by Scott Samuelson
When I turned fifty, I went through the usual crisis of facing that my life was—so to speak—more than half drunk. After moping a while, one of the more productive things I started to do was to write letters to people living and dead, people known to me and unknown, sometimes people who simply caught my eye on the street, sometimes even animals or plants. Except in rare cases, I haven’t sent the letters or shown them to anyone.
Writing personal letters without any designs has been psychologically helpful. After venting any rage or confusion, I’ve found that what I have to say generally boils down to two things: I love you and I’m sorry. In the face of my mortality, it’s been good to be reminded of the strength of those two sentences and the connections built on their foundation. There’s something more than proper or quaint in addressing someone at the start of a letter as “Dear.”
Because our current president occupies more of my mental space than I’d prefer, he’s one of the people I’ve written a letter to. Dear Donald Trump. Then I ticked off a laundry list of grievances, going all the way back to the 80s.
When it finally dawned on me that I was addressing him as a figure rather than as a person, I began to wonder if I could talk to him human to human. Here’s a snippet of what I went on to write:
I’m having real troubles believing that you think of similar things as I do when you think about what makes life worth living. Am I wrong? For instance, that cry inside John Coltrane’s tone and Dolly Parton’s voice—do any songs at all break your heart with their beauty? Or what about friendship? When I recently visited a dear old friend of mine who lives in Brussels, my whole being flooded with joy when I saw his face at the airport. Do you have any such friends? What about a first love, a sweet pure love before puberty, before you even longed to kiss her (much less grab her by the pussy)—do you still dream of her? When you see, say, the first little daffodil after what has felt like three straight months of February, do you feel glad to be alive?
I continued like that in search of how we might connect over a fundamental good, away from the political shitshow that he’s in part responsible for.
But I couldn’t for the life of me imagine connecting with the guy about even a shred of what matters most to me: art, friendship, love, nature, sports, wine, teaching, reading, birdwatching. A glimmer of hope sent me down the road of family, but I soon hit a dead-end when I thought about how he didn’t hesitate in agreeing with Howard Stern’s description of his daughter as “a piece of ass.”
Don’t get me wrong. It wouldn’t shock me if the two of us could have a nice conversation. I don’t care or converse only about the essential things—far from it. I have plenty of crassness and superficiality in me where we could probably find some charming overlap. Not only do I have nothing against locker-room talk, I thoroughly enjoy it and am exasperated by the moral scolds of it. Plus, the guy can be funny, even if it’s not exactly my favorite kind of humor. It’s just that I have real trouble seeing even a twinkle of soul in him.
What I could imagine us chatting about are things like expensive artwork, high-powered acquaintances, hot supermodels, million-dollar views, box seats, swanky meals, Nobel Peace Prizes, comparative IQs. The money and status of it all, not the love and beauty of it all. The outer shell, not the living glory.
Could it be that his whole inner garden was paved over many years ago? Is it possible that there were no seeds in the soil to begin with?
Or is it me? Am I doing my president an injustice? Am I being uncharitable in utterly failing to see the humanity in this human? Have I been somehow blinded by the spray tan?
If I’m not wrong about him, how does this guy get through life? If God said to me, “You must experience the hard fate of being human—just without ever being in love, having friends, or knowing beauty,” maybe I’d cram the black hole with as much power, money, and fame as I could; maybe I’d seethe with resentment at people who had more than me, especially those with a baffling charm; maybe I’d dismiss as losers those who moon over childhood sweethearts and get off on jazz and flowers—unless they happened to chant my name or kiss my ring, in which case I’d shower them with phony affection until they were no longer useful; maybe I’d see language only as a tool of manipulation; maybe I’d develop a sense of humor that exacts my revenge on human life. Maybe. But I suspect that I’d be suicidal.
The more I wrote my letter, the more I discovered something surprising in me, something hidden behind my rage and frustration. I felt sorry for the guy. I began filling up with pity—a huge pity, a Trump-Tower-sized pity, what could have been a divine pity were it not for the fact that you and I have to live with the consequences of his tweets. As Pascal says, “We must have pity for one another, but we must feel for some a pity born of tenderness and for others a pity born of disgust.”
When I’ve dared to admit my underlying feeling for this polarizing American character, it hasn’t gone well. My anti-Trump pals think that my pity for him is a waste of emotional energy if not a grotesque response to someone I should have nothing but disdain or even hatred for, while my Trump-sympathetic pals think that I’m making a category error, bringing sentimentality to a political situation that calls for a bare-knuckles fighter. Maybe they’re right.
For what it’s worth, I have yet to find someone who says that my judgment of his character is wrong, someone who insists that he probably does have a sense of love beyond lust, a sense of friendship beyond strategic alliance, a sense of truth beyond power, and a sense of beauty beyond glitz and glamor. Though I’ve heard Christian nationalists compare him to King David to contextualize his personal sins within a divine mission, his transgressions—however disturbing—are not what really disturb me. What really disturbs me is that I can’t imagine this so-called David ever composing a psalm on his lyre. I can’t even imagine him being moved by a psalm. It’s devastating