Like a Friend

 Literature  6 Responses »
Mar 022003
 

Will Duquette, proprietor of a fine blog of mostly book reviews, recently praised The Passion of Artemisia by Susan Vreeland by saying that when he was finished he knew the main character “like a friend.” That never seems like praise to me. I know dozens of fictional characters far better than I know any of my friends. I talk to my friends maybe twice a week; an author has direct access to his characters’ thoughts and actions 24 hours a day, plus, presumably, psychological insight and talent. He ought to be able to do better than I can. I would not testify, in advance, that any of my friends was incapable of committing some ghastly crime; I would take the stand for Newland Archer or Caspar Goodwood without hesitation.

Artemisia is a historical character, but still, you devote a few years to someone’s life and you ought to have a pretty good idea what makes them tick. “Like a friend” seems like a pretty abysmal standard.

Group Theory

 Blogs, Politics  7 Responses »
Mar 022003
 

The other day D-Squared called Steven Den Beste a nasty name for daring to mourn the people killed on September 11th. Den Beste, you see, lives in San Diego, and he didn’t know any of the New Yorkers who died, so mourning, in his case, is “grave-robbing.” Now this raises a nice question. Just what sort of relation will do? Apparently family, friends, and professional colleagues all qualify. (In another post D2 magnanimously lets Ann Coulter, who had a friend who died in one of the planes, off the hook.) Interestingly, mourning fellow members of humanity is OK too, as long as they aren’t fellow Americans; at least I haven’t seen D2 complain about “grave-robbing” when lefties shed crocodile tears over the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis that American sanctions are supposed to have killed.

So it’s not a matter of proximity, and it’s not a matter of choice either, since we choose our colleagues only incidentally and our families not at all. It seems, in fact, that only countrymen are out of bounds, and only patriotism is objectionable. Moral high-mindedness, or reflexive anti-Americanism? You make the call.