Farther Away: Essays

by Jonathan Franzen

  There is, to be sure, one positive social consequence of this worsening misbehavior. The abstract notion of civilized public spaces, as rare resources worth defending, may be all but dead, but there’s still consolation to be found in the momentary ad hoc microcommunities of fellow sufferers which bad behavior creates. To look out your car window and see the steam coming out of another driver’s ears, or to meet the eyes of a pissed-off checkout clerk and to shake your head along with her: it makes you feel a little less alone. Which is why, of all the worsening varieties of bad cell-phone behavior, the one that most deeply irritates me is the one that seems, because it is ostensibly victimless, to irritate nobody else. I’m talking about the habit, uncommon ten years ago, now ubiquitous, of ending cell-phone conversations by braying the words “LOVE YOU!” Or, even more oppressive and grating: “I LOVE YOU!” It makes me want to go and live in China, where I don’t understand the language.

  The cellular component of my irritation is straightforward. I simply do not, while buying socks at the Gap, or standing in a ticket line and pursuing my private thoughts, or trying to read a novel on a plane that’s being boarded, want to be imaginatively drawn into the sticky world of some nearby human being’s home life. The very essence of the cell phone’s hideousness, as a social phenomenon—the bad news that stays bad news—is that it enables and encourages the inflicting of the personal and individual on the public and communal. And there is no higher-caliber utterance than “I love you”—nothing worse that an individual can inflict on a communal public space. Even “Fuck you, dickhead” is less invasive, since it’s the kind of thing that angry people do sometimes shout in public, and it can just as easily be directed at a stranger.

  My friend Elisabeth assures me that the new national plague of love-yous is a good thing: a healthy reaction against the repressed family dynamics of our Protestant childhoods some decades ago. What could be wrong, Elisabeth asks, with telling your mother that you love her, or with hearing from her that she loves you? What if one of you dies before you can speak again? Isn’t it nice that we can say these things to each other so freely now?

  I do here admit the possibility that, compared with everyone else on the airport concourse, I am an extraordinarily cold and unloving person; that the sudden overwhelming sensation of loving somebody (a friend, a spouse, a parent, a sibling), which to me is such an important and signal sensation that I’m at pains not to wear out the phrase that best expresses it, is for other people so common and routine and easily achieved that it can be reexperienced and reexpressed many times in a single day without significant loss of power.

  It’s also possible, however, that too-frequent habitual repetition empties phrases of their meaning. Joni Mitchell, in the last verse of “Both Sides Now,” referenced the solemn amazement of saying I love you “right out loud”: of giving vocal birth to such intensity of feeling. Stevie Wonder, in lyrics written seventeen years later, sings of calling somebody up on an ordinary afternoon simply to say “I love you,” and, being Stevie Wonder (who probably really is a more loving person than I am), he half succeeds in making me believe in his sincerity—at least until the last line of the chorus, where he finds it necessary to add: “And I mean it from the bottom of my heart.” Avowing sincerity is more or less diagnostic of insincerity.

  And, just so, when I’m buying those socks at the Gap and the mom in line behind me shouts “I love you!” into her little phone, I am powerless not to feel that something is being performed; overperformed; publicly performed; defiantly inflicted. Yes, a lot of domestic things get shouted in public which really aren’t intended for public consumption; yes, people get carried away. But the phrase “I love you” is too important and loaded, and its use as a sign-off too self-conscious, for me to believe I’m being made to hear it accidentally. If the mother’s declaration of love had genuine, private emotional weight, wouldn’t she take at least a little care to guard it from public hearing? If she truly meant what she was saying, from the bottom of her heart, wouldn’t she have to say it quietly? Overhearing her, as a stranger, I have the feeling of being made party to an aggressive assertion of entitlement. At a minimum, the person seems to be saying to me and to everyone else present: “My emotions and my family are more important to me than your social comfort.” And also, often enough, I suspect: “I want you all to know that unlike many people, including my cold bastard of a father, I am the kind of person who always tells my loved ones that I love them.”

