Seriously

For Lionel Trilling, his widow points out, seriousness, not happiness, was the goal worthy of an intellectual life.

This week I’m reading from David Lehman’s The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets, from which the above is excerpted.

Lehman is speculating on why poet Frank O’Hara might not have liked Columbia professor Lionel Trilling, who was outed by his wife as a depressive, and attributes the dislike to O’Hara’s personality and value system being all about happiness.

Logical.

More fascinating is this picture of the serious professor, the kind we all know, and the kind we don’t question because there’s this idea that smart must equal serious, while happy-fun-fun is merely frivolous. The message is clear: you can’t be both and, so, depending on who you want to be or how you want to be perceived, there’s a strange choice to make and social expectations to uphold. That is if your thing is to toe this conventional belief system.

But, really, how much of this either/or is meaningful? Or, real? And why do we promote it? In other words, why do we still say Dumb Jock, when many are intelligent, or just don’t have as much time for studies as those who don’t train? Why do we imagine serious must mean brainy? Could be humorless, dull, depressive. And why is the happy giggling blonde still considered an idiot? What happened to the idea we aren’t cardboard categorized cut-outs?

I confess. I believed in many such mutually exclusive conceptions, the one about serious academics are the smart one, but time and experience is proving my beliefs to be misguided.

Last night, I had the chance to shake the hand of a Pulitzer winner, an unbelievably uncommon event for me, and instead of his sparkling like some literary star, one blessed with insight and expressivity that merit such a prize, the person was nice but bland, seemingly too serious to smile much. The cliche writer, who should be read and not seen or heard, because its the writing that grips the imagination, not the person (although some famously grip both!)? In that odd disappointment, I realized a big break with past thinking had begun: I’ll keep the stars in the skies.

People are people, and their work is something, a part of them, but not them. To see it otherwise is to rest on the surface, but in this workhorse culture, where you are what you do and how much you make, it’s easy to forget.

I returned to O’Hara’s open dislike of Trilling, and for the first time in my personal life and career, one that has always put the serious intellectuals on a pedestal because I believed they worked hard and earned that admiration and respect (they somehow do), I shrugged. Genius is in the eye of the beholder, an idealized notion, a conventional agreement among those who we generally accept as all-knowing, not a human. I like humans, flaws and all, especially when they come with a lilt and smile. I’d rather be enchanted by, interested in people as much as in what they create. His smile was missing, the lilt not there. Very humdrum. We wouldn’t be having coffee, discussing art and poetry.

There’s this new idea, this building desire to celebrate the passionate, effusive, excited, smart and sassy, the funny and irreverent but committed wholeheartedly, whatever the credentials, awards, education, calluses, curriculum vitae, double-helix dynasty. Delight, dammit. I want more of that in interpersonal exchanges.

Perhaps I am academic saturated. Perhaps I miss my crowd, the wicked and funny and seriously smart-assed, the ones who are now scattered around the world weighed down by responsibility and ambition, so so serious we become. The ones who fell away the more I dedicated myself to serious academic pursuits, chasing the wrong gold star (I learned this in the doing, the pushing to its limit).

Undergoing seismic shifts in self.

Why don’t people smile openly more often? Too serious, are they?

Seriously, though, the bigger question is what does it all mean, the prizes and awards, the degrees and the alma maters, the business card with apt typography signalling the role chosen? Who says what is worthy of our time, our way through life? If evaluations, like I am thinking, are now overrated, then what is left?

Happiness, maybe. Freedom from the confines of others’ expectations, the ones I unknowingly made my own.