The Book of Grotesques
It seems somehow illegal to be reading The Grapes of Wrath and Winesburg, Ohio at the same time, but that’s what I’m doing anyhow. Winesburg entrances me, especially when Anderson spins out bits like this:
… in the beginning when the world was young there were a great many thoughts but no such thing as a truth. Man made the truths himself and each truth was a composite of a great many vague thoughts. All about in the world were the truths and they were all beautiful.
The old man had listed hundreds of the truths in his book. I will not try to tell you all of them. There was the truth of virginity and the truth of passion, the truth of wealth and of poverty, of thrift and of profligacy, of carefulness and abandon. Hundreds and hundreds were the truths and they were all beautiful.
And then the people came along. Each as he appeared snatched up one of the truths and some who were quite strong snatched up a dozen of them.
It was the truths that made the people grotesques. The old man had quite an elaborate theory concerning the matter. It was his notion that the moment one of the people took one of the truths to himself, called it his truth, and tried to live his life by it, he became a grotesque and the truth he embraced became a falsehood.
Truth isn’t always beauty, and it doesn’t always do beautiful things to people. Sometimes it does, but more often I see it break people, or turn them into cynics. Brokenness can be beautiful. In fact, I would go so far as to say that brokenness makes us more beautiful. Cynicism, on the other hand, is grotesque, and so often I feel that I teeter right on the edge of it. Especially when I come across something like the proposed amendments to the US Patriot Act. If America is indeed about embracing the truth of freedom, then the passage of this Act will make it a falsehood. But then again, there's a lot of folks who would argue that America hasn't been about freedom in a long time - whether as a truth or even as an idea.
Maybe the thing to keep in mind (particularly while doing the sort of other reading I’m up to now) is that all truth is subjective. The important thing is to try to keep an open heart and meet each day as it comes. I need to keep telling myself that.
Comments
If we use Sherwood Anderson's definition of "grotesque" I suspect Ashcroft would qualify as a grotesque because he grabs hold of "one truth" and loses sight of all the other truths of life.
He is a grotesque because his "one truth" distorts the way he sees everything else that is true, apparenty including the Constitution.
This administration reminds me of Ahab, a very famous grotesque, in Moby Dick trying to destroy "evil," while himself becoming "evil" in the very act of attempting to destroy the whale.
Posted by: Loren | February 9, 2003 4:43 PM
One ought not forget that Thomas Hardy had some fun with this idea, as well. In Far From The Madding Crowd, Gabriel Oak puts down his young sheepdog after it has driven his flock over a cliff, killing them all:
"George's son had done his work so thoroughly that he was considered too good a workman to live, and was, in fact, taken and tragically shot at twelve o'clock that same day -- another instance of the untoward fate which so often attends dogs and other philosophers who follow out a train of reasoning to its logical conclusion, and attempt perfectly consistent conduct in a world made up so largely of compromise."
Posted by: Scott | February 9, 2003 11:46 PM
That's incredible balance. Truly.
Posted by: Ailina | February 10, 2003 12:58 PM