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In this age of rampant blogging and opinionated writers, would-be journalists, and snob professionals, it makes me wonder if we Americans can count beyond three. Lets face it, Microsoft Word and Powerpoint have done more than enabled us to make our points, they have also ruined our fluid expression and made it conform to nothing more than a heading followed by three points of emphasis. Great intellectual thought somehow escapes us, the story becomes reduced, the points alas irrelevant or worse: redundant and boring. Let me think for a minute, do we know what good writing is anymore? Perhaps we need to remember?

Stranger In A Strange Land

What comes to mind is The American, that novel by Henry James. Before Jerry Seinfeld’s Newman, there was Christopher Newman. The New World Man. Yes, that is also a great Rush song, but I still prefer Subdivisions, but New World Man does indeed summarize the character Christopher Newman. Imagine the mythical man, The American, a man of nature, of wealth, of strength, of careless mind, and powerful will: a noble man, but not of cautious mind. A great character? Yes.

Though, A better intellectual author is what concerns me now. Henry James does something which we forget too often today, which is to not take sides. Too often we confront issues from the beginning from unfounded facts and personal bias than from pure intellectual neutrality. In The American, Henry James describes a social world in which right and wrong has no favorites, everyone has faults and admirable traits. Reality is often grounded in complexities that lead to interesting arguments, or at least humorous irony. You love her, but she loves you not, you hate her, and yet she still loves you more. Obsession, desperation, inspiration, tragedy, for all romance is irony.

You Do Not Talk About Fight Club!

And I wanted to smash his beautiful face to pieces as well. If you watched the film Fight Club, or better yet read book, it comes to mind. You need to feel it, see it, sweat and bleed the same space. Form your own conclusions, but do not just take some pseudo-intellectual’s word for it. Be there in the moment and live it as they say. I have watched too many pundits on cable news shout louder and louder to make me believe they know what they are talking about. But that is not news, that is not brilliant intellectual thought, that is just some guy speaking louder, making me think that because he acts mad it must be true. But they have never been to Fight Club, they have never bothered to show up and pick their man out, stood there shaking, holding their fists up, getting ready to be beaten senseless for the next three to five minutes. Good intellectuals, be it writers, painters, or performance artists describe the world to us, they do not sit there and preach to us as if we were watching television or did not know how to read the book of Genesis ourselves.

Great art, great thought is not about passionate belief, it is about describing the world, perhaps it is never our world, but it is a world, and if we see it without bias, without stupidity, and have the fortitude to have the vision ourselves, then perhaps I will think that I have not wasted my time.