In her new book, she gives back.
Peggy Noonan has today published a collection of her columns, The Time of Our Lives. It reads like a peek into the window of a grateful steward’s soul — and, to borrow her phrase in another but intimately related context, into the “startling and wonderful” lives we lead.
Bear in mind that, at the same time, she also grieves “the lost world of privacy.” There is not an immodesty here but a sisterhood and a mentorship. This is an examination of the soul of a politics and a culture. In her approach to writing, she seems to ask: Can we sit down and talk? This is what I’ve seen. This is what I’ve thought. This is what I’ve learned. Can I share a little? It isn’t easy. I’m not going to pretend it is. But can we help one another along here? To be full of grace?
“We come at politics and cultural issues, all of us, as full individuals — thinking, judging, weighing, feeling, taking it all in,” Noonan writes. She observes culture and politics as a human being, alongside others, knowing it as a “full-body exercise involving all parts of the human being — mind, soul, intellect, emotions.” You’ll sometimes agree. You sometimes won’t. But she’ll share what she sees. That’s how she goes about “righting,” by writing.
“We’re all experiencing history each day; why not name what you think you’re seeing?” Peggy writes in her introduction. “You write as you, and sound like you, because you are: you.”
Peggy shares her “belief that deep down no writer knows precisely what he’s doing and is simply thinking, thinking, thinking — testing a thought and writing it down as quickly as possible so it doesn’t blot.”
Noonan tells us that “sometimes I write tough criticisms. But deep in my heart I always hope I’m wrong, that it’s not as bad as I say it is, that there are mitigating circumstances no one knows about, facts few can see, reasons for the bad decision that make it explicable.”
She explains:
I look at the blank screen, the antic blinking cursor, glance at my notes, put my hands on the keyboard and go. I become good at the point my interest in what I’m trying to say overwhelms anxiety about how to say it. Desire to make a point defeats self-consciousness and lets things begin. “The words flow” is not something that happens to me. They never flow. They come out, are not right, are corrected. Or they come out right and are corrected into something inferior, at which point I try to remember what I originally write.
Anxiety and self-consciousness. Why share such things? Because we’re all in this together. Let’s count some blessings together. Among them: I love the gratitude with which she writes about Bob Bartley. He called her in the spring of 2002 asking if she would like to write a weekly Internet column. She explains that
the first or second time I ever had a long conversation with Bob, about 1991, when we discussed my writing op-eds for the Journal, he brought along a paperback copy of a book, Mark Helprin’s great novel A Soldier of the Great War. Bob had circled a long, descriptive paragraph. He held it toward me, tapped it with his finger, said nothing. But his eyes shined. He was saying: This is what I value, this is what I want. I took it as a charge: Write for our page but don’t feel bound or constricted by thoughts of traditional form, approach, subject matter. Be yourself, like Mark.
Earlier she notes why she quickly said yes to his offer about “this thing called the Internet”: “If he thought it was a good idea it probably was, if he thought I could do it I probably could.” What respect! What freedom! What if we could live our lives that way always? With self-knowledge, gratitude, and mutual respect?
#share#Noonan writes engagingly about the early days and development of the Internet:
There was a woman who, early on, wrote to say she hoped I would have a brain aneurysm as that’s what people with views such as mine deserve. This was, in those early days, so surprising to me that I actually wrote back and told her it’s not nice to write someone and say you wish them dead or disabled. She wrote back explaining why I deserved crippling. I actually wrote back, she responded. Fifteen years later we’re still writing. I believe, though she’s never quite said it, that she no longer wishes me dead, and I kind of love her. She’s passionate and sincere — she’s a good woman. She’ll write and say she hopes I have a nice weekend and I’m wrong about Hillary and should be fired.
Peggy explains this “instant community” as “all kind of startling and wonderful.” For those of us who remember it — even as a fog of days gone by — yes, it was both of these things! It was the beginning of wonderful friendships. Including over AOL Instant Messenger, back in the day. I’m grateful for the occasional early-morning and late-night chats with the author of The Time of Our Lives during those years and since, online and off.
The word “civil,” like so many of our words today, can feel somewhat devoid of meaning, an excuse for watering things down, nostalgia for Barney the Purple Dinosaur and “Kumbaya.” But it’s nothing of the sort. If you are engaged in it truly, it’s nothing easy. It’s rigorous. It’s a rejection of indifference and an embrace of the fullness of humanity — to varying degrees, of course. And it can be weird online, awkward in person. But it leads to community and solidarity, things we surely need.
She writes:
Here is my concern. There are not fewer children living stressed, chaotic lives in America now, there are more. There will be more still, because among the things America no longer manufactures is stability. And the culture around them will not protect them, as the culture protected me. The culture around them will make their lives harder, more frightening, more dangerous. They are going to come up with nothing to believe in, their nerves essentially shot. And they’re going to be — they are already — very angry.
About her vocation as a writer, and of her Internet column particularly, Peggy explains that a “special challenge” is that
writers have to proceed through life with an attitude of openness. They have to be available to thoughts, views, sensations. You have to let the experience of life sort of wash over and through you to do your job. But if you are on the net and writing regularly — especially about politics and culture, but not only — you are operating in a highly dramatic, immediate, emotional, partisan and ideological environment. It’s a sparky place full of attack and defend. And you can’t as a writer be so open as you walk forward that the invective and dislike enter your head and heart and disfigure your thinking. You can’t let your critics shape your conception of yourself. You have to try to not let it enter you . . . while still being open to what people are saying and life is doing. I think this is a big challenge to writers now.
Isn’t that a special challenge, in many ways, for us all, now? In the stress and the chaos and the ideological colonies.
In writing about America in 2012, she wrote: “Sometimes we think our problems are so big we have to remake ourselves to meet them. But maybe we don’t. Maybe we just have to remember who we are — open, friendly, welcoming, and free.”
That could go for so much, every day of our lives, couldn’t it? That could change the heart of a nation and a world, which could use more people rising to the challenge.
In one of her columns included in The Time of Our Lives, Noonan notes that a culture that talks a lot about tolerance doesn’t always help as it used to. This book helps, by teaching, encouraging, challenging, chronicling — by giving thanks and raising grave concerns, too, but always laced with hope illuminated by faith.
She reminds us: Do good and: “Pray. Unceasingly. Take the time.”