It’s gotten so I can start counting backward silently from our arrivals at parties and dinners.
Coats are hung, greetings exchanged. Ten, nine, eight. And I can safely bet you a set of nested Tupperware that by the time I reach “two,” the conversation I most dread will have begun.
It is triggered by any subject: How delicious this soup is, for example. Where, someone wonders, did the host find the magical ingredients? Why, answers the flattered host, I found them at that Alpha Market where they sell those other magical ingredients.
Alpha Market? another guest chimes. But it’s so expensive there!
And off we go, for the rest of the evening. If it’s not the cost of food, it’s the cost of clothing. Furniture. Wallpaper. The wall itself, the carpet, the building we’re in and the land below.
The men dive right in: real estate rates, stock market quotes, loan percentages. It’s part of the original hunter-gatherer deal. Men seldom bother with preliminaries: In seconds they have pried from one another their salaries, airfares, amounts paid for the roofing job. Men see nothing to apologize for. They are conditioned (nobly, if you trace it back to days of slaying their own food) to elbow their ways straight to the beast and take it by the horns. But more than ever, women, too, shoulder that heavy obsession. In result it takes over our words and deeds; even our dreams.
People fashion what appear to be decent lives. But talk with them lately, and you may find yourself listening to grim, gray, cardboard cut-outs, twisted up over who paid what. Their faces wear tight, sharp expressions, and their words come in nervous bursts.
The truth is that our anxious fixation with money, our relentless yammer about it at every occasion, grows stagger ingly dull. Inflexible. Unfunny. A sleeping aid.
It also stunts us, unmistakably as foot-binding.
I want to wail.
Can’t we please, please, please talk about anything else?
Surely we didn’t bring ourselves this far (helped by the lifetime efforts of parents, teachers, community leaders) to become a bunch of tense, witless brokers, spouting cost-comparisons at one another around the clock. Who wants to face a future of the same words, the same laments, the same atmosphere of fierce, restless grasping?
American culture, of course, tells us to do this. We strain to listen, to memorize. We are creatures who must survive, after all. We need to be smart about it.
But meantime we forget the simplest truth.
We lose track of the reason for surviving so splendidly.
What, I want to ask my dinner companions, did you actually have it in mind to be, during this brief earthly visit? Did our moms take us to the library and to feed the ducks so we’d turn into this?
Once, when people met for meals or gatherings, they traded stories about their thoughts and experiences. They traded jokes, anecdotes, crazy hunches. Of course, everyone worked to survive, and survival was often difficult. But somehow in recent years, a massive panic has taken over what we used to call the middle class: not just to survive but to conquer, to win big. And this constant, dogging fear of never getting enough, of never winning cagily enough, cancels the pursuit of any other kind of meaning. It reduces us to jittery, shallow lemmings.
Shall our epitaphs read “Here lies one ruthless little deal-cutter”?
Texture, nuance, depth, complexity: The great questions are swept off the table. If all we can do is rank costs on a scoreboard, doesn’t this flatten the universe, and our perception of it, into columns of numbers? What happens then to the realm of ideas?
Art and nature, last time I looked, do not generally charge piles of money to provoke, inspire and enlarge us. They help us think, help us live better; perhaps more wisely. And not by adding a bathroom. You know it. I know it. But we keep letting the big voices and video pictures and glossy pages push us around.
Yes, if we take my quarrel back to the days of slaying our own food, we see that all of history was fought and refought over who got the goods. But consider: All that time, art was never far away, insisting quietly that something else was also going on. To quote from a William Stafford poem, about our miraculous ability to create meaning: “More, there is more to find all around us.”
Tell me your dreams, your memories, your passions.
Tell me about a book, a painting, a dance, a play, a sculpture, a piece of music. Tell me about sports. Church. Travel. A character you met. A poem, joke or riddle.
Only let’s skip the money part, for just a little while. Please?
