A Bleak, Inspiring Tapestry of Life With People
Why authentic human communication is everything.
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You will ask me, “Who are you to judge?”
I judge because I am a who, a human person, and judging is what we do. There is no who, who does not judge. It’s what makes us be. To be or not to be? Nah.
What I’m judging, now that’s a question.
I’m in the cafeteria at work. I normally sit alone, eating and reading. Today is no different and I’m reading Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem again, preparing to teach it this week.
On this journey through the book, I have a new experience with it that gives me a thrill, a new insight (I may try and capture that in another essay later). The insight has something to do with sincerity and meaning so this is what’s jitterbugging through my mind as I put the book down and gaze out across the room. Under that influence, I’m suddenly saddened to be sitting alone. The experience I’m having with Lethem’s book has uncorked a desire to commune, to be in community. And here I am just reading and thinking. So my first judgment is levied against myself. Take note of that.
My lonely moment of minor despair causes me to notice the clusters of people around me, the people who gather in community. My attention fixes on four groups in particular, but in no particular order.
The Performative Enthusiasts
Straight in front of me, just off to the left of my center, I see three young men who I know to be deeply involved with the theater program. The stage is their place of comfort and self-expression, so I’m not surprised to see them engaged in intense conversation. Focused eye-contact and wild gesticulations of the arms are key signatures of this social moment. I cannot hear what they say but my mind imagines quotations from old television shows sung with heavy English accents. Among their peers in the student body that are athletes or career-obsessed, they must seem strange. The passions they are committed to, and the exuberant enthusiasm that explodes from them, mark them as oddballs to many, less interesting, people. Watching this group warms my heart, though. Their engagement is authentic and when I compare them to the group that’s gathered in the distance, just to the right of my center, I appreciate them all the more.
The Miserable Hermits
There is a place in the world for silence. And it’s not just for monks. We all need to withdraw and look inward.
And there is a place in the world for introverts. I probably fall on that spectrum myself, gaining my energy from quality time alone (perhaps this explains my exhaustion at the end of this particular semester).
But what I see in the cafe on this day is a poor excuse for living. Three young women sit silently together staring down at dark rectangles they lovingly caress every few seconds. Yes, I know that sweeping dismissals of “kids these days” is boring old hat. There’s a whole sub-genre of memes with pictures of people in some long gone day and some variation of “just living in the moment, not a phone in sight.” And of course, there are the parodies of this meme too.
Let me suggest here that mechanical resistance to “kids these days” dismissals can also be boring and reactionary. Is it very common for people to make stupid claims about young people and their technology? Yes. Is there also a good point buried in there somewhere? Yes.
If the people I see staring into their phones in the café on this day didn’t look so miserable, I probably wouldn’t have noticed them. But the truth is, this particular group of young women look like they’d rather be anywhere but where they are. And with anyone but who they are with. I can’t help but wonder why they are even sitting together. There is no sharing of humorous TikToks. There is no discussion about a shockingly inappropriate or inspiring Instagram photo.
There is only three young people swiping away the precious time they have to spend with their supposed friends.
I happen to believe that facing the world honestly is the only way to live. And it would be dishonest of me to call this scene anything but a tragic waste of life on a lovely spring day. Fortunately this group is the infinite minority on this day, a fact that encourages me.
Life is With People
Breaking from the 90 degree line in front of me, I look to the table to the right of me, on the 180.
Here is another table with three young women. But unlike their classmates, around these three there are, as the meme says, no phones in sight. And the cliché holds true for this group. They are conversing and laughing, looking at and listening to each other. They are enjoying the moment in which they are living. With other people. Phones provide a devastatingly easy escape hatch from these moments with people, who can be messy and unpredictable. So much so that it’s easy to understand the allure of escape. Who knows? Maybe the girls at that other table are all jerks and they justifiably want to escape from one another.
But I’m reminded of a phrase that provides the title of a book, Life is With People. The book is a 1952 anthropological study of the era of the lost Jewish shtetl. One concept from the book has always stuck with me:
“For its inhabitants, the shtetl is less the physical town than the people who live in it. ‘My shtetl’ means my community, and community means the Jewish community. Traditionally, the human rather than the physical environment has always been given primary importance” (22).
This insight is profound.
It’s far too easy to forget the places we live are mostly important because of the people who live there. Whether you’re an East Coast Elite or a denizen of small-town flyover country, you probably don’t love the place you live just because of the buildings and street grid. It’s the people and the culture that create the place you love. They are not just another element of place, they are the fabric of place. And any life worth living is best lived with the people.
The girls at my right are a beautiful embodiment of that ideal. But there is one other group to discuss.
A Silent Lunch
Some communities live in silence, and not just religious communities. Where I work, there is an active American Sign Language/English Interpreting program. One of their weekly activities is the hosting of a “Silent Lunch” for members of the local Deaf community. Today, they sit off to the side, to my left at about 65 degrees on my existential protractor.
Their community is inaccessible to me. I do not know the language. But what I can see at my distance is inspiring. Phones simply will not do in that group. Human connection depends on focused concentration. Hand movements are elevated to holy levels of symbolic meaning. Being distracted, pulled away by the dark rectangles, means utter exclusion here. This group lacks the aesthetic, noisy animation of the conversation of the girls on my right, but the quiet intensity of their community is awe-inspiring. In the moment. With people.
Yes everyone has the right to live as they wish. That does not make every life choice of equal merit. There are better and worse choices to make in this life. Some choose to live with people, others in spite of them. I choose the former.