Mick Hartley

Paul Berman at last shares his thoughts on the Trump victory in his latest Tablet piece – and it's a strange one. He's reading Emerson, and pondering the mystic emanations of the Over-Soul:

There is a famous chapter in Democracy in America in which de Tocqueville describes the frenzy that overcomes Americans during election campaigns, and I could have written an appendix about our own election merely by producing an electrocardiogram of my own heartbeat. Continually I orated—privately to friends, intimately to the inside of my head, publicly to my readers—about fascism and Bonapartism and the toadies of Marshall Pétain. And yet, in the days immediately before the election—still more disgracefully, on election day itself, while strolling to the public school to mark my ballot—worse yet, on post-election day, when I knew how things had turned out—I was amazed to notice that, regardless of the republic and its traumas, I was vibrating in happy sympathy with the natural marvels of the Brooklyn sidewalks.

These caught my attention because, in the autumn light, which in November becomes exceptionally clear, every last thing begins to shimmer and glow. The trees lining the streets undergo their transformations, and, behind them, the hidden rows of stately brownstones likewise change color, which is amazing to see. Subtly the browns begin to redden. Every tinted molecule appears to be in flight from one point on the color spectrum to another, and, amid the chromatic chaos, the houses and the trees appear almost to be nodding and curtsying at one another. Miracles like these cry out for interpretation. I want to know, who planned these sidewalk astonishments? Who was the forgotten architectural genius? Are these the mystic emanations of the Over-Soul? The weightless leaves scatter beneath my shoe soles. I am not describing nothing. And yet, I haven’t forgotten—I do know that something is gigantically wrong.

It's a common enough observation that people under a sentence of death become acutely aware of the beauty and wonder of the physical world they're about to leave. Trump's election, it seems, can have a similar effect.

I have to say it's something of a relief that Berman spares us any more of the endless commentary about the left-behind white working class, the smugness of the elite liberal world-view, etc. etc. etc.. For the moment, until the dust settles and we see how Trump actually conducts himself in office, a retreat into quietude seems about as good a response as any.

I'm sure we'll get the old politically acute Berman back soon - if he doesn't head off to a retreat somewhere up in New England. I'll still read him, whichever way he goes.