How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying? Read a Novel

I don't terribly often link to other sites, and it's not like my flagging an article that was already in the New York Times is going to earn said article any wider dissemination, but I just couldn't resist this one: Your Brain on Fiction.

So apparently reading fiction makes you smarter.  Kinda seems like something a lot of us already knew, but hey, we fiction writers, assaulted, staggering away from the hulking threat of obsolescence, need all the help we can get.  Maybe I should order up some bumper stickers: If you value your emotional acuity, thank a novelist.  

I figure as long as it fits on a ribbon it'll sell, right?

John Adams! St. Paul! America!

 
Nearing 90, well-advanced and suffering his dotage, without the powerful aid of his wife and great friend Abigail for many years, John Adams, the querulous successor to George Washington as president of the newly united states of America, supposedly stopped during a walk in the Massachusetts countryside to marvel at the intricacy and majesty of a wildflower.  He bid his companion admire the sight as well, and the two of them stood in the road quietly until Adams, overcome, shouted to the fields and orchards, and to the heavens, "Rejoice, evermore!  Rejoice!  Evermore!"  As played by Paul Giamatti in the HBO miniseries based on Adams' life, the old ex-president giggled and gripped his walking stick, tried to arrange himself into a position of worship on his knees.  He couldn't do it, he was too old and infirm, but by God he tried.  He tried to meet the moment with all the fervor of gratitude, appreciation, awe, engagement and bursting joy that it demanded.  He had life, and this was what one must do with life: Rejoice in it.  Rejoice!

Two hundred years later, I walk out each day into the Virginia sunshine with Adams and Whitman and Emerson and Saul Bellow and William Kennedy behind me, and with my papers and books and songs, all those consolations of learning and feeling before me, and I think, Yes!  Yes, John Adams, yes!  Rejoice!

Well.  What of it?  Such giddiness and overstatement.  Adams' exhortation was drawn from a letter of St. Paul.  And it occurs to me that had I encountered it in the context of scripture, I'd have bristled at it.  Why?  Why does it move me so as part of an impressionistic (if well-documented) biography, when it would've chafed as a doctrinal imperative?  Am I really so brazen, so completely unwilling to be instructed that I can't recognize or accept fine advice when it comes from any kind of (putative) institutional authority?  Apparently.  But of this growling cockiness I'm sure God is aware, and I suspect that in His better moments He's inclined to forgive me for it.  I am an American, after all, and certain things can't be helped.

The greater difficulty, as I see it, is in accounting for the very sudden luck in my life that has made it rather easier than it otherwise might have been to do all this exuberant hollering.  However cavalier I might be about preferring John Adams' visceral joy to St. Paul's admonitions, I at least can remember that in any event there are a great many people in my life, dear friends and readers of this blog, as well as untold multitudes in America and throughout the world who cannot but consider themselves more bound to heartbreak, emptiness and disappointment than to celebration.  I am not insensitive to the concrete sources of despair in people's lives.  I felt them acutely in my own life until very, very recently.  And I felt vexed and betrayed by joy--I had the strongest sense of it, I understood and venerated it, I felt the aching need of it everywhere.  But I couldn't grasp it.  Now I can.  I can swim in it, and I do, unreservedly.

But how did such a miracle occur?  My best (if still faltering) answer is that it isn't a miracle.  That in fact, it's a mistake to perceive discontinuity in my circumstances, or in any of our circumstances.  Better to understand experience as a spectrum, lived continuously and without end. At each pole of this spectrum is an almost incomprehensible fullness--at one pole, the fullness of joy; at the other, the fullness of anguish.  In their fullness, the two modes find a complimentary perfection.  This is the only way I can make sense of my current joy, by reference to my own (previous) and others' (current) sadness.  And it's the hope of the joyful man that by reference to his joy, others will be able make sense of their sadness.  That's my hope.  It's a blundering hope, this is a blundering post, and mine is a blundering life.  But it's mine now, in a way that it hasn't been before.  It's mine because of the blunders, and so I blunder on, rejoicing.  Rejoicing in fortune!  Rejoicing in art!  Rejoicing in human failure and error and ridiculousness!  Rejoicing in America and animals and the strange design of everything!  Everything!  Rejoice, everything!  Rejoice!