank screen too long, I will default to a rant about some flaw in my fellow humans.

Lately, however, when flawed humanity has had to choose between Life or Death, they’ve chosen Death, which makes them less interesting.

I really hadn’t planned on writing that. But there it is, in black and white.

_________

Which tangentially recalls my first class at the College of Idaho in Caldwell, Idaho, in the fall of 1968. It was Introduction to the Old Testament, taught by the much-feared Professor Grob, the authoritarian daughter of an authoritarian Swiss theologian.

Professor Grob had no detectable sense of humor. Her class was required, because at that time, the College of Idaho was still maintaining a connection to its Presbyterian roots. It was at 8 a.m., and if you were a student who tended to fall asleep at that hour, she made you sit in the front row. She would bend close to you and scream your name in your unprotected ears if you started nodding off. Hers was the voice of an angry God.

Professor Grob scared the bejeezus out of me, but she did teach me the cruel parts of the Old Testament, which was most of it. In particular I remember Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Qohelet, son of King David and the poet of Ecclesiastes, whom Professor Grob rendered in sonorous Hebrew.

Ecclesiastes was beautiful and cruel and terrifying in English. I got an inkling, listening to those burred and guttural syllables, that it could be more beautiful and more cruel and more terrifying yet.

The prophets were terrifying and cruel without being beautiful, at least if you didn’t see beauty in being told your civilization, your culture, and your people will be as a vessel broken upon stones.

But I read them just the same. I realized that they weren’t trying to predict the future. They were describing the world they lived in, and they were illustrating the baked-in consequences of decisions already made. They were witnesses to their priests and politicians, and although countless latter-day preachers have used their words as a call to faith, the prophets were simply translating a message from God: “You guys have screwed up. You have fallen asleep during my lecture, and I’m going to flunk your ass.” 

No mention of an appeals court in the Old Testament.

Flunking out of college was a bit more terrifying in 1968 than it is now, because of the draft. The OT prophets now sound a bit crazed, even if they were proved right. Ecclesiastes gets more beautiful, and life more precious, every time I read it.

________

Joan Didion’s book of essays, Slouching Toward Bethlehem, contains her 1967 Saturday Evening Post article, “7000 Romain, Los Angeles 38,” which gets its title from the address of a Hughes Corporation communications center in a Hollywood slum, one locked and apparently empty.

The essay is worth reading. Didion proves that you can take fragments of rumor, Las Vegas real estate deals, abandoned buildings, and the compulsive need for privacy of the then richest private citizen in the world, and turn it into prophecy.

The present contains the future. To predict the future, just look around you.

Howard Hughes died in 1976, surrounded by people who wanted his money (and got it), along with bottles of his own nail clippings and bodily waste. Hughes was a hoarder, and he used his unlimited money to indulge his compulsions without restraint.

The most quoted paragraph of Didion’s essay is one where she writes that Howard Hughes is a folk hero because of an unadmitted American instinct toward absolute personal freedom, the ability to “live by one’s own rules.”

But in the next and last paragraph Didion becomes a prophet. She says, “The instinct is socially suicidal, and because we recognize this is so we have developed workable ways of saying one thing and believing quite another.”

Social suicide. We live in a country that says one thing and believes another, where suicidal dreams and compulsions are out in the open for everyone to see, but people refuse to see them. They close their eyes, they lie, they ignore the fact that actions have consequences, they justify hatred and vindictiveness, separation, alienation, madness, all because their deepest dream is to live by their own rules. That deepest dream, says Didion, is death.

________

I went to high school in Hailey, Idaho. My family was poor compared to most of my classmates, many of whom came from the resort towns of Ketchum and Sun Valley. As an adult, I worked for Sun Valley Corporation, and taught English in the financially exclusive Ketchum-Sun Valley Community School, and kept track of my old classmates.

In my study of people who had more money than they knew what to do with, I learned that wealth is lethal in far smaller amounts than what Howard Hughes possessed.

