William Ian Miller - Outrageous Fortune

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Miller, William Ian, 1946 author.

Title: Outrageous fortune : gloomy reflections on luck and life / William Ian Miller.

Description: New York : Oxford University Press, 2021. |

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020023114 (print) | LCCN 2020023115 (ebook) |

ISBN 9780197530689 (hardback) | ISBN 9780197530702 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Fortune.

Classification: LCC BD595 .M55 2021 (print) | LCC BD595 (ebook) |

DDC 128dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020023114

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020023115

In memory of Donald C. Koehler (d. June 7, 2019), teacher and father-in-law

I am not well...

Shylock

I wish to thank Annalise Acorn, Jordan Corrente Beck, Dan Crane, John Crigler, Don Herzog, John Hudson, and Mark West for reading and commenting on various drafts. And thanks for specific inputs to Andrew Cecchinato, Rich Friedman, Abigail Hartman, Ingrid Hedstrm, and Nina Mendelson. Thanks too to Anna Becker who designed the cover and to my editor at Oxford University Press, Cynthia Read, who, along with other sage advice, suggested the title, wisely saving me the humiliation of my initial offerings: Naying from Gullivers Stable (yes, Naying), or Liver of Blaspheming Jew. Even I knew, I think, that neither of these would end up the title.

About a third of chapter 1 appeared as May You Have My Luck, The Chronicle Review, The Chronicle of Higher Education, February 6, 2015. Chapter 4Vile Jellyis an expanded and revised version of Epilogue: Do I Disgust You? (Or Rather, You Me?) mes frres, mes surs, mes semblables? in Le Dgot: Histoire, langage, esthtique et politique, edited by Michel Delville, Andrew Norris, and Viktoria von Hoffmann (Presses Universitaires de Lige, 2015), 14961. And a version of chapter 5 appeared as The Messenger, in Frieden stiften: Vermittlung und Konfliktslsung vom Mittelalter bis heute, edited by Gerd Althoff (Darmstadt: WBG, 2011), 1936.

Ann Arbor, 2020

now that we live so long, retirement poses an insistent peril. Each new day eyes me with disapproval, having learned from its predecessor that I did nothing that could justify the food and drink I consumed the day before. Admonishing spirits, though I cannot see them, prove their presence in stage whispers. They do not let me, a chronic insomniac, feel as if I accomplished something because I actually managed five hours of sleep assisted by only one Ambien. Their whispers grow harsher, especially at bedtime, threatening revenge for the five hours I managed the night before. Not a chance in hell I will get five hours of sleep tonight, even with three Ambien, washed down by a shot of whisky.

Sure, my antidepressants can help make me feel less like I am criminally wasting the new day, reducing my sense of culpability from felony to misdemeanor. Read the newspapers (online)? Not even opioids could dull the despair they evoke. But when at seventy-four I have an exceptionally healthy mother who is ninety-eight and tests out as if she were fifty, my fear is that I might have quite a few more years to fill or kill, though hardly twenty-four of themI have only half her genes anyway, and male mortality is higher than female at every age. Her health, a blessing to the intelligent yet innately cheerful her, threatens me, a nerve-addled pessimist, with untoward longevity, a genetic curse. Even if, as I suspect, my pessimism is in part an act, I am incapable of not performing it. It is a trait that can be attributed to my fathers way of being in the world when he was in it. Not an ounce of irony could interfere with his seeing a harbinger of Nuremburg rallies in ranks of fluffy fair-weather cumulus clouds drifting slowly across the summer sky. And he was born and raised in Green Bay, Wisconsin, not even in the Baltic his parents had the fortune to flee at the beginning of the twentieth century.

I hate the phrase that now has become the obligatory riposte to my tiresome complaints about aging, its aches, debilities, and demoralizationsa phrase mostly voiced by old people but that has trickled down to people much younger: better than the alternative, they say. If the alternative is having to accept a world in which that passes for wit, let me walk over and touch the wire. If all they mean to do is politely put a halt to my kvetching, then I guess I had it coming, but to the extent they are actually signing on to the sentiment (as most speakers over seventy are), I fear they are already in the midst of an alternative they have not fully considered. Like, say, dementia. Nor do they seem to have accounted for the likely alternative of nursing homes, a kinder kind of death camp. Or somewhat less bleakly, they have not yet thought of what it means to be objects of those twinges of resentment even an otherwise decent person might feel when old people get to board the plane first, whether they can do so under their own power or have to be wheeled on. Better than the alternative encapsulates the deep cowardice that seems to fund our antiheroic never-die-at-no-matter-what-the-cost way of life; otherwise, why not say as we used to: oh stop complaining already?

I do have a soft side. Ask my dog, the cats, even the two turtles and the mouse we just saved (and caged) from one of the cats who teamed up with the dog to make the catch. An hour earlier we could hear him rummaging behind the microwave. These creatures are all sources of pleasure and reminders that beauty and good still exist in the nonhuman world at least, and damn if that cute field mouse, no bigger than the unshelled peanut we put in a small cage we readied for him, or one of his larger house-mice cousins, was not also the source of what I thought were the tasteless caraway or cumin seeds I was trapping on the counter with my wet index finger and eating up as I did the dishes. (While revising this two weeks after it was first drafted I checked on the mouse, who would hide under the wood shavings in his cage. He/she was dead. I was surprised at how much it got me all Hamletted up about the meaninglessness of everything.)