The last few years I’ve been slowly reading my way through the Travis McGee novels by John D. MacDonald.
He left us 40 years ago, in 1986, and the 21 novels in the well-regarded McGee series were written over the 20 years prior. The books are very much products of their time, as the Eloi ruling us like to say, but I hardly mean it in a negative way.
Being just barely old enough of a babby Gen X-er to have living memories of the 1980s, I can recall a taste of American life as it was in the mid to late 20th century. The Travis McGee books, which could be too easily written off as “genre trash” crime fiction, capture it to a T.
Trav himself appears from the outside as a washed-up beach-bum living on the seedy margins of decent civilized life, making his home on a house-boat at the Bahia Mar marina in Fort Lauderdale.
Funny trivia: that marina is a real place right off A1A, a little ways south of Las Olas. I used to live about 10 minutes up the road.
Decadent crime-fic they may be, but there’s a sophistication hiding right under the surface of these tales.
McGee may look like a dim brute, but he’s no dummy. One of the remarkable signatures of these books is MacDonald’s introspective asides, given in the voice of Trav’s inner monologue.
Take this gem, quoted at length because it’s just that good:
I am apart. Always I have seen around me all the games and parades of life and have always envied the players and the marchers. I watch the cards they play and feel in my belly the hollowness as the big drums go by, and I smile and shrug and say, Who needs games? Who wants parades? The world seems to be masses of smiling people who hug each other and sway back and forth in front of a fire and sing old songs and laugh into each other’s faces, all truth and trust. And I kneel at the edge of the woods, too far to feel the heat of the fire. Everything seems to come to me in some kind of secondhand way which I cannot describe. Am I not meat and tears, bone and fears, just as they? Yet when most deeply touched, I seem, too often, to respond with smirk or sneer, another page in my immense catalog of remorses. I seem forever on the edge of expressing the inexpressible, touching what has never been touched, but I cannot reach through the veil of apartness. I am living without being truly alive. I can love without loving. When I am in the midst of friends, when there is laughter, closeness, empathy, warmth, sometimes I can look at myself from a little way off and think that they do not really know who is with them there, what strangeness is there beside them, trying to be something else.
Once, just deep enough into the cup to be articulate about subjective things, I tried to tell Meyer all this. I shall never forget the strange expression on his face. “But we are all like that!” he said. “That’s the way it is. For everyone in the world. Didn’t you know?”
I tried to believe him. But belief is a very difficult feat when you crouch out here in the night, too far from the fire to feel its heat, too far from the people to hear the words of their songs.
That passage is a horse-kick to the abdominals.
Maybe it only hits me hard because those three paragraphs are about the clearest description I’ve ever found of how it is to be a in the awkward position of watching yourself live life, looking in through the window from outside.
I have no idea if John D. MacDonald suffered from any kind of depressive disorder, or if existential malaise comes with the territory of those called to create, but when I read those words I’m nodding along and thinking, he gets it.
Imagine such meditations dropped right into the middle of an action-driven crime story. He does this more than once in each book. It shouldn’t work in a book about sketchy brawlers going after hardened criminals, but the formula ends up making the magic.
Same power that makes Robert E. Howard’s Conan stories work, when you get down to it. Civilization may have advanced the human condition in many ways, and few of us would really enjoy life without it, but the civilizing process comes at a tremendous price.
Nobody’s quite happy. Nobody really feels at home. Everything feels off somehow.
We’re living in the most public and connected world in all of history, and strangely we find ourselves more isolated than any time in the past.
They call this the “meaning crisis”.
If you only know that term through podcasters, it was already kicked around over 100 years ago after World War I destroyed what was left of the old pre-industrial world.
Whatever this problem is, it’s been building for a long time.
That’s the paradox of freedom. When any option is available to you, if only you choose it, no option is worth choosing. We’ve liberated ourselves from nature and history and — for what?
Not an easy question to answer.
If you try, you’ll quickly discover that most all your answers were somebody else’s answers that found their way into your thoughts and never shook loose.
For my two pennies, things are not that terrible, not for you or me, and not for society at large. But there is no denying that “perpetual crisis” is an accurate term for the present moment.
The way things have been may not be the way thing are going to be.
Change is always painful, and the kicker is that this is equally true of fresh new growth as it is of decline into death.
What, you wanted solutions? Even if I gave them to you, they wouldn’t stick.
If you’re interested in a glimpse under the hood as to how it might go, here’s an article I found the other day which sheds light on the situation:
Be warned: it’s almost 5000 words and requires thinking.
If you read it, send me a message and let me know how it landed for you.
Matt Perryman