Confessions of a Nonpolitical Man

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Selfishness? The belief that I will be giving more than I get back? Maybe. It's not as though I haven't made those calculations, balancing the time and caloric output required to swell the ranks of a demonstration by my humble numerical presence. I have to deem what I do--think, read, write--to be part of the struggle: the larger one, which works to ensure the survival of spirit, free inquiry, humanness in a world where these qualities are threatened. I am not greedy of the time because I want to work on my stamp collection. The heavenly powers could grant me bonus days with the stipulation that they not be used for reading or writing, and I still would not hasten to the march.

Why, then, am I paralyzed? Because I do not believe there is a division between the political sphere of life and the others. I see the various levels of perception, action, and consequence as interfused, a continuum. It is therefore fundamentally false to mark out one such area as requiring us especially.

This sounds as though I claim for myself some exalted private agenda and urge on others the tasks I cannot bring myself to do. I do not mean it this way. My point is that some people are bent in a certain way; they feel a call to do the obscure labor of perceiving and processing the larger current shifts. It does not seem possible to do both--to pursue a clear picture of these inchoate weather patterns and to engage in specified, directed activity. The continuum, the psyche's economy, will not allow it.

My place, then, is at the desk with my books and thoughts. I hope that my words promote the humane values, that they exert some small influence on people who do act. But who can say how these indeterminate forces move through the world?

Sven Birkerts teaches at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts. Excerpted with permission from Readings (Graywolf Press).

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