A Certain Idea of America, page 14
There are beautiful set pieces. Count Pierre, sick, starving, a prisoner of Napoleon’s army, on a constant forced march without shoes, sets his entire intellect to understanding the truth of life. All he has experienced tells him “that man is created for happiness, that happiness is within him, in the satisfaction of simple human needs, and that all unhappiness arises not from privation but from superfluity.” An epiphany follows: “That nothing in this world is terrible.” “Life is everything. Life is God. Everything changes and moves and that movement is God…. To love life is to love God.”
His character is transformed. Once he waited to discover good qualities in people before caring for them. Now he loved them first, “and by loving people without cause he discovered indubitable causes for loving them.”
I read this in a hotel in Ireland after visiting the site of a nineteenth-century Marian apparition in the town of Knock. It was a peaceful place and felt holy. Pierre would have been comfortable there.
And so the lessons of my War and Peace summer.
Feeling such love for a great work did something important to me. For the first time in some years I felt freed for long periods of an affliction common to many, certainly journalists, the compulsion to reach for a device to find out what’s happening, what’s new. But I already knew the news. Pierre was in love with Natasha. Prince Andrei was wounded at Borodino. Princess Mary was saved by Nicholas’s intervention with the serfs. That was all I had to know and it was enough, it was the real news.
Don’t be afraid to visit old worlds. Man is man, wherever he is you can follow. Sometimes a thing is called a masterpiece because it is a masterpiece.
When you allow a past work of art to enter your mind and imagination you are embarked on a kind of reclamation project, a rescue mission. As you read, Nicholas and Sonya are alive, but Tolstoy himself is still alive. He isn’t gone, his mind is still producing, he continues in human consciousness. You are continuing something. You should feel satisfaction in this.
THE LONELY OFFICE IS BAD FOR AMERICA
July 28, 2022
Where are we in the office wars? I think there’s an armistice between the return-to-the-office side and the work-from-home forces. Perhaps hostilities will resume in the fall. Bosses are hoping the old reality will snap back as the drama of 2020–22 recedes, that people will start to feel they need to come back, or can be made to. The work-from-home people are dug in, believing they’re on the winning side, that the transformation of work in America, which had been going remote for years, was simply sped up and finalized by the pandemic. In this tight job market they have the upper hand. Employers are fighting for talent: Fire me—I’ll get a better job tomorrow, and you’ll get fifty hours with HR onboarding my replacement. The balance of power will change if the slowing economy leads to layoffs and hiring freezes.
The benefits of working from home are obvious: freedom, no commute; it’s easier to be there for family, the dog, the dentist appointment. Less time wasted in goofy officewide meetings. I’ve wondered if there is another aspect, that office life was demystified by what began in the years before the pandemic, the rise of HR complaints and accusations of bullying, bad language, and sexual misconduct. Add arguments over masks and vaccines, and maybe office life came to be seen less as a healthy culture you could be part of and more like a battlefield you wanted to avoid.
Arguments against working from home are largely intangible, and I focus on these. They are less personal, more national and societal.
I don’t want to see office life in America end. The decline in office life is going to have an impact on the general atmosphere of the country. There is something demoralizing about all the empty offices, something post-greatness about them. All the almost-empty buildings in all the downtowns—it feels too much like a metaphor for decline.
My mind goes first to the young. People starting out need offices to learn a profession, to make friends, meet colleagues, find romantic partners and mates. The #MeToo movement did a lot to damage mentoring—senior employees no longer wanted to take the chance—but the end of office life would pretty much do away with it.
There will be less knowledge of the workplace, of what’s going on, of the sense that you’re part of a burbling ecosystem. There will be fewer deep friendships, antagonisms, real and daily relationships. Work will seem without depth, flat as a Zoom screen. Less human. Without offices you’ll lose a place to escape from your home life.
My guess is the end of the office will lead to a decline in professionalism across the board. You learn things in the hall from the old veteran. You understand she’s watching your progress, and you want to come through with your excellence. Without her down the hall, who will you be excellent for?
There will likely, in each company and organization, be a decline in a sense of mission. A diluting of company spirit looks to me inevitable. Spirit, mission—they come from people and are established and imparted through being together, sharing a particular space, talking to each other spontaneously and privately, encouraging and correcting.
At some point in the twentieth century, America invented big-scale office life. We were the envy of the world for it. Without it there will be less bubbling creativity, less of the chance meeting in the hall and the offhand comment that results in brains sparking off brains.
Companies may seem more communal, in a way—Zoom screens aren’t explicitly hierarchical. But there will be less clarity, and less leadership. Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase, who has said he wants people back in the office and experienced pushback for it, just stated in his annual report that people with ambition “cannot lead from behind a desk or in front of a screen.”
