Here and Now: Letters (2008-2011) Read Free

instance—is what puts the parent off.
    As for friendships between men and women, it does strike me as curious that the usual order of events nowadays is for a man and a woman first to become lovers and then later friends, rather than first friends and later lovers. If this generalization is true, are we to think of friendship between a man and a woman as in some sense higher than erotic love, a stage to which they may graduate after mere sexual experience of each other? There are certainly people who think this way: the course of erotic love is unpredictable, they say, it does not endure, it can turn unexpectedly into its opposite; whereas friendship is constant and enduring, can spur the friends to become better people (as you have described).
    I think we should be suspicious of accepting too readily this claim, and the consequences that flow from it. For instance, it is conventional wisdom that it is unwise for a man and a woman who have long been friends (“mere” friends) to take the step into physical love. Sleeping with a friend is a tame experience, says conventional wisdom; a good friend does not have the element of mystery that eros demands. Is this in fact true? Surely the allure of incest between brother and sister is precisely that of stepping from the all too well known into the mysterious unknown.
    Incest used to be a big topic in literature (Musil, Nabokov) but no longer seems to be. I wonder why. Perhaps because the notion of sex as a quasi-religious experience—and therefore of incest as a challenge to the gods—has evaporated into thin air.
Best wishes,
John

Brooklyn
    September 22, 2008
    Dear John,
    Please tell Dorothy to be more careful. Bronchitis is bad enough, but falling down is terrible. I trust (hope) that no bones were broken. Siri and I are extremely happy that she will be going to Portugal in November.
    I have been traveling—and am about to take off again in a couple of days. No time right now to give a full response, but I promise to send one as soon as I return in mid-October.
    Curious that you should have mentioned brother-sister incest in your letter. Such a thing happens in my new book (and is dwelled upon at some length)—and indeed, the sex is a quasi-religious experience for the two characters (to use your words). Does that mean I am hopelessly out of date? Probably.
    As for admiration, I was referring to friendships between men. But more about that after I return . . .
With a handshake,
Paul

October 28, 2008
    Dear John,
    I wanted to write sooner but returned to New York suffering from a bad intestinal bug that has kept me on my back until this morning. Fortunately, I managed to get through seventeen days of hectic travels in one piece and became ill only on the final night, after the last of my chores was done. A predictable result, no doubt. You live on pure adrenaline and then, once the adrenaline ebbs out of you, you understand that you’ve pushed yourself too hard. I look forward to Portugal as a respite, a period of calm and composure, the next best thing to a holiday.
    In your last letter, you mentioned “athletic sports—activities with no parallel in the rest of creation . . . ,” which reminded me of some brief exchanges about sports while we were driving around France last summer. Would it interest you to delve into this matter? I have read your “[Four] Notes on Rugby” from thirty years ago. Provocative and tightly argued, but if you care to revisit this territory, I would be happy to go there with you. (My own little contribution to the subject is “The Best Substitute for War” in Collected Prose , a commission from the New York Times Magazine for an issue about the millennium a decade ago. My assignment: Write—very briefly—about the best game of the past thousand years. I chose soccer.)
    Possible points to discuss: 1) Sports and aggression; 2) Playing a sport as opposed to watching others play it; 3) The phenomenology—and mysteries—of fandom;