“What a change of temper a fixed income will bring about.”

No, I did not just win the lottery, nor did my aunt in Bombay fall off her horse and leave me her fortune.  That's a quote from Virginia Woolf, who experienced said change of temper "when her aunt, out for some fresh air in Bombay, fell off a horse and left her niece an annual income 'forever,' as Woolf writes with gratitude in A Room of One’s Own."

Woolf's famous book is appropriately cited in this article in the New York Times, which was literally painful to read.  The lad in the piece is just 32, and they say he has "endured" a daunting housing history.  At 32?  Nuh-uh.  The struggle to find acceptable, affordable housing without having to take soul-crushing measures to secure it, has defined the last twenty years of my life.  It's why I lived in Eastern Europe for a third of them.  It has also forced me into compromising situations and cynical relationships with those ensconced in our "Ownership Society."  And it has finally ended me up here in the parapet at the Seven Hills orphanage in the ruins of the haunted Palace of Dunga.

I can't help but think that one reason a generation of truer, better writers and artists has not emerged in the US or Europe since the seventies is because it's too much work being poor these days.  This is not to say there aren't scores of talented, technically competent writers and artists out there — I know many, myself — but the conditions don't seem to favor the forging of the sort of spirit and soul of the artist capable of feats of true transcendence. 

Affordable housing is part of that equation, as prosaic as it sounds.  There would have been no Lost Generation if the cost of living in Paris in the twenties had been comparable to what it is today.  The Beatniks could not have survived, much less flourished in Greenwich Village as it now exists.  What's needed is a city life that does not crush those whose sensitivity doesn't suit them for the kind of work you can make a living with, that allows them to be poor without relegating them to poverty so abject it destroys them.

One answer to this perennial problem has been to professionalize the arts — in other words, to transform the arts into the kind of work you can make a living with. And this works remarkably well for many talented, technically competent artists.  And I know many people plying their arts out there very viably.  Whether the hustling, networking, and endless "consulting" jobs allow them no time for their "true" vocation, or whether they have actually found their true vocation in the hustling, networking, and so on, becomes a chicken-and-egg question after a time.

What I know from my own struggles as a writer-for-hire is that even moderately worthwhile writing (which I consider both craft and art, myself) requires enormous energy from many different parts of a person.  The great blog explosion should put to rest any lingering doubts that typing and writing really are not the same.  To get to writing that is something more than personally meaningful but might also be intelligible to others on occasion, is no mean feat.  To be consistently interesting (and I'm by no means making any claims for myself here) is an achievement as rare as a lunar landing. 

There is a degree to which strife develops one part of a writer (like the struggles captured beautifully by Orwell in his delightful Down and Out in Paris and London).  But to develop the others takes endless reflection, and ceaseless practice.  Thinking and writing clearly are not by any means easy.  To develop the whole artist takes dedication, discipline, and time.  And, truly, a room of one's own.

I was reading another interesting article about what some are seeing as the New Anti-Intellectualism.  I don't know if I agree there's anything all that new here, but I will say that "educated" people in the States are shockingly less educated than they were a generation or two ago, and inarguably less so than educated people in much of the rest of the world.  Cultural literacy, I'm talking here.  And I agree it's not a question of IQ so much as inclination.  There's no question it's the value system that's changed.

It sounds snobby, I know, but there is no core curriculum here, and little agreement as to the function and form of a liberal arts education.  It may seem like a frivolous concern, but its actually the stuff of a common language.  Even highly educated people with similar backgrounds don't have a common language that has the reach and depth to really express their humanity intelligently and intelligibly.  We can snicker about American Idol or scoff at Mitt Romney's White House run, but none of what is readily available to us culturally is on the scale of popular resources of a generation or two before us. 

And not to get all doomy and gloomy on you, but it doesn't seem to be getting better, particularly.  There was an excellent piece in a recent issue of the New Yorker about Megan Meier, the teenager who committed suicide after being taunted by neighbors pretending to be someone they weren't on My Space.  Talk about growing up absurd.   This was the exchange that led to her death:

[A classmate's] message to Megan, as Josh, said that he had heard she was mean to her friends. In the course of the day, Megan’s anxiety escalated. “What???” she wrote at 8:57 P.M. “Umm how bout no were the hell u gewt this?” she wrote, frantically, at 8:59. At 9:00: “Who are u even talkin bout umm ya idk.” 9:03: “Ok how bout no tell me who they are and ya so w/e u know u ant to nice ur self!!!!!” 9:05: “What the hell did I even say?”

Reading the piece you can't help but feel the barrenness of the cultural landscape.  We have these marvelous instruments to make music at our disposal, and yet we're banging out noises with sticks and stones. 

It's all connected.  Courtly love would not exist without the troubadours.  That's not an exaggeration. Whole species of emotion go extinct when language becomes slash-and-burn.  Art and language aren't ancillary to our humanity, they're its foundation.  We give humanity precious little space to grow these days.  And the thing of it is, the soul doesn't need an expanse.  A room of its own will do.