It is possible working at home is changing the nature of professional ambition. A piece last month in the Journal by Callum Borchers cited Jonathan Johnson, CEO of Overstock.com. To foster a sense of togetherness and shared mission, he invited everyone on staff to join him for lunch every Tuesday at the company’s Midvale, Utah, headquarters. In eight months, a total of ten people attended. “Most of the time, I eat my peanut butter sandwich alone,” Mr. Johnson told Mr. Borchers. “When I was 25, if I had a chance to eat my sandwich with the CEO, I’d have been there.”
We’re pro-ambition in this space: God gave you gifts, bring them fruitfully into the world, rise, and make things better. Then again maybe this age is making people ambitious for different things.
Here are my two greatest concerns. The first is that in my lifetime the office is where America happened each day. That’s why many of our most popular TV programs were about the office, from The Mary Tyler Moore Show through Mad Men, from ER through 30 Rock and Parks and Recreation. You can name others. Even M*A*S*H was about the workplace. And of course The Office. Without Dunder Mifflin, how would Jim have met Pam? How could the utterly ridiculous Michael Scott have entered your sympathies without your seeing him every day, and knowing him?
The primary location of daily integration in America—the coming together of all ages, religions, ethnicities, and political tendencies, all colors, classes, and conditions—has been, during the past century, the office. It is where you learn to negotiate relationships with people very different from you, where you discover what people with different experiences of life really think. You discern all this in the joke, the aside, the shared confidence, the rolled eyes. And with all this variety you manage to come together in a shared, formal mission: Get that account, sell that property, get the story, process those claims.
Daily life in America happened in the office. If it doesn’t, where will America happen?
And, this being a political column, my second worry. The end of the office will contribute to polarization. Receding from office life will become another way of self-segregating. People will be exposed to less and, in their downtime, will burrow down into their sites, their groups, their online angers. Their group-driven information and facts.
I suppose what I fear is a more disembodied nation. You can see it on the TV news—the empty, echoing set where there used to be people at desks in the background, running around. You see it in big offices when you go to see an accountant or a travel agent. There is no there there.
Disembodied isn’t good. This fall and winter I hope we see the buildings full and the people going in and out. I want the center of our cities to hum and thrum again.
I don’t want America to look like an Edward Hopper painting. He was the great artist of American loneliness—empty streets, tables for one, everyone at the bar drinking alone. We weren’t meant to be a Hopper painting. We were meant to be and work together.
A GENIUS FOR FRIENDSHIP
July 1, 2021
America is a sharply divided place. The conservative world is divided, marked by the continued estrangement of old friends. There is the divide over Donald Trump, and the connected division between those open to conspiracism and those not. There are divides between those quietly fighting over policies that will determine the Republican Party’s future meaning and purpose, its reason for being, and between those who differ—polite word!—on the right moral attitude, after 1/6, toward the former president.
So let’s take a look at the historian Gordon Wood’s superb Friends Divided: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson (2017), the story of two great men whose deep friendship was sundered over politics and later repaired.
They met in Philadelphia in the Continental Congress in 1775 and invented a nation together in 1776. What allies they were, how brilliantly they worked, in spite of differences in temperament, personality, cast of mind, and background. Adams of Massachusetts was hearty, frank, abrupt. He was ardent, a brilliant, highly educated man who found it difficult to conceal his true thoughts. His background was plain New England. He made his own way in the world.
Jefferson of course was an aristocrat, a member of Virginia’s landed gentry. He let the game come to him. Mr. Wood quotes a eulogist, who said Jefferson “kept at all times such a command over his temper that no one could discover the workings of his soul.” He was serene.
Adams tended to erupt. But once past his awkwardness and shyness he was jovial and warm. Jefferson, in Mr. Wood’s words, “used his affability to keep people at a distance.” Their mutual friend Dr. Benjamin Rush said Adams was “a stranger to dissimulation.” No one ever said that of Jefferson.
In the Continental Congress Adams found Jefferson so frank and decisive on the issue of independence “that he soon seized upon my heart.” Jefferson would tell Daniel Webster that Adams in those days was a “Colossus.” He was “not graceful, not elegant, not always fluent.” But in debate he’d come out “with a power, both of thought and of expression which moved us from our seats.”
Their friendship deepened in the late 1770s and ’80s, when both were diplomats representing the new nation in Europe. Abigail Adams captivated Jefferson; she was so intelligent, well-read, and politically astute that he called her “one of the most estimable characters on earth.” Abigail told Jefferson her husband had no closer friend. Jefferson was “the only person with whom my companion could associate with perfect freedom, and unreserve.” When Jefferson was made minister to France and Adams to Britain, their families parted. Jefferson wrote to say it left him “in the dumps.”
Jefferson later told James Madison that while Adams was vain, that was “all the ill” that could be said of him. He was a man of “rigorous honesty,” “profound in his views,” and “he is so amiable, that I pronounce you will love him if ever you become acquainted with him.”
