...Which brings me back to my daughter, who, underneath her shy and somewhat diffident exterior, has always harbored the soul of an iconoclast. I might take some credit for having planted this renegade seed — when she was still very young, I invented a nonconformist club to which we were to elect worthy candidates (we found very few) — were it not for the fact that where I am volubly contrarian she has always quietly done her own thing. The truth is, I am of mixed minds about having handed on the mantle of dissent — of keeping a leery distance from the commonly held view — to my daughter. I worry that her instinct to think for herself is as much a curse as a blessing — that she will, despite her capacity to establish close connections, end up standing warily on the sidelines. Although as a culture we bemoan the perils of groupthink, it can be very cold once you move beyond the circle of warmth that is the reward for adding your voice to the collective chorus. We celebrate loners and visionaries, but we tend to do so only after the fact, when the class nerd who sat by himself in the lunchroom ends up writing a best-selling software program. Defiant individualism is fine if it succeeds, but for every misfit who becomes a Charles Bukowski or R. Crumb there is one who becomes Jeffrey Dahmer or the Unabomber. Striking up a different tune has always come with certain costs, beginning with ridicule and ending with social ostracism. A famous loner of a British poet once noted that “our virtues are all social” and that there is always the lurking possibility that what you stand for on your lonesome is nothing more than “a compensating make-believe.”
So although I admire my freethinking daughter, I also feel anxious on her account. My hope is that her idiosyncratic take on the world will lead her to unexpected places rather than to an embittered outlook, and I’m happy to say that the portents are looking good. The other night she watched a two-hour History Channel program on the counterculture of the ’60s, a period she is boundlessly fascinated by, as if it harked back to the Pleistocene era. With her imagination fired up by the spectacle of flower children and Woodstock, she announced to me that she wanted to try LSD; the fact that it is no longer the drug of choice would only be further inducement for her to seek it out. But then, as we sat in the kitchen equably discussing the possibility of her gaining hallucinogenic experiences, I was suddenly struck by the humor of it. Here was a girl who eschewed getting smashed and hooking up and insisted we subdivide our garbage into ecologically faithful bins. The chances were highly unlikely that she’d pursue a wild life on the margins. Far safer to bet that she’d get with the program in her own laggardly time and unlemminglike way.
Daphne Merkin is a contributing writer for the magazine.
No comments:
Post a Comment