  Or am I, in my admittedly now rather lunatic-sounding irritation, simply projecting all this?

  The cell phone came of age on September 11, 2001. Imprinted that day on our collective consciousness was the image of cell phones as conduits of intimacy for the desperate. In every too-loud I-love-you that I hear nowadays, as in the more general national orgy of connectedness—the imperative for parents and children to connect by phone once or twice or five or ten times daily—it’s difficult not to hear an echo of those terrible, entirely appropriate I-love-yous uttered on the four doomed planes and in the two doomed towers. And it’s precisely this echo, the fact that it’s an echo, the sentimentality of it, that so irritates me.

  My own experience of 9/11 was anomalous for the lack of television in it. At nine in the morning, I got a phone call from my book editor, who, from his office window, had just seen the second plane hit the towers. I did immediately go to the nearest TV, in the conference room of the real estate office downstairs from my apartment, and watch with a group of agents as first one tower and then the other went down. But then my girlfriend came home and we spent the rest of the day listening to the radio, checking the Internet, reassuring our families, and watching from our roof and from the middle of Lexington Avenue (which was filled with pedestrians streaming uptown) as the dust and smoke at the bottom of Manhattan diffused into a sickening pall. In the evening, we walked down to Forty-second Street and met up with an out-of-town friend and found a restaurant in the West Forties which happened to be serving dinner. Every table was packed with people drinking heavily; the mood was wartime. I got another brief glimpse of a TV screen, this one showing the face of George W. Bush, as we were departing through the restaurant’s bar. “He looks like a scared mouse,” somebody said. Sitting on a 6 train at Grand Central, waiting for it to move, we watched a New York commuter angrily complain to a conductor about the lack of express service to the Bronx.

  Three nights later, from 11:00 p.m. to nearly 3:00 a.m., I sat in a frigid room at ABC News from which I could see my fellow New Yorker David Halberstam and speak by video link to Maya Angelou and a couple of other out-of-town writers while we waited to offer Ted Koppel a literary perspective on Tuesday morning’s attacks. The wait was not short. Footage of the attacks and the ensuing collapses and fires was shown again and again, interspersed with long segments on the emotional toll on ordinary citizens and their impressionable children. Every once in a while, one or two of us writers would have sixty seconds to say something writerly before the coverage reverted to more carnage and wrenching interviews with friends and family of the dead and the missing. I spoke four times in three and a half hours. The second time, I was asked to confirm widespread reports that Tuesday’s attacks had profoundly changed the personality of New Yorkers. Thinking of the angry commuter, I could not confirm these reports. I talked about the people I’d seen shopping in the stores in my neighborhood on Wednesday afternoon, buying fall clothes. Ted Koppel, in his response, made clear that I’d failed at the task I’d been waiting half the night to perform. With a frown, he said that his own impression was very different: that the attacks had indeed profoundly changed the personality of New York City.

  Naturally, I assumed that I was speaking truth and Koppel merely retransmitting received opinion. But Koppel had been watching TV and I had not. I didn’t understand that the worst damage to the country was being done not by the pathogen but by the immune system’s massive overresponse to it, because I didn’t have a TV. I was mentally comparing Tuesday�
��s death toll with other tallies of violent death—three thousand Americans killed in traffic accidents in the thirty days preceding September 11—because, not seeing the images, I thought the numbers mattered. I was devoting energy to imagining, or resisting imagining, the horror of sitting in a window seat while your plane came in low along the West Side Highway, or of being trapped on the ninety-fifth floor and hearing the steel structure below you begin to groan and rumble, while the rest of the country was experiencing actual real-time trauma by watching the same footage over and over. And so I was not in need of—was, for a while, not even aware of—the national televised group therapy session, the vast techno-hug-a-thon, that unfolded in the following days and weeks and months in response to the trauma of exposure to televised images.

