Risks and High Jinks
I spotted a copy of The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster on my in-laws’ bookshelf. No offence to Juster who is obviously smashing, but it was the intro from Maurice Sendak — he of Where the Wild Things Are — that most caught my imagination.
Sendak wrote this in 1996:
[The Phantom] Tollbooth is a product of a time and a place that fills me with fierce nostaliga. It was published in New York City in 1961. … [we] were all swept up in a publishing adventure full of risks and high jinks that has nearly faded from memory. There were no temptations except to astonish … Simply, it was easy to stay clean and fresh, and wildly ourselves — a pod of happy baby whales flipping our flukes and diving deep for gold.
We have to be careful with this kind of “fierce nostalgia,” to think that the past was necessarily better than things are today. But I know what he means. I was talking to Friend Andy the other day, who remembers well the indie publishing and queer and dot-com cultures around the Bay Area of the time Sendak wrote the words above. That’s a time and a place he seems fiercely nostalgic about. In fact, Andy says, he was aware at the time that it was all over by 1995, a year before Senak wrote those words.
In turn, I’m often nostalgic for the young Tony Blair years of England in 1997-2000. I woulnd’t want to go back there, but I do lament the savage siphoning away of “adventure” and “risk and high jinks” from our culture that felt present in the atmosphere of that time.
The future doesn’t look great. A recent YouGov poll suggests most people would rather live in the past than in the future. “Because that’s where people live,” quipped our pub quiz master at the time of the poll. He’s certainly right that the 20th Century was full of life while our own one is preoccupied with extinction. That’s not how it was in the 1960s! Everyone wanted to know about the future back then, couldn’t wait to get here.
Well, I say this: never mind.
Never mind if the future looks bleak to you.
If a bomb drops on you, you probably won’t know about it.
Insulate yourself to it. Live as ethically as you can but also as well as you can. “Aflluence without abundance.” From our own hererotopias, let us have, in Sendak’s terms, “adventure” and “stay clean and fresh, and wildly ourselves” no matter what.
If it’s harder to do that in the world of Musk and Deliveroo and forest fires than it was in the days of Lou Reed (60s NY), Jaron Lanier (90s SF), and Blur (millennial UK) then there’s even fewer “temptations except to astonish.”
So. Let’s astonish.
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About Robert Wringham
Robert Wringham is the editor of New Escapologist. He also writes books and articles. Read more at wringham.co.uk
For a while now I have been more or less living in the 60s and 70s (an idealised version I must admit).
I find the world as it is just too painful to bear, my doctor prescribed antidepressants last month. I only visit a few websites weekly and no social media. LPs and CDs supply all my music along with a local ‘oldies’ radio station. TV largely comes from dvd box sets (not correct chronologically but there isn’t a better way to watch 60s and 70s TV shows).
We are very environmentally aware but buying second hand LPs etc. is a good way to save money and stay green.
Anyway, I am off to listen to the Beatles while I make bread!
Fergie
Nothing better. That’s luxurious.
I’ve been hearing the Beatles a lot lately. Must be something in the air.