We both need to explain ourselves. I’ll let Deresiewicz go first. Here is the meat of his argument:
By eliminating all the big, noisy events that usually absorb our interest when we read novels—the adventures and affairs, the romances and the crises, even, at times, the plot—Austen was asking us to pay attention to the things we usually miss or don’t accord enough esteem, in novels or in life. Those small, “trivial,” everyday things, the things that happen hour by hour to people in our lives: what your nephew said, what your friend heard, what your neighbor did. That, she was telling us, is what the fabric of our years really consists of. That is what life is.
The important lesson was that “trivial” everyday things are not just the filler between plot twists. If you look at life that way, then you probably see yourself as a protagonist navigating the mundane on the way to extraordinary world-changing triumph. The gentle term is “idealist.”
And this recognition, he said, allowed him to take life, for the first time, seriously:
Being asked to take seriously the everyday lives of ordinary people, which matter for the sole reason that they are lives, made me finally begin to take my own life seriously.
Not that I hadn’t always taken my plans and grand ambitions seriously—of course I had. Hadn’t I always worried about the big issues—politics, social justice, the future? Didn’t I spend a lot of time arguing about them with my friends, deciding how everything should be? But ultimately, all that talk was just theoretical, not real in feelings. Austen taught me a new kind of moral seriousness—taught me what moral seriousness really means. It means taking responsibility for the little world, not the big one.
Some literary critics have claimed that Austen’s 400 page books of trivial un-extraordinariness are really epics in disguise—that behind the mundane events there are tales of heroes and villains and triumph. Deresiewicz’s response is much kinder than mine would’ve been:
This utterly misses the point of what Austen was trying to do—even, in a sense, disparages it. We don’t need to pretend that Austen’s novels are really epics in disguise in order to value them as highly as they deserve. She didn’t need to play the same game as the big boys. Her small, feminine game was every bit as good, and every bit as grand. Austen glorified the everyday on its own terms. What she offered us, if we’re willing to see it, is just the everyday, without amplification. Just the novel, without excuses. Just the personal, just the private, just the little, without apologies.
The ladies seem to have us pretty flatly beat in this regard. What we males often dismiss as petty gossip while we write on our blogs about “important” topics like politics and economics and education is in fact women taking an interest in the life they live.
If I was slow to catch on to all this, there was, of course, a very good reason. I’m a guy, after all. We aren’t exactly taught to pay attention to “minute particulars.” Gossip, we’re told, is for women. The very word is feminine, derogatory, trivializing. It is women who are supposed to spend hours gabbing with their girlfriends about every little thing. We are expected to preserve a manly silence, or speak only of impersonal matters—in other words, girls, gear, sports or, if we take ourselves very seriously, politics and public affairs.
That paragraph came at a good time for me because I was feeling my own masculine doubts as I started writing on my private blog about “petty” stuff such as how someone phrased an email. Thank you, Mr. Deresiewicz, for affirming that it’s okay to be interested in this stuff. That it’s okay – reasonable, even – to consider it “important,” even though I have a Y-chromosome.
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I’d edit the Don’t be good at trivia point this way:
Being good at *pop* trivia – the kind at bar competitions where you try to win free beers – means that you are probably thickly engulfed in narratives of heroes and villains and triumph and tragedy. That stuff, like candy, is okay in small doses, but it’s pleasurable precisely because it allows us to pretend that we’re somebody else and that life is somehow bigger and more coherent and more compelling and attractive and in general just more entertaining than it really is. This is as true of the evening news and CNN as it is of Hollywood movies.
The other kind of “trivia,” however – the “minute particulars” of your own life – well, that’s pretty much what life is, so you should probably try to be good at it, even if it won’t win you free beers.
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The one thing that makes me uneasy about this post and about Deresiewicz’s chapter is that it seems a bit on the preachy side, as in “look, here is what life is; this is how you should live it.”
We’re all primates scrambling around trying to figure out what to do with ourselves. If the best option you’ve found is writing about political ideas on your blog, fine, go for it.
