Americans have too much of everything. Too much food, too many words, too many choices. The heaps of produce in my supermarket dazzle the eye, tease the appetite, and boggle the mind. Where does all that excess go? So many lemons, apples, faux-tomatoes, grapes!
Ever visited the cereal aisle? Endless ranks of super-sweetened toxins with frolicsome cartoon barkers. Want plain old cornflakes? Oh, there they are, tucked onto a lower shelf, almost apologetically ycleped “original.” (I’m beginning to feel original myself.)
Haste snags the wrong Triscuits. In pursuit of “original”, I mistakenly acquire “Rosemary – slim” – and of a triangular shape. Who on earth wants a skinny triangular oddly-flavored Triscuit?
We’ll never see all the streamed shows on our must-see list. And every online opinion-spouter, it seems, is ballyhooing the year’s, decade’s, millennium’s, ten, hundred, thousand best! (And don’t forget all those Oscar contenders!)
Words may be the worst. Online is a riot of unruly voices where the quiet get trampled. Everybody has something to say. Their cute pet sleeping. What they ate for breakfast. How, after sadness, they found joy. I blush to add my spew. Who needs more! Only I can’t help myself. I must because I can. And you guys cheer me on. So what the hell.
When does superabundance become hyperabundance? Yesterday. Nor is this plethora pleasurable. Excess afflicts us with the dual anxiety of choosing and missing out. Every choice demands attention, of which our supply is limited. With every choice we risk choosing wrong. I get stuck with those skinny triangular rosemary-flavored pseudo-Triscuits – now what? Return them? – what a bother! Toss ‘em? That feels improvident, insensitive to the neediness of many. Donate them? Who’d want them? Even Henry sniffs them with disdain. I end up deep-six-ing them, hurriedly tying off the plastic trash bag to erase (to the extent erasure from consciousness is possible) evidence of my inadvertence. Gone! – but not forgotten. Now I’m whisking those Triscuit crumbs from my dreams.
It hurts me how many published words I delete unread – or read with too little care. Friends wrote them – family – professors I revere. Friends urged them on me. My need to know incalculably exceeds my capacity. I do not believe in speed-reading; speed-reading rumbles over prose and leaves it for dead. What’s worth reading is worth rereading. Such are the tenets of my faith. Yet live by my rule? Who has time! Can a monk plead with his abbot, “Sorry, Father, I haven’t time to pray”?
Our response to excess is not to revel in it but to slam our door. Enough whirling in this whirlwind of maybes! We settle on our routines, blinkering ourselves to the rest. In politics we may close our minds to contrary views: I know what I know, don’t bother me. If the Nameless One is our Messiah, his detractors are the Devil, case closed. I whoosh down the cereal aisle, almost with my eyes shut: No, Tony Tiger, Captain Crunch! I’d skip the aisle, only opposite the cereals they’ve shelved Ethnic, where I find our soy sauce.
Excess contributes to our national dyspepsia. So many choices, yet none quite suits. In Haiti one is swarmed with children begging; in America, with commercial mendicants. Neither’s comfortable. We’d be happier, I sometimes think, in mandatory habits (in both senses), unafflicted with freedom, with time to pray.
Composing is how I compose myself: writing is my prayer. Here perhaps, for a moment, stillness, a glimpse of significance beyond the rat-a-tat and roar. Music works on me similarly. I scribble syllables to restore my spirits, then sigh and return to the fray.