About this very long article, or rather excerpt from a soon-to-be-published biography.
Regardless of politics -- incidentally, isn't it funny how people always seem to preface any non-political comment about the President with "regardless of your politics?" I've read/heard two different people's accounts of traveling among people who speak a different language, who mentioned that the only word they could both understand was "George Bush" or "Obama." And these writers always prefaced the anecdote with "regardless of your politics." Are they just being overcautious, or are people really so touchy that even the name of the President is inherently "political"?
Anyway, regardless of politics, this account of Obama's youth reminds me forcibly of a Fitzgerald novel (esp. The Beautiful and the Damned). Look at his diary entries, his letters, his girlfriend's diary entries and letters! Just thirty years ago, did people (or at least, these two people) think so much and observe so much and write it all down and have the right word at their fingertips all the time without having to Google "thesaurus" every few minutes to find exactly the right connotation? After reading some of this I feel sort of misled by his public demeanor, which seems too friendly and almost slightly bumbling compared to this...this mind. (Though on second thoughts, perhaps acquiring this unimposing personability was what "growing up" meant to Barack Obama.)
But but but how can someone think so much?
And now, how can we think so little? Do we think and write less, or is it (as always) just me? Considering the effects of the Internet, it seems almost inevitable that we write less, if only because the public screams of the few are spread so well that they threaten to eclipse our individual whisperings, or at least make them pointless to record. Maybe this is a good thing: maybe nobody actually wants their diaries to be found thirty years later, no matter how well thought out, and maybe the individual whisperings are all drivel anyway. (I'm almost positive that mine are, but I will publish them anyway in complete confidence that at most two people will read them.)
But do we think less than the average Obama contemporary? Was Obama an anomaly, a real-life Fitzgeraldian hero who happened to choose statecraft instead of an inevitable spiral into madness and/or debauchery? Or am I the anomaly, living a semi-examined life? I would guess that it is probably easier (but also less fulfilling) to avoid introspection today than it was ten years ago. (Hint: www.tumblr.com, or failing that, Netflix.) I would also suggest that introspection may be more discouraged today than it was years ago. At college (or at least at my university), there's a culture of efficiency: of speed-reading, of not asking questions, of cramming courses into schedules, of fulfilling requirements, of why do you care so much, of pretending that you don't. That list is actually quite close to my list of "keys for success for the incoming university student."
But maybe the lack of introspection comes back to the "why do you care so much" point. We had to keep journals for the class associated with my scholarship, and my first entry turned into a very long rant (somewhat akin to this one) that jumped off from something that was said in one of my classes or lab or something and went off on a philosophical tangent (as I am wont to do when I write.) I was of course terribly embarrassed almost immediately upon finishing and ripped out the pages and started a fresh entry wherein I quite literally listed the events of my day. A bulleted list. And wrote a to-do list. A bulleted to-do list.
Keys to success!
I wish I had time, I wish I could think, I wish I could read, I wish I didn't have Calculus homework due at midnight.
Procrastination accomplished. My deepest apologies.
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