The Last Word
Walsh, Lawrence
THE LAST WORD Lawrence Walsh WHAT AVAIL WITHITNESS? Someone whose opinion I respect but probably shouldn't told me not long ago to get with it. Get with it I did. His urging at first had to do...
...I know that my yearly set-asides for the IRA I've opened will be just so many coins thrown into a wishing well...
...My groping researches into itness were a fine, ennobling thing and all that, but it was past time I struck a bargain with the implacable world around me, hang the consequences...
...There is no winking from the page...
...That may be...
...If you don't now, and, like me, you read magazines from back to front, you will by the time you've been through the edging-toward-war group of pieces in the front of the book...
...He apprehensively fingered my tie for the day, taking offense at a pattern that one might call bold...
...Oh, I fell to...
...I was prostrate with a sense of my dereliction...
...My finances—then, as now, in calamitous repair—are no recommendation for one already hiking the first rolling foothills of middle age...
...Where did you prep...
...Out came a handsome brochure, Intimations of Mortality and the Under-Forty World Beater, published by the Young Republicans...
...In any event, I've steamed mine open...
...Let it be said that I have long been preoccupied, not with withitness, but with itness itself, with quiddity...
...We moved on to my finances, my abominably unwithit finances, but only after completing an inventory of my unwithit habits, manners, and possessions...
...My friend, who went to Andover and Princeton and would never say drape, drapes, or drapery when curtain was called for, knew perfectly well where I "prepped...
...My tie, as I now know, was unfashionably, obsolescently broad...
...But the width was the true source of his perturbation...
...Kierkegaard believed that "we come into this world with sealed orders...
...A little money grubbing now, and I wouldn't fetch up in one of those dark oubliettes of a nursing home you read about in gripe sheets like The Progressive...
...My Adam's apple will no longer quiver with sartorial shame...
...It is in Great Neck, New York...
...Here's what I know...
...So it was that I had to sit through a long lecture on shiftlessness and lack of foresight...
...Good God, man, look at that...
...Most men would have gone crackers, the fruits of such an uncompromising exposition of their unwithitness raining down pitilessly on their dull heads, but not I. A student of the self, I could see there was room for improvement...
...This I did at once...
...Skilled tie surgery can save those handsome, costly matador capes you've been hanging from collars...
...and who knows what a good clinician would have charged for such a bracing recitation...
...Wide ties slimmed...
...His urging at first had to do with my neckties...
...We pored over the Individual Retirement Account provisions...
...A stern and mortifying lecture it was, bristling with morals extruded from Aesopian fables (yes, yes, the story of the ant and the grasshopper—the one wily and tomorrow-bent, the other witless and carefree...
...Ontology, if you like...
...So do you...
...His counsel was simple, prescriptive: Banish them to a fat farm...
...I would die quietly in my sleep (clean linen) in George Bush City, Arizona...
...Perplexed) under my arm...
...This matters to me more than I can or should say...
...And I'd owe it all to withitness— to an ant-like presence of mind acquired back in the early 1980s—and to my IRA, never mind the neat desecration of those initials holy to my County Clare forebears...
...I had not...
...The tax break details and IRA rules need not detain us...
...My old age would not need be a gloss on the Book of Lamentations...
...What a lifting of the heart I felt when I boarded Spaceship Reagan, a fresh copy of the bourgeois script (Frank Sinatra's Guide for the Lawrence Walsh, an associate editor of The Progressive, is trying to edge toward solvency...
...So were both of my other ties...
...But as you were...
...Ants and grasshoppers alike have acquiesced in the death of reason...
...It was an impressive, withit exegesis of the Economic Recovery Shuck 'n' Jive Act of 1981...
...I was electrified to learn that if I could gin myself up to sock away $2,000 a year until, say, my sixtieth birthday, the abracadabra of compound interest and the IRA tax exemption would build me a geezer's bankroll way into the six figures, as they say...
...I'd have a good supply of argyle socks, thin ties, fat ties, you name it...
...A compact with self-destruction has been made in our names...
...All this took place in Madison, Wisconsin, a town of boisterous, uncaring American good fun, where everything is sort of flecked with draft foam...
...they've been well covered by the conventional press...
...Less is more...
...Look here, friend, have you given no thought to retirement...
...They make for a penitential exercise, for writers, editors, and readers...
...I should soon have back three scaled-down upscale ties...
...I resolved to blend henceforth the practical and the philistine with the impossible and philosophical...
...I know better...
...This was accomplished with a kind of insane vigor...
...I am thirty-six and penniless...
...So reads an ad for the firm that I have engaged...
...They confront our true condition: Our lives are in the hands of men who shouldn't be allowed out after dark without carfare and a note from home...
...I understood, though, that life was at least a two-front war...
...that curtain you're wearing...
Vol. 46 • February 1982 • No. 2