  What I could see was the sudden, mysterious, disastrous sentimentalization of American public discourse. And just as I can’t help blaming cellular technology when people pour parental or filial affection into their phones and rudeness onto every stranger within earshot, I can’t help blaming media technology for the national foregrounding of the personal. Unlike in, say, 1941, when the United States responded to a terrible attack with collective resolve and discipline and sacrifice, in 2001 we had terrific visuals. We had amateur footage and could break it down frame by frame. We had screens to bring the violence raw into every bedroom in the country, and voice mail to record the desperate final calls of the doomed, and late-model psychology to explicate and heal our trauma. But as for what the attacks actually signified, and what a sensible response to them might look like, opinions varied. This was the wonderful thing about digital technology: no more hurtful censoring of anybody’s feelings! Everybody entitled to express his or her own opinion! Whether or not Saddam Hussein had personally bought plane tickets for the hijackers therefore remained open to lively debate. What everybody agreed to agree on, instead, was that the families of 9/11’s victims had a right to approve or veto plans for the memorial at Ground Zero. And everybody could share in the pain experienced by the families of the fallen cops and firefighters. And everybody agreed that irony was dead. The bad, empty irony of the nineties was simply “no longer possible” post-9/11; we’d stepped forward into a new age of sincerity.

  On the plus side, Americans in 2001 were a lot better at saying “I love you” to their children than their fathers or grandfathers had been. But competing economically? Pulling together as a nation? Defeating our enemies? Forming strong international alliances? Perhaps a bit of a minus side there.

  My parents met two years after Pearl Harbor, in the fall of 1943, and within a few months they were exchanging cards and letters. My father worked for the Great Northern Railway and was often on the road, in small towns, inspecting or repairing bridges, while my mother stayed in Minneapolis and worked as a receptionist. Of the letters from him to her in my possession, the oldest is from Valentine’s Day 1944. He was in Fairview, Montana, and my mother had sent him a Valentine’s card in the style of all her cards in the year leading up to their marriage: sweetly drawn babies or toddlers or baby animals voicing sweet sentiments. The front of her valentine (which my father likewise saved) shows a pigtailed little girl and a blushing little boy standing beside each other with their eyes bashfully averted and their hands tucked bashfully behind their backs.

  I wish I were a little rock,

  ’Cause then when I grew older,

  Maybe I would find some day

  I was a little “boulder.”

  Inside the card is a drawing of the same two kids, but holding hands now, with my mother’s cursive signature (“Irene”) at the feet of the little girl. A second verse reads:

  And that would really help a lot

  It sure would suit me fine,

  For I’d be “bould” enough to say,

  “Please be my Valentine.”

  My father’s letter in response was postmarked Fairview, Montana, February 14.

  Tuesday Evening

  Dear Irene,

  I’m sorry to have disappointed you on Valentine’s Day; I did remember but after not being able to get one at the drugstore, I felt a little foolish about asking at the grocery or hardware store. I’m sure they have heard about Valentine’s Day out here. Your card fit the situation out here perfectly and I’m not sure if it were intentional or accidental, but I guess I did tell about our rock troubles. Today we ran out of rock so I’m wishing for little rocks, big rocks or any kind of rocks as there is nothing we can do until we get some. There is little enough for me to do when the contractor is working and now there is nothing at all. Today I hiked out to the bridge where we are working just to kill time and get a little exercise; it’s about four miles which is far enough with a sharp wind blowing. Unless we get rock on the freight in the morning, I’m going to sit right here and read philosophy; it hardly seems right that I should get paid for putting in that kind of day. About the only other pastime around here is to sit in the hotel lobby and take in the town gossip, and the old timers who haunt the place can sure put it out. You would get a kick out of it because there is sure a broad cross section of life represented here—from the local doctor down to the town drunk. And the last is probably the most interesting; I heard that he taught at the University of N.D. at one time, and he seems really to be quite an intelligent person, even when drunk. Normally the talk is pretty rough, about like Steinbeck must have used for a pattern, but this evening there came in a great big woman who made herself right at home. It all sort of makes me realize how sheltered a life we city people live. I grew up in a small town and feel quite at home here but I somehow now seem to view things differently. You will hear more of this.

