eBook - ePub
Essays
Wallace Shawn
This is a test
Share book
- 186 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub
Essays
Wallace Shawn
Book details
Book preview
Table of contents
Citations
About This Book
- Receiving critical praise from sources as varied as The Los Angeles Times, Heeb, GQ, O: The Oprah Magazine, Democracy Now, The New Yorker, and Women's Wear Daily, the cloth edition of Essays sold 8,000 copies upon publication in the Fall of 2009
- Wallace Shawn is a nationally known actor and playwright with a prolific career spanning nearly four decades. His face, style, and inimitable voice are loved by millions.
- Shawn's work is treasured for both his comic acting (The Princess Bride) and his often intensely political playwriting. This book of personal reflections brings together the different strands of Shawn's life's work, on-stage and off.
- Recently, Shawn's most recent visible acting and voice roles have been on the network drama Gossip Girl and the forthcoming Toy Story 3
Frequently asked questions
How do I cancel my subscription?
Can/how do I download books?
At the moment all of our mobile-responsive ePub books are available to download via the app. Most of our PDFs are also available to download and we're working on making the final remaining ones downloadable now. Learn more here.
What is the difference between the pricing plans?
Both plans give you full access to the library and all of Perlegoâs features. The only differences are the price and subscription period: With the annual plan youâll save around 30% compared to 12 months on the monthly plan.
What is Perlego?
We are an online textbook subscription service, where you can get access to an entire online library for less than the price of a single book per month. With over 1 million books across 1000+ topics, weâve got you covered! Learn more here.
Do you support text-to-speech?
Look out for the read-aloud symbol on your next book to see if you can listen to it. The read-aloud tool reads text aloud for you, highlighting the text as it is being read. You can pause it, speed it up and slow it down. Learn more here.
Is Essays an online PDF/ePUB?
Yes, you can access Essays by Wallace Shawn in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Politics & International Relations & Essays in Politics & International Relations. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.
Information
PART ONE
REALITY
dp n="18" folio="18" ?dp n="19" folio="19" ? ONE
THE QUEST FOR SUPERIORITY
2008
When I was five years old, I had a small room of my own, with a record-player and records and shelves full of books. I listened to music, I thought up different kinds of stories, and I played with paper and crayons and paint.
Now Iâve grown up, and thank God things have mostly gone on as beforeâthe paper, the storiesâitâs pretty much the same. Iâve been allowed to become a professional maker of art, Iâve become a writer, and I dwell in the mansion of arts and letters.
When I was a child, I didnât know that the pieces of paper I used had been made by anybody. I certainly didnât know that almost everything I touched had been made by people who were poor, people who worked in factories or on farms or places like that. In fact Iâd never met anyone who worked in a factory or on a farm. Iâd frequently met people who owned factories and farms, because they lived all around us in the huge houses I could see from my window, although I wasnât aware then that the houses were huge because the people who lived in them paid very low salaries to their employees, while paying themselves enormous sums. Our wealthy neighbors were really like the giants in a fantastic tale, giants who were superior to others because they could spin gold out of human suffering.
Well, it turns out that I still live in the same neighborhood, because thatâs where the mansion of arts and letters is located. So I still can see giants when I look out my window, and the funny thing is that pretty much all of us in the mansion of arts and letters actually live off the money we get from these giants. Isnât that funny? You know, they buy the tickets to our shows, they buy our books and paintings, they support the universities where we teach, there are gifts and grantsâit all comes out of the gold theyâve spun. And we live with them, we share the streets with them, and weâre all protected by the same cops.
But you see, some of the people who donât live in the neighborhoodâthe ones our neighbors donât pay well, or treat well?âsome of those people are out of control, theyâre so miserable, so desperate, theyâre out of their minds, theyâre very threatening, so it turns out we need more than cops. We actually have a large army as well, and a navy and an air force, plus the F.B.I., Coast Guard, Central Intelligence Agency, and marinesâoy. It turned out that simply in order to be secure and protect our neighborhood, we needed an empire.
