George F. Will - American happiness and discontents : the unruly torrent, 2008-2020

In order to master the unruly torrent of life the learned man meditates, the poet quivers, and the political hero erects the fortress of his will.

Jos Ortega y Gasset

B ut a journalist, whose job is to chronicle and comment on the torrent, knows that this is not amenable to being mastered. That is what it means to be unruly. Besides, the enjoyment of life is inseparable from lifes surprises, and hence from its contingencies. Surprises and contingencies have propelled this columnist through a happy half century of arriving at his office each morning impatient to get on with the pleasure of immersion in the torrent.

For a third of a century my office has been in a narrow, three-story townhouse built in 1810 in what is now Washingtons Georgetown section. It was here in 1814 when marauding British troops burned the White House and part of the Capitol. I purchased the building in 1987 from a small, sprightly, sparrow-like woman, then in her nineties, who had lived there since her childhood. She said that her parents recalled seeing Abraham Lincolns son Robert walk past the house on his way to the corner saloon to purchase a pail of beer. This is plausible. Back then, beer was often sold in pails. And Robert, although frail at age seventy-eight, haltingly made his way up the steps of the memorial to his father at the dedication of it on May 30, 1922.

Because of where I live and work, the continuity of Americas institutions and arguments is never far from my mind, as is the truth of William Faulkners statement that the past is not dead. It is not even past. That is why this book begins with some writings about American history. Were I a benevolent dictator, I would make history the only permissible college major in order to equip the public with the stock of knowledge required for thinking clearly about how we arrived at this point in our national narrative.

The poet E. E. Cummingsor as hes remembered, e.e. cummingswrote of a footprint in the sand of was. As a Washingtonian, I live immersed in wasin history. I have spent almost all of my adult life in Washington and still am stirred by its grand vistas and monuments. And by the fact that the bricks of Georgetowns sidewalks have been trod by politicians, jurists, and statesmen who have made American principles vivid and the American project successful.

I have now completed five decades as a columnist, and a few readers might be interested in learning how someone could have the good fortune to tumble into such a delightful career. In September 1958, four months after my seventeenth birthday, I came out of the Illinois wilderness to matriculate at Trinity College in Hartford. Soon thereafter I did what a young man from Central Illinois would naturally do: I took the train to New York City. Arriving in the splendor of Grand Central Terminal, I plunked down a nickel for a New York tabloid in order to see what was going on in Gotham. This purchase of a New York Post was a life-changing event because in it I found a column by Murray Kempton.

I do not remember what his subject was that day, but his subjects generally were of secondary importance to his style, which reflected his refined mind and his penchant for understated passion, mordantly expressed. Here, for example, is a sentence from his October 26, 1956, report on President Dwight David Eisenhower campaigning for re-election:

In Miami he had walked carefully by the harsher realities, speaking some 20 feet from an airport drinking fountain labeled Colored and saying that the condition it represented was more amenable to solution by the hearts of men than by laws, and complimenting Florida as typical today of what is best in America, a verdict which might seem to some contingent on finding out what happened to the Negro snatched from the Wildwood jail Sunday.

This seventy-five-word sentencesinewy, ironic, and somewhat demandingpaid a compliment to his readers: He knew they could and would follow a winding syntactical path through a thought so obliquely expressed as to be almost merely intimated. Kempton understood that the swirling, stirring society in which Americans are at all times immersed is constantly clamoring for their attention, plucking at their sleeves and even grabbing them by the lapels with journalism, politics, advertising, and other distractions. Furthermore, Kempton knew that reading newspaper columns is an optional activity, so a writer must make the most of his ration of wordsin Kemptons case, often fewer than 700 of them. Reading a columnists commentary on political and cultural subjects is an acquired taste, and a minority taste: It will only be acquired if it is pleasant, even fun.

However, the fact that most Americans do not read newspapers, let alone the commentary columns, is actually emancipating for columnists. The kind of people who seek out written arguments are apt to bring to the written word a fund of information and opinions. Having a self-selected audience of intellectually upscale readers allows the columnist to assume that his or her readers have a reservoir of knowledge about the world. So, he can be briefmost of the writings in this book are approximately 750 words longwithout being superficial.