  I hope to get back to St. Paul on Saturday night but cannot tell for certain now. I’ll call you when I get in.

  With all my love,

  Earl

  My father had recently turned twenty-nine. It’s impossible to know how my mother, in her innocence and optimism, received his letter at the time, but in general, considering the woman I grew up knowing, I can say that it was absolutely not the sort of letter she would have wanted from her romantic interest. Her valentine’s cutely punning conceit taken literally as a reference to track ballast? And she, who spent her whole life shuddering free of the hotel bar where her father had worked as a bartender, getting a kick out of hearing “rough talk” from the town drunk? Where were the endearments? Where were the dreamy discussions of love? It was obvious that my father still had a lot to learn about her.

  To me, though, his letter seems full of love. Love for my mother, certainly: he’s tried to get her a valentine, he’s read her card carefully, he wishes she were with him, he has ideas he wants to share with her, he’s sending all his love, he’ll call her as soon as he’s back. But love, too, for the larger world: for the varieties of people in it, for small towns and big cities, for philosophy and literature, for hard work and fair pay, for conversation, for thinking, for long walks in a sharp wind, for carefully chosen words and perfect spelling. The letter reminds me of the many things I loved in my father, his decency, his intelligence, his unexpected humor, his curiosity, his conscientiousness, his reserve and dignity. Only when I place it alongside the valentine from my mother, with its big-eyed babies and preoccupation with pure sentiment, does my focus shift to the decades of mutual disappointment that followed my parents’ first few years of half-seeing bliss.

  Late in life, my mother complained to me that my father had never told her that he loved her. And it may literally be true that he never spoke the big three words to her—I certainly never heard him do it. But it’s definitely not true that he never wrote the words. One reason it took me years to summon the courage to read their old correspondence is that the first letter of my father’s that I glanced at, after my mother died, began with an endearment (“Irenie”) that I had never heard him utter in the thirty-five years I knew him, and it ended with a declaration (“I love you, Irene”) that was more than I could stand to see. It sounded nothing like him, and
so I buried all the letters in a trunk in my brother’s attic. More recently, when I retrieved them and managed to read through them all, I discovered that my father had in fact declared his love dozens of times, using the big three words, both before and after he married my mother. But maybe, even then, he’d been incapable of saying the words out loud, and maybe this was why, in my mother’s memory, he’d never “said” them at all. It’s also possible that his written declarations had sounded as strange and untrue to his character in the forties as they now sound to me, and that my mother, in her complaints, was remembering a deeper truth now concealed by his seemingly affectionate words. It’s possible that, in guilty response to the onslaught of sentiment he was getting from her notes to him (“I love you with all my heart,” “With oh so much love,” etc.), he’d felt obliged to perform romantic love in return, or to try to perform it, the way he’d tried (sort of) to buy a valentine in Fairview, Montana.

  “Both Sides Now,” in the Judy Collins version, was the first pop song that ever stuck in my head. It was getting heavy radio play when I was eight or nine, and its reference to declaring love “right out loud,” combined with the crush I had on Judy Collins’s voice, helped to ensure that for me the primary import of “I love you” was sexual. I did eventually live through the seventies and become capable, in rare accesses of emotion, of telling my brothers and many of my best male friends that I loved them. But throughout grade school and junior high, the words had only one meaning for me. “I love you” was the phrase I wanted to see scrawled on a note from the cutest girl in the class or to hear whispered in the woods on a school picnic. It happened only a couple of times, in those years, that a girl I liked actually said or wrote this to me. But when it did happen, it came as a shot of pure adrenaline. Even after I got to college and started reading Wallace Stevens and found him making fun, in “Le Monocle de Mon Oncle,” of indiscriminately love-seeking people like me—