Pirates You Don't Know, and Other Adventures in the Examined Life: Collected Essays

Repose

186 Repose Dick said no American men had any repose, except himself, and they were seeking an example to confront him with. . . . In another unseated party a man endlessly patted his shaven cheek with his palm, and his companion mechanically raised and lowered the stub of a cold cigar. The luckier ones fingered eyeglasses and facial hair, the unequipped stroked blank mouths, or even pulled desperately at the lobes of their ears. . . . “You see,” said Dick smugly, “I’m the only one.” — f. scott fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night All that desperate fingering / stroking / pulling at hair / cheeks / mouths / lobes—observed by someone named Dick Diver—only sounds like a reference to the monthly orgy on the yacht of one of my publishers, to which I’m never invited.Really the passage is about appearing to be self-possessed even when you’re cracking up—doubly important if the other chaps at Princeton judged you because you hail from St. Paul, Minnesota. Fitzgerald’s repose, a class notion that rejects the body as vulgar, is not insignificant. Think of Nixon’s sweaty jowls in his debates with Kennedy, or the panther scream of politician Howard Dean. But true repose, if it’s achievable, is not posturing.Thoreau describes it in Walden: Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance, that alluvion which covers the globe . . . till we come to a hard repose 187 bottom . . . which we call reality, and say, This is, and no mistake . . . below freshet and frost and fire, a place where you might found a wall or state, or set a lamp-post safely. He got the idea from Emerson, who points back to Plato: “The problem of philosophy is . . . to find a ground unconditioned and absolute.” It’s the place that makes possible any number of things—independence, selfhood, seeing clearly. But how to get there? r It was finals week at Hinterland, and students were permitting their parents to drive three hours south to pick them up for a summer at home. Outside one residence hall a dad in expensive shorts barked orders at his son’s friends humping stereo components to the car. Mother, in her nylon tracksuit, did the cha-cha of uselessness, trying to be helpful but also getting yelled at by her husband as if she were a child. Several younger parents in the drive seemed eager to relive their own college glory; they shouted to each other and giggled and went into football stances and paced up the block, evidently looking for the Skulls kegger. An older mom and dad trudged from dorm to curb, hardly looking up; their demeanor said, It’s ok, run over my feet again with your wheeled Vuitton luggage, I’m of no great consequence anyhow. All the students were embarrassed and begged to get on the road. It’s an awkward time. Disengaging suddenly and finally from my students each semester fills me with nervous energy.I walked to,and from, and then back to,campus— more than four miles—for no good reason other than to focus my eyes on something more distant than a page of student writing. r Do you have repose? Take the Patillo test. It’s named for an army friend who used to try to annoy us by always asking, “Ain’t you itchin’?” “No,” we replied, even when covered in ticks and leeches and dying the death of a thousand cuts from saw grass. “Bet you are,”Patillo said.“Bet you’re itchin’right now.Huh? You itchin’? Up there on your scalp? Top of your left ear?” 188 repose “Hell we are,” we replied. “Oh, yes you are, you can’t help it,”Patillo said.“It’s just a little tickle, but it’s growing, isn’t it? Now it’s on your right shoulder blade, and it itches like hell. Jesus, it’s on your lip. Scratch it. Scratch at it. You know you want to. You got to. It’s in the hair on your shin, it’s like you got fleas and they’re bitin’you.They brought the mosquitoes with’em.And the earwax is in on it; it’s tickling the little hairs in your ear canal; my God, it’s the most sensitive place on your body. Scratch it! Rub...