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from: Susan Cheever

Idle for Too Long

Posted Monday, Nov. 9, 1998, at 3:09 PM ET

I think I'd rather argue about colonialism than Clinton, although I guess the fact that you aren't allowed to subdue a willing young woman in the hallway outside your office is truly the death of colonialism. I mean there was a time when you were allowed to subdue entire countries, whole races of men women and children and now even the colonialization of an intern is going to far. What if he had taught her to read or given her good medical benefits, would that have made a difference? Nope.

And as for Yeats, as he wrote about Swift--it's an epitaph and although I used it in a book I'm probably mangling it:

Swift has sailed unto his rest
Savage indignation there
Cannot lacerate his breast
Imitate him if you dare
World besotted traveller: he
Served human liberty.

That's the problem for me. I don't care if my leaders subdue interns or even whole nations, I don't care who gives them blow jobs. I don't even care what they think about social security. What I want to know is, do they serve human liberty? Do they even think about human liberty? Have they ever asked themselves what human liberty might consist of and how they might serve it?

Does poetry have to set the bar so high? And speaking of bars, how can he say that stories that live longest are sung above the glass. Is that a bit of Irish blarney or a strain for a rhyme or what? Stories sung above the glass are often, often forgotten, it's the reconstruction of those half-remembered stories days and weeks afterward that gives them their poetry. Now my machine says I've been idle for too long. Do you have the same feature?

the breakfast table
entries
123456789101112131415161718192021
from: Susan Cheever

Idle for Too Long

Posted Monday, Nov. 9, 1998, at 3:09 PM ET
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Benjamin Cheever is a novelist and author of the forthcoming Famous After Death. Susan Cheever is a teacher, columnist, and writer. Her memoir, Note Found in a Bottle: My Life as a Drinker, is forthcoming. They are siblings.
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