The Last Page
Berman, Paul
If this were a nineteenth-century book and not a modern magazine, the last few entries of a lengthy, cluttered index might appear right here, listing every conceivable and inconceivable topic...
...I think a misunderstanding is at work...
...The book is called A Rebel in Defense of Tradition: The Life and Politics of Dwight Macdonald, and proceeds for 564 pages, which is long...
...Every new technology replaces an older technology that used to be no different...
...and humanity has always flicked through whatever entertainment is at hand, looking for the good parts...
...The downward development of culture is actually a permanent depressed plateau...
...We see very few indexes like that anymore...
...It is always imagined today that something in the human brain has been lost in our high tech culture, that we have become frivolous where once we were grave, that television— worse, the remote control switch—is the symbol and culprit of every lamentable downward development in the human soul...
...Here is the new biography of Dwight Macdonald by Michael Wreszin, published by Basic Books...
...Your eye lights upon "attitude about having affairs," followed instantly by "attitudes toward Jews...
...People worry that massive indexes advertise a volume's dullness...
...In modem academic tomes, it is the bibliography that runs on forever—not the index...
...But that is doubtful...
...And the thing is already a must-read...
...And so, with the right-hand thumb holding down the index page at the back, the left-hand thumb surfs through the text, and in that manner a book is read, not very thoroughly, perhaps...
...Macdonald, Dwight," the biographee himself, receives three and a half pages of listings, divided into subsets that constitute a mini-biography of their own, beginning: "CHARACTERISTICS: anglophilia, 7, 307, 310-13...
...appearance of letters, 14, 521n4...
...Today, the remote control...
...But that is an error...
...Why do so few nineteenth-century-style grand-scale indexes appear in books today...
...PAUL BERMAN q 288 • DISSENT...
...If this were a nineteenth-century book and not a modern magazine, the last few entries of a lengthy, cluttered index might appear right here, listing every conceivable and inconceivable topic along with the appropriate page number...
...Massive indexes are lightness itself...
...You read an index the way you click a remote control at a television set...
...And yet, from time to time the old nineteenth-century inspiration does seize a modern publisher, and you turn to the back of a fresh new book, and the double columns of little print deploy across an astounding number of pages, and you discover at once a rare but not lesser joy of reading...
...But on page 565 the index begins, precisely as you would expect it to do ("Aaron, Daniel, 554n15"), except that it keeps doing for twenty-five additional pages of tiny print and tinier arcana...
...attitudes toward Jews, 11, 111-12, 228-32, 483...
...attitudes toward women, 7, 24-26, 243...
...yesterday, the index...
...Books published by commercial publishers today tend to have no index at all, and the books that are published by university presses contain miserable shrunken indexes of a mere seven or eight or perhaps fifteen pages, but not more, which, from a nineteenth-century point of view, is brevity itself...
...Humanity has always needed food and shelter and pleasant company...
...The dull parts of a book are the ordinary chapters, which you must plod through a page at a time...
...But indexes are for channel surfing...
...attitude about having affairs, 35, 258-59...
...Computers have made indexing a far simpler task than was ever the case in the past, so the problem cannot really be the expense...
...But not all pleasures are thorough, as the booklovers of the nineteenth century knew...
Vol. 42 • April 1995 • No. 2