We all have compulsions, thankfully (usually) kept in check by our economic circumstances. But give any of us enough money, and the resulting life will steer itself inexorably toward the grotesque. And the grotesque trends inexorably toward the realization that This Cannot Go On.

________

This week the annual Allen & Company gathering happens in Sun Valley. A sea of private jets is parked at the Hailey Airport. Fabulously wealthy people from all over the world are met there by limousines and delivered to their rooms in the Sun Valley Lodge. Money is thick in the Central Idaho air, at morally hazardous levels.

The gathering is a national lesson in inequality—in money, in power, in importance, in grace or lack of it—and as such, it is one more reminder that this country’s ostensibly foundational ideas are dead.

One of Didion’s foundational ideas—no doubt borrowed from Freud—is that you can ban your deepest desires from your consciousness, but they don’t go away. They return with renewed vigor in your moments of weakness. They’ll take over your life to the detriment of you, your family, and all the people around you. If you want to live by your own rules, and you’re wealthy, you’ll eventually succeed beyond your wildest dreams, but it won’t look like success to you or anybody else.

________

At the Community School I co-taught a senior seminar with James Pleasant Woods the Third, known to all as Jimmy, a great and wasted intellect who taught me a great deal about teaching and careful observation of the world. As far as I know, he was the only committed Marxist the Community School ever hired.

Jimmy’s regular job was as a bartender in the Christiania Restaurant in Ketchum, and I used to correct seminar papers at the bar, sipping from a bottomless glass of Grand Marnier. Grades at the end of the evening were better than grades at the beginning.

Jimmy had gone to Williams College with Herbert Allen, the president of Allen & Co., who started the Sun Valley gathering. When he was in town, Herbert would stop at the Christiania to say hello to Jimmy and reminisce.

I never witnessed these meetings, but Jimmy had nothing but praise for Herbert Allen. He said he was a brilliant analytic intellect, a financial genius, and a decent human being with a great sense of humor. It was a combination you didn’t see every day.

Since that time, I’ve thought about the Allen & Company gathering, mostly in the context of a dark story by Mark Twain, “The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg.” Written toward the bitter end of Twain’s life, the story describes a famously incorruptible town that falls into discord and avarice and lying when a stranger promises a fortune to the citizen who committed a long ago act of generosity. The generous act never happened. To claim the fortune, people have to lie, and accuse all the other claimants of lying.

Virtuous Hadleyburg is, by the end of the story, a nest of venality.

A corollary to the story is that humans make of their communities a heaven or a hell, and over time end up with the latter.

I’ve thought that Herbert Allen has probably read “The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg.” I’ve thought he probably reads it once a year. I’ve wondered if he started his gatherings in Sun Valley in honor of his friend Jimmy Woods and Jimmy’s ability to see things as they are.

True friendships require a shared vision, an affirmation that the things you see are real and not made up of things you wish were true. Find someone who sees the world as you do, and in a harsh desert world of financial-service clients, you’ll have found a friend, tending bar in an oasis.

________

­­Jimmy Woods, the poet of Ecclesiastes, Freud, Mark Twain, Howard Hughes, Joan Didion, Professor Grob: Lo! Dead these many years.

All were brilliant. All were wise.

All knew, with the poet, that with much wisdom comes much sorrow; the more knowledge, the more grief.

Also, Vanity of vanities; all is vanity.

This is the pure nihilism of the dead. Meaning succumbs to death. The mansion of the rich man and the hovel of the peasant are in the end, equally meaningless. A virtuous life and a life devoted to evil are, in the end, the same thing. The people who inherit the fruits of your hard work and intelligence will be, compared to you, lazy and stupid, but you will be dead and they won’t.

 That’s the bad news.

The good news comes along in Ecclesiastes 8:15, when Qoholet writes that a man has no better thing under the sun than to eat and to drink and to be merry, for this should accompany him in his labor all the days of the life that God has given him under the sun.

This is also nihilism, but of a far more benign kind. It gives us a small but firm push toward happiness as we face the baked-in consequences of decisions already made, and as our once-solid world fades beneath our feet.