What blew them apart? The French Revolution. Other things too but 1789 was at the heart of it. They disagreed on what it was (a continuation of 1776, said Jefferson; a perversion of 1776, said Adams) and what it would produce (a Continent drowning in blood, said Adams, who could see a Napoleon coming; a global flowering of the spirit of liberty, thought Jefferson, who seems to have mistaken Robespierre for Paul Revere). When the Revolution’s ferocity was revealed in the Terror, Adams threw it in Jefferson’s face: “In France anarchy had done more mischief in one night than all the despotism of their kings had ever done in 20 or 30 years.”
If it hadn’t been for the Revolution, they might have gotten through the other strains in store. There were many. Adams became the second president, served one term, ran for reelection and was defeated by Vice President Jefferson in the brutal, rancorous 1800 election.
They disengaged, brooded (mostly Adams), and said bitter things in letters to others (mostly Jefferson).
What saved their friendship? Their friend Benjamin Rush, another great though insufficiently remembered Founder. He and Adams had a long correspondence. In 1809, as Jefferson’s second presidential term ended, Adams teasingly asked Rush if he’d had any dreams about Jefferson. Rush had a lot of dreams and often shared them. Months later he reported he did have a dream, about “one of the most extraordinary events” of 1809, “the renewal of the friendship” of Adams and Jefferson. In the dream Adams wrote a short note congratulating Jefferson on his retirement.
“A Dream again!” Adams responded. “It may be Prophecy.”
Rush wrote to Jefferson to soften him up. You loved Adams, he said. Of all the evils of politics, none were so great “as the dissolution of friendships.”
Rush then told Adams to forget what had separated them—explanations are required of lovers, he said, “but are never so between divided friends.”
On New Year’s Day 1812, Adams sent Jefferson a friendly letter. Jefferson wrote back right away, what he later called a “rambling gossiping epistle.” And so their great dialogue recommenced.
They wrote faithfully for fourteen years, 158 letters, on everything—what they were reading, who they saw, political philosophy, a thought they’d just had. At one point Adams said, “You and I ought not to die, before We have explained ourselves to each other.” They did their best. Adams would bring up the French Revolution. Jefferson would dodge and share his thoughts on the religious beliefs of the Shawnee Tribe. Adams remembered their history. “I look back with rapture to those golden days” when Virginia and Massachusetts “acted together like a band of brothers.”
They were writing for themselves but also, they knew, for history. They knew who they were.
And so it continued, a great pouring out, until the summer of 1826, the Jubilee summer when the entire country would celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of what had happened in Philadelphia on July 4.
Both men were near the end of their lives. Both held on for the great day. Wood reports that Jefferson woke the night of the third and asked if it was the Fourth yet. His doctor said it soon would be. Early the next morning he woke again and called for his servants. Just after noon he died.
At the same time Adams, five hundred miles to the north, lay dying. A memoir by Abigail’s nephew William Cranch, chief judge of the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, reports that Adams awoke on the Fourth to bells ringing and cannon booming. The celebrations had begun. Asked if he knew what day it was he said yes, “It is the glorious 4th of July—God bless it—God bless you all.” According to legend, just before he died at six p.m., he awoke and said, “Thomas Jefferson survives.”
What drove their reconciliation? A tenderness, toward history and toward themselves. They knew what their friendship had been. They had lived through and to a significant degree driven a world-historical event, the invention of America. They had shared that moment and it had been the great moment of their lives, greater than their presidencies, greater than what followed. They had been geniuses together.
As the Fourth explodes around us we should take some inspiration from the story of an old estrangement healed. We’re all trying to repair something. May you have a Benjamin Rush.
AMERICA’S MOST TUMULTUOUS HOLY WEEK
April 14, 2022
It was the Easter of epochal events. All that Holy Week history came like a barrage. It was April 1865, the Civil War. No one touched by that war ever got over it; it was the signal historical event of their lives, the greatest national trauma in U.S. history. It would claim 750,000 lives.
Everyone knew the South would fight to the end, but suddenly people wondered if it was the end. General Robert E. Lee’s army was trapped and under siege in the middle of Virginia. General Ulysses S. Grant was bearing down, his army going from strength to strength.
The two exchanged letters under flag of truce. Grant to Lee: Did the general not see the “hopelessness” of his position? Lee sent a roundabout response, Grant a roundabout reply, but he was starting to see: Lee knows he is beat.
On the morning of April 9, Palm Sunday, Lee sent word: He would discuss terms of surrender. They met that afternoon in the Appomattox home of Wilmer McLean.
Lee got there first. Allen C. Guelzo, in his masterly Robert E. Lee: A Life, quotes a reporter from the New York Herald who had joined a crowd outside. He was bowled over by the bearing of the imposing Lee, in full dress uniform with “an elegant sword, sash and gauntlets.”
In truth, Lee didn’t know what to expect. He’d told his staff, “If I am to be General Grant’s prisoner to-day, I intend to make my best appearance.” His close friend General James Longstreet thought Lee’s fine dress a form of “emotional armor,” an attempt to conceal “profound depression,” according to Ron Chernow’s superb, compendious Grant.
