Picture it: It’s Sunday, Father’s Day, and I am browsing in Book Trader, a cafe and used-book store in New Haven. (For Father’s Day, the gift I asked for was a couple hours by myself to go downtown and browse for clothes and books.) In the midst of working on a biography myself, I am ever in search of other biographies to read, particularly of writers, since that’s my task. I pull off the shelf The Art of Burning Bridges: A Life of John O’Hara, whose subject is interesting to me, and whose author, Geoffrey Wolff, is even more interesting to me. Wolff is the author of a good novel I have read (The Finals Club) and one of the best memoirs I have ever read, The Duke of Deception. He is also a character in another book I am slowly working on, about antisemitism in the eating clubs at Princeton in the late 1950s, and I have interviewed him at length about his experience there.
But that is merely the backdrop to my story. Because as I am skimming this biography of O’Hara—there is no doubt I’ll leave with it; I have ample credit at this store, so the book is a freebie to me—a group of very good-looking, very well-spoken, college-town denizens, men and women, sitting in the cafe section, begin talking loudly about astrology. All of them know their “signs,” and all of them have opinions about their signs. A couple of them are all in—they have made life decisions based on the movement of the stars as related to their Virgo or Leo status. A couple are more skeptical, but by no means disbelievers. They say things like, “Yeah, you don’t want to use astrology to pick a spouse, but to pick your grad school, or your next job? Sure, it can help.”
“Yeah, you don’t want to use astrology to pick a spouse, but to pick your grad school, or your next job? Sure, it can help.”
As I battled the scorn welling up inside me—never my best trait—I remembered the interview I did with the great theologian Stanley Hauerwas (he’s a hoot; read my old profile of him here; you won’t regret it). He is an evangelical Christian of a very intellectual bent, and we were talking about the fundamentalist strain in evangelicalism, in particular the “premillennial dispensationalists,” some of whom believed you could predict the precise date that the end times would begin, and the saved would be raptured to Heaven, using a close reading of the Book of Revelation. I was remarking how complex and intricate their system of belief was, and Hauerwas said something like, “Well, that’s no surprise, is it? These are smart people. They want to use their minds. They have just chosen to apply their minds to the wrong problem.”
I try to remember that all the time. There are smart people everywhere, engaged in all kinds of hobbies. Think of the depth of knowledge that a serious sports fan has, the astonishing recall for statistics, the encyclopedic grasp of the history of the sport(s). Heck, when I consider what I knew about baseball at age twelve (all of which I have forgotten), if my love at that age had been Shakespeare, I’d have known the plots of all his plays. Gamers, curlers, military history buffs—there are people everywhere who know tons, who think tons, who are using their minds minute to minute, second to second.
But sometimes they use their minds on astrology.
Is that “worse” than my reading police procedurals and spy novels? Or re-watching the great, under-appreciated Will Arnett dramedy Flaked?
We all have finite time—if we’re lucky, four thousand weeks, as Oliver Burkeman reminds us—so why not spend some on astrology? So long as you’re using astrology to pick a job, but not a spouse, maybe? Is that the dividing line between a little random and totally stupid?
I’ll ponder this question, of how smart people spend their time, as I watch yet another YouTube of Daniel Negreanu playing Texas hold ’em.
Black men and spectacles
Here’s a remarkable essay by Richard V. Reeves of the Brookings Institution about racial disparity, which includes these lines:
A few years back, I was delighted to see my godson wearing glasses. It makes me feel better to know others are aging too. Judge me if you like. “Don’t feel too bad, Dwight,” I said with faux sympathy. “It happens to all of us in the end.” Dwight laughed. “Oh no,” he said, “these are clear lenses. I just do more business when I’m wearing them.” Dwight sells cars for a living. I was confused. How does wearing unnecessary glasses help him sell more cars? “White people especially are just more relaxed around me when I wear them,” he explained.
Read it, seriously.
A dad on the last day of preschool
The Oppenheimers hold the record, we think, for most child-years at our children’s nursery school: five children, two years each. I have asked around if any other family has ten combined child-years at this place (which is only for “threes and fours”), and I’ve come up empty. Our eldest started in the fall of 2009 (wow, another era in America), and our youngest finished last week. It was a fitting time to finish: Patty, the school’s wonderful director, was retiring after sixteen years, just enough to have seen all the Oppenheimers through. They sang her a song, there were cupcakes, we all cried. I pulled it together, eventually, but then, on the way out the door, I passed through the cubby room, all cleaned out on the last day of school. I saw this, which broke me all over again:
I don’t do well at times like this. God help me next fall on the first day of kindergarten—my last first day of kindergarten.