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Jonathan Lear and Andrew Sullivan

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from: Jonathan Lear

What's Special About Provincetown

Posted Wednesday, Aug. 22, 2001, at 12:36 PM ET

Andrew,

This is your horoscope speaking: Today is your lucky day. Two of your most important stars are in alignment: P'town is covered in the New York Times. In "A Presidential Adviser Trades Neckties for Boas," Jane Gross tells the tale of how Ben Schatz "had the midlife crisis to end all midlife crises" and traded in his life of lawyering, turned him/herself into Rachel, and formed a "dragapella" singing group, the Kinsey Sicks.

I suppose what is special about Provincetown is the distinctively un-American way its inhabitants handle anxiety.

In Being and Time, Heidegger tells us that the function of anxiety is to shake us out of established routines. It is supposed to wake us up, make us anxiously realize this is the one finite life we have. It seems to me, the genius of American culture, that anxiety has been put to exactly the opposite use. By the time undergraduates arrive at college one can see that their anxiety--which is strictly about nothing--has already been turned into anxiety about succeeding. And they are so anxious about succeeding that there is no longer any room to think about what success might be. In America, anxiety keeps people locked into their routines.

I first arrived in P'town as a little boy in the late 1950s--and I treated it like Eloise treated the Plaza: There was so much to do. Early in the morning, I'd meet the incoming Portuguese fishermen at the dock where they'd throw free fish to the small group of locals. (It was how they fed their own). Then on to chat with a silversmith on Commercial Street, hang out with the lady selling tickets for a deep-sea fishing boat (now a whale watch). My first sense of what it would be like to be an adult was being allowed to sell tickets on her lunch hour. My first sense of not going along with a crowd was when I refused to join a bunch of boys jumping off the dock for quarters that tourists threw. My first sense of there being a wide world out there was when the taste of pesto--my Madeline--touched my tongue. (In those days Ciro and Sal's was a small place, and they served pesto as an unordered side dish.) The town was full of artists and writers, fishermen, gays, craftsmen, and a very large assortment of oddball characters for whom the issue of profession or sexual orientation did not arise. (My then recently divorced mother dated a guy named Graham who kept his change of sweatshirt in a beer keg at the Foc'sle.) I don't think I have ever again seen a place where the live-and-let-live atmosphere ran so deep. It was a magical place where poetry and life came together. And for all their mistakes, immaturities, and so on, people were trying to figure out how they wanted to live.

Jonathan

the breakfast table
entries
12345678910111213141516
from: Jonathan Lear

What's Special About Provincetown

Posted Wednesday, Aug. 22, 2001, at 12:36 PM ET
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Jonathan Lear is a member of the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. His most recent book is Happiness, Death, and the Remainder of Life. Andrew Sullivan writes daily for andrewsullivan.com, writes the "TRB" column for the New Republic, and is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine.
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