Some of us who live in the mansion of arts and letters are a bit touchy about our relationship to our wealthy neighbors. Bob, for exampleâheâs a painter who lives down the hall from meâhe refuses to bow to them when they pass him in the street, but, you knowâthey buy his paintings just the same. For me, though, itâs my relationship with the poor people outside the neighborhood that I sometimes brood about in the middle of the night. Itâs the fact that so many of them are in agony thatâs in a way thought-provoking.
One evening last week, a friend and I went to a somewhat inexpensive restaurant, and the waiter who served us was in such a state of agitation or anxiety about God knows what that he didnât even look at us. And so I was thinking about the fact that in more expensive restaurants, the staff is usually trained to focus their attention on the pleasure of the diners, not on their own problems. In fact, the waiters in more expensive restaurants are invited to be friendly, amusing, to make funny remarks about their lives, to let us diners get to know them a little. But in the most expensive restaurants, the really fancy ones, we donât get to know the waiters at all. The waiters in those restaurants donât make funny remarks. They do their work with such discretion that theyâre barely noticed. And people compliment them by saying that theyâre unobtrusive.
Actually thatâs quite a good word for all those people whom we donât know and donât think about much but who serve us and make the things we need and whose lives we actually dominate: âthe unobtrusives.â And the interesting thing Iâve noticed is that in those very expensive restaurants, we donât talk with the waiters, but we enjoy their presence enormously. We certainly wouldnât want them to be replaced by robots or by conveyer belts that would carry our food to us while we sat in the dining room completely alone. No, we want them there, these silent waiters, theseââunobtrusives.â
Itâs obviously a characteristic of human beings that we like to feel superior to others. But our problem is that weâre not superior. We like the sensation of being served by others and feeling superior to them, but if weâre forced to get to know the people who serve us, we quickly see that theyâre in fact just like us. And then we become uncomfortableâuncomfortable and scared, because if we can see that weâre just the same, well, they might too, and if they did, they might become terribly, terribly angry, because why should they be serving us? So thatâs why we prefer not to talk to waiters.
A king feels the very same way, Iâd have to imagine. He doesnât really want to get to know his subjects, but he nonetheless enjoys the fact that he has them. He finds it enjoyable to be told, âYour Majesty, you have ten thousand subjects.â And in fact he finds it even more enjoyable to be told, âYour Majesty, you have a million subjects,â even though he may never see them. The subjects are in the background of his life. Theyâre in the background of his life, and yet they provide the meaning of his life. Without his subjects, he wouldnât be king.
Some people like to feel superior because once they were made to feel inferior. Others, including myself, were told constantly in their early days that they were superior and now find themselves to be hopelessly addicted. So, if I get into a conversation, for example, with a person who knows nothing about me, I immediately start to experience a sort of horrible tension, as if my head were being squashed, because the person Iâm talking to is unaware of my superiority. Well, I have at my disposal an arsenal of indicators of superiority that I can potentially deployâI can casually allude to certain schools I attended, to my artistic work, to the elegant street on which I grew upâbut if, by analogy to some of those Tantric exercises one reads about, I attempt to follow the counterintuitive path of not revealing any of these cluesâwell, itâs simply interesting to observe that I can rarely manage to hold out for as long as ten minutes before forcing my interlocutor to learn the truth about me.
Weirdly, it turns out to be possible for a person to feel superior because someone somehow connected to them has been raised up above othersâa friend, an acquaintance, a parent, a childâand the connection can be even vaguer than that. I have to admit, I take a certain pride in Gustav Mahlerâs symphoniesâafter all, he was Jewish, and so am I. And Emily Dickinson was born in the United States, just like me. Incidentally, one unmistakable way to know youâre superior to someone is to beat them up. And just as I feel rather distinguished if a writer from the United States wins the Nobel Prize, I also feel stronger and more important because my countryâs army happens to dominate the world. The king doesnât need to meet his subjects in order to enjoy his dominion over them, and I donât need to go to Iraq to know that there are people all over the world, a great number of quiet âunobtrusives,â who experience a feeling of stomach-turning terror when they see soldiers wearing the uniform of my country approaching their door in the middle of the night. Now, letâs admit that some of the rougher people who seem to thrive in our country, people like George Bush or Dick Cheney, for example, may perhaps take actual pleasure from the thought of our countryâs soldiers smashing in the door of some modest house in some god-forsaken region of the planet, forcing a family to huddle on the floor, administering kicks in the face to anyone they like. Perhaps there may even be a modest clerk in a bank in Kansas or a quiet housewife on a farm in Idaho who feels a bit of enjoyment at a thought like that. But what bothers me more is that although I have nothing but contempt for imperial adventures, Iâve marched in the streets to demonstrate for peace, and I donât make it a practice to wink or joke about the brutal actions of brutal men, I canât deny that in spite of myself I derive some sense of superiority from being a citizen of a country that can act brutally with impunity and canât be stopped. I feel quite different from the way I know I would feel if I were a citizen of Grenada, Mauritius, or the Tongan Islands.
My feeling of superiority, and the sense of well-being that comes from that, increases with the number of poor people on the planet whose lives are dominated by me or my proxies and whom I nonetheless can completely ignore. I like to be reminded of these poor people, the unobtrusives, and then I like to be reminded of my lack of interest in them. For example, while I eat my breakfast each morning, I absolutely love to read my morning newspaper, because in the first few pages the newspaper tells me how my country treated all the unobtrusives on the day beforeâdeaths, beatings, torture, what have youâand then, as I keep turning the pages, the newspaper reminds me how unimportant the unobtrusives are to me, and it tries to tempt me in its articles on shirts to consider different shirts that I might want to wear, and then it goes on, as I turn the pages, to try to coax me into sampling different forms of cooking, and then to experience different plays or films, different types of vacationsâŠ
Itâs become second nature to me to use the quiet crushing of the unobtrusives as a sort of almost inaudible background music to my daily life. Like those people who grow bizarrely nervous if they donât have a recording of something or other quietly playing on their sound system at dinnertime, weâve become dependent over the course of decades on hearing the faint murmur of cries and groans as we eat, shop, and live.
How will the world change? Believe me, those who are now unobtrusive have their own ideas about how the situation might improve. But in the middle of the night I wonder: Can we in the mansion of arts and letters play a part? Could we reduce the destructiveness of the people we know? Could we possibly use the dreams we create to lure our friends in another direction? Because itâs valuable to remember that the feeling of superiority is not the only source of human satisfaction. Imperial dreams are not the only dreams. Iâve known people, for example, whoâve derived satisfaction from collecting seashells. And sometimes I think of a woman I knew a long time ago who seemed to be terribly happy, although her life consisted of not much more than getting up each day, playing with the cat, reading a mystery, eating an agreeable sandwich for lunch, then taking a walk in the afternoon. No wealthy giant eating dishes costing hundreds of dollars could ever have enjoyed a meal more than this woman seemed to enjoy her simple sandwichesâso what was her secret? And what about Edgar, who gets such pleasure out of working as a nurse, or Tom, who finds such nourishment teaching children in school? Janeâs need for superiority seems fully satisfied if a friend admires one of her drawings. And Ednaâs overjoyed if she wins at cards. People can make a life, it seems, out of loveâout of gardening, out of sex, friendship, the company of animals, the search for enlightenment, the enjoyment of beauty. Waitâisnât that our particular province?
Beauty can be important in a personâs life. And people beguiled by the beautiful are less dangerous to others than those obsessed by the thought of supremacy. If an afternoon of reading poetry has given me a feeling of profound well-being, I donât then need to go out into the street and seek satisfaction by strangling prostitutes. Art can be central in a personâs life. If the art we create is beautiful enough, will people be so drawn to looking at it that theyâll leave behind their quest for power? Beauty really is more enjoyable than power. A poem really is more enjoyable than an empire, because a poem doesnât hate you. The defense of privilege, the center of our lives for such a long time, is grim, exhausting. Weâre exhausted from holding on to things, exhausted from trying not to see those unobtrusive people weâre kicking away, whose suffering is actually unbearable to us.
In the mansion of arts and letters, we live like children, running and playing up and down the hallways all day and all night. We fill room after room with the things we make. After our deaths, weâll leave behind our poems, drawings, and songs, made for our own pleasure, and we wonât know if theyâll be allowed to help in the making of a better world.
dp n="28" folio="28" ?dp n="29" folio="29" ? TWO
AFTER THE DESTRUCTION OF THE WORLD TRADE CENTER
NOVEMBER 2001
To: The Foreign Policy Therapist
From: The United States of America
November 12, 2001
Dear Foreign Policy Therapist,
I donât know what to do. I want to be safe. I want safety. But I have a terrible problem: It all began several weeks ago when I lost several thousand loved ones to a horrible terrorist crime. I feel an overwhelming need to apprehend and punish those who committed this unbearably cruel act, but they designed their crime in such a diabolical fashion that I cannot do so, because they arranged to be killed themselves while committing the crime, and they are now all dead. I feel in my heart that none of these men, however, could possibly have planned this crime themselves and that another man, who is living in a cave in Afghanistan, must surely have done so. At any rate I know that some people he knows knew some of the people who committed the crime and possibly gave them some money. I feel an overwhelming need to kill this man in the cave, but the location of the cave is unknown to me, and so itâs impossible to find him. Heâs been allowed to stay in the cave, however, by the fanatical rulers of the country where the cave is, Afghanistan, so I feel an overwhelming need to kill those rulers. As theyâve moved from place to place, though, I havenât found them, but Iâve succeeded in finding and killing many young soldiers who guarded them and shepherds who lived near them. Nonetheless, I do not feel any of the expected âclosure,â and in fact Iâm becoming increasingly depressed and am obsessed with nameless fears. Can you help me?
To: The United States of America
From: The Foreign Policy Therapist
Dear United States,
In psychological circles, we call your problem âdenial.â You cannot face your real problem, so you deny that it exists and create instead a different problem that you try to solve. Meanwhile, the real problem, denied and ignored, becomes more and more serious. In your case, your real problem is simply the way that millions and millions of people around the world feel about you.
Who are these people? They share the world with youâone single world, which works as a unified mechanism. These people are the ones for whom the mechanismâs current way of workingâcall it the status quoâoffers a life of anguish and servitude. Theyâre well aware that this status quo, which for them is a prison, is for you (or for the privileged among you), on the contrary, so close to a paradise that you will never allow their lives to change. These millions of people are in many cases uneducatedâto you they seem unsophisticatedâand yet they still somehow know that you have played an enormous role in keeping this status quo in place. And so they know you as the enemy. They feel they have to fight you. Some of them hate you. And some will gladly die in order to hurt youâin order to stop you.
They know where the fruits of the planet, the oil and the spices, are going. And when your actions cause grief in some new corner of the world, they know about it. And when you kill people who are poor and desperate, no matter what explanation you give for what youâve done, their anger against you grows. You canât kill all these millions of people, but almost any one of them, in some way, some place, or to some degree, can cause damage to you.
But hereâs a strange fact about these people whom you consider unsophisticated: Most of the situations in the world in which they perceive âinjusticeâ are actually ones in which you yourself would see injustice if you yourself werenât so deeply involved in creating the situations. Even though they may dress differently and live differently, their standards of justice seem oddly similar to yours.
Your problem, ultimately, can only be solved over decades, through a radical readjustment of the way you think and behave. If the denial persists, you are sure to continue killing more poor and desperate people, causing the hatred against you to grow, until at a certain point there will be no hope for you. But itâs not too late. Yes, there are some among your current enemies who can no longer be reached by reason. Yes, there are some who are crazy. But most are not. Most people are not insane. If you do change, it is inevitable that over time...