Out Of This World

By Roger Rosenblatt

The teachers would catch me dreaming out the window and ask the shrill, predictable question, "Roger, would you care to rejoin the class?" I would think, "Not really," as I swiveled reluctantly toward Planet Earth. Being an apolitical junkie, I feel the same way in this season, which is an unacceptable (not to mention unemployable) position for a journalist. From time to time, I try to be interested in what they are saying--the specialists on TV and in the papers who are lecturing on Bush, Gore, Tecumseh, the tundra, [pi]r2. (Shouldn't it be "pi is squared"?) But a blind man could see that I am drifting downstream with a weed in my teeth.

"Don't you care about the political process?"

Not really. I care who winds up as President. I vote. I like Gore, and I'll vote for him. But I liked him long before the Year of Relentless Analysis. I do tend to get lost in fringe questions: How will Ezola Foster vote on NAFTA if Pat can no longer serve? But I'm not protesting anything. It is simply my nature to be out of things.

"Well, bully for you!"

This tendency has its penalties, as you may imagine. In the sixth grade, our teacher, having momentarily forced me to rejoin the class, asked anyone who had a musical instrument to bring it in and play it. As it happened, my aunt had bought me a guitar the day before, and though I had never played the guitar, I thought I'd do a few numbers. The next day I sat before my classmates, whose rising laughter nearly drowned out my one-chord rendition of Red River Valley. I just assumed that if I sat up there with my guitar, the ability to play it would come to me.

If need be, your worship, I can summon witnesses to defend my way of life, such as it is. In "Memories of West Street and Lepke," Robert Lowell lamented, "I was so out of things," to indicate he was praising the condition. Unhappily, one of the things he was out of was his mind. In a movie, Oscar Levant told Joan Crawford, "Don't blame me, lady. I didn't make the world. I barely live on it." Somerset Maugham dignified the dreaming-out-the-window business. "A state of reverie," he said, "does not avoid reality; it accedes to reality." I like that--accedes to reality.

"I'm sure you do!"

It suggests that being out of things is a way of seeing the things one is out of more clearly. Like the old visual puzzle that showed nine dots in the shape of a square, and you had to connect them all in a single diagram, without lifting your pen from the paper. The solution was to draw the connecting lines starting outside the dots.

Like Holden Caulfield in speech class, when the kids were taught to yell out "Digression! Digression!" at anyone who got off point, the point of which being...

"Yes, yes. We get it. So now you're claiming a uniquely brilliant perspective. Oh, please."

You're right, of course. The whole point of being out of things is not to justify it, not to pretend any grand intentions. Holden never felt the need to explain himself, nor did Huck. (Both, I believe, could have grown up to be capable journalists.) To be out of things has to mean everything, including the implication that one is a superior person for being there. Yet, I tell you, I do feel better this way.

Would you care to rejoin the class? Would you care to rejoin the program in progress? Would you care to rejoin Cokie and Sam and Tim and Wolf? (I wish that Wolf were on Fox.) Would you care to rejoin the parties, the pollsters, the civil service, the Civil War, the Elks, Moose, Masons, Mummers, the American Legion, the French Foreign Legion, the Boy Scouts, the team, the league, the gang, the clique, band, guild, the company, the task force, the committee, the subcommittee, the staff, the tribe, sect, clan, caste, phylum, genus, species? The presidential race? The human race? Not really.

"Very funny, very clever. What about you? Are you ever going to grow up?"

I hope not.

"Know what your trouble is? You think most political thinking goes no deeper than sports reports. You think people can figure out the qualities of their leaders without the aid of intermediaries. You think daydreaming is a way to fly above all that, when it's really an act of hostility."

Have you been reading Gail Sheehy?

"You're a snob, that's what you are. And the worst sort of snob. You claim to be on the side of the people when it is obvious you don't want anything to do with people. You're a jerk. You're a loser. Hey, you! I'm talking to you!"

Outside the window, the day breaks like an egg over a red Schwinn bike that powers itself toward the smiling sun. The ball game is about to begin. Someone is handing out free guitars and chocolate shakes. The school has just burned to the ground. And I am kissing Ashley Judd.