My Personal Life Trumps The Election

My wife Deborah and I are co-hosting a gathering at our Manhattan home for Hamptons Community Outreach, a poverty-fighting organization I’ve mentioned before. This week we’ll send out invitations.

The event will take place on November 19^th, a few weeks after the election.

Our invitations and our event exist on either side of an election that can seem like a strict barrier. Blood and brain. Before and after. The cat is dead or the cat is alive.

I’ve heard people talk about “after the election” as if it were a personal watershed event, like a wedding, a birth, a life or death operation. People freezing their lives in place until the result is known.

I feel that impulse myself but it’s wrong and counterproductive. And I mean to resist it.

I’ve already participated in the election to a degree sufficient to prevent any post-election personal remorse that I should have done more. I’ve already voted. I’ve “maxed out” contributing to candidates. I’ve contributed prodigiously to an organization that helps and encourages certain demographics to vote.

Now I’m prepared to accept the result with serenity. Most of the island of Manhattan fell into gloom in 2016. That will not be me if my disfavored candidate wins.

I understand that I enjoy the luxury of protection from most political vicissitudes. I’m a wealthy, white, straight male living in New York State. I neither deny nor disinherit myself of that privilege.

For the next three weeks, I’m far more interested in following the New York Mets in their rare playoff success, which on Wednesday night at Citi Field gave my son and me moments and memories of outrageous joy.

October 9th clinching victory over the Phillies

The personal vs. the political

When I think about the past eight years, the elections of 2016 and 2020 don’t register in their impact on me personally. The people I’m close to and even the books I’ve read seem far more important as well as emotionally resonant.

Here’s a top of mind list (of what I’m comfortable revealing) of personal events and changes over the past eight years, most joyful, some not. I could expand the list by many times and the elections of 2016 and 2020 would still be absent.

• We adopted my first ever pet, our Shih Tzu Sophie, with whom I’ve fallen in love.

• My father had a serious heart issue that led to a month long stay in the ICU.

• My mother died.

• Our two older children were married.

• Our daughter gave birth to our grandson and granddaughter.

• I celebrated the graduations of my two sons from law school and business school.

• I changed careers and took up writing as my vocation.

• I became involved as a volunteer with The Robin Hood Foundation.

• My wife and I started a weekly food delivery program to all the families in a middle school in Washington Heights.

• I took up tennis and made new and wonderful friends.

• I became part of the Substack community and made more new and wonderful friends.

• I’ve been reading literature at a greater pace, intensity, and intentionality than at any other time in my life.

Think of any great work of literature that involves historical events.

I don’t read a thousand pages of War and Peace to learn the details of Napoleon’s failed campaign. I don’t read Proust to learn about the Dreyfuss Affair. I don’t read Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell trilogy to learn about the history of Henry VIII.

It’s the personal lives of the characters that matter to me, and it’s their individual essences that I carry around with me like living talismans to brighten my day.

Sailing calmly on

Whenever I think about the sweep of history and find myself getting caught up in events that I can’t influence, I turn to the last stanza of the rightfully famous poem Musee Des Beaux Arts by Auden about the Brueghel painting Icarus.

The painting and the lines below from the second and final stanza hit me in a way different than they do Auden scholars.¹

For me the disastrous fall of Icarus was something that no one in the painting’s world could have prevented, a brief spectacle of tragedy entirely separate from the act of living.

“In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.”

In a moment Icarus’s thrashing “white legs” (bottom right corner) will sink into the sea and life will go on.

Note on Hamptons Community Outreach

I wrote about HCO in this post. If you or anyone you know lives in NYC, has a connection to the Hamptons, and is interested in helping HCO either through raising awareness or contributing, let me know.  

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Question for the comments: Do you agree with my attitude about the election and, in any event, do you believe I will stop reading every post by Nate Silver?

1. In Early Auden, Later Auden, for example, Edward Mendelson writes of the poem:

“…suffering is no less critical because it happens somewhere else, or when we are too busy to notice.”

Auden wrote the poem in 1938, a year when historical catastrophe seemed and was imminent. Yet as Mendelson further writes, the poem

“…makes none of the demands for action and attention that marked Auden’s earlier harangues on the urgency of the times.”

So we are left knowing that suffering exists beyond our scope and ability to heal the world. I would add, however, this doesn't let us off the hook to do our part to heal what suffering we can even if once the wings of Icarus had melted, his fate was immutable. Nothing could be done.