Finding Higher Ground: A Life Of Travels

Getting Along

64 Getting Along Like Rousseau, who gave advice in Emile on the education of children while abandoning to foundling hospitals those he begat with Thérèse Levasseur, I am going to write here on a topic for which, some might say, I am ill qualified or at least not licensed. Like many of the thousands of other terms in English that include particles, getting along is an interesting little verb, which must be distinguished from getting by, getting on, getting away, getting away with . . . , getting with [it]—one I wouldn’t use—moving along, and various locative and performance expressions such as getting up. The along part suggests progress or movement through space or time, appropriate to the temporal dimension of human life. The French say s’entendre—“to understand one another”—a clearer expression than afforded by the Germanic get of the grounds of comprehension on which good relations are built, but less progressive. Surely, I have no claim to have had smoother dealings than others with my fellow human beings or to have succeeded particularly well in the rocky, sometimes treacherous fields of human intercourse, especially marriage , and sometimes I’ve done worse than could have been hoped for; in addition, nothing certifies me professionally , unless you deem that, given much of its subject getting along 65 matter since the twelfth century, a broad acquaintance with French literature does constitute some informal credentials. But precisely as the ill are concerned with medicine and victims of crime and those involved in litigation have an uncommon interest in policing, law, and court proceedings, so I, as someone connected, willynilly , to others, have particular interest, as well as something at stake, in this business of getting along. And failure does not mean necessarily absence of ideas or ideals. Moreover, many of those who have so-called credentials in the “getting along” business—I think of school and marriage counselors, “human relations” officers in industry and at universities, psychologists and psychiatrists , institutional sociologists, neo-Marxist critics—are half-charlatans, maladjusted, incompetent, sometimes crazies, no better placed (perhaps less well) than the rest of us to advise, and chiefly concerned with preserving or enhancing their clientele or position. The influence that they exercise over others is sometimes abusive and pathological, including the transference phenomenon between subject and analyst. As for celibate counselors, no matter how good their intentions, they are, I remain convinced, ill positioned to advise on conjugal matters, grave or mundane, beyond handing out truisms. Finally, I certainly am no less authorized to write, as I shall, on social matters, whether at the individual or community level, than are many self-proclaimed experts, such as those in the English or French departments at XYZ University who pronounce on capitalism, pornography, imperialism, “gender construction,” and so forth. This concern for getting along is notwithstanding the fact that now I live alone, with those I care about the most residing elsewhere and, having turned in my time card at Tulane for the last time, as readers know, so that I would have more opportunity and more freedom for other things, now am under no daily obligation, practically speaking, to get along with anyone. I could just become an old misanthropic curmudgeon and say “a 66 finding higher ground plague on you all.” But the other things for which I wished more time include other people, some known to me and nearby or easily reachable by highway or plane, others members of the anonymous crowds of life, about whom, after all, I am concerned, and to whom my writing is directed. (These others nearby include Paul Brosman , about whom a word is in order: he and I are no longer married, but I do not want to write him out of this book because he is not written out of my life. Far from it. We see each other at least twice a week, I prepare a hot meal at his house on Sunday evenings and share it with him, I get library books for him, and I assist him with typing and groceries and so on.) As the example of Swift is there to show, misanthropy does not exclude caring. The maxim attributed to Chamfort is apt: “He who is not a misanthrope at age forty has never loved mankind.” Chamfort saw things very darkly indeed , not only for personal reasons: he watched the 1789 Revolution, to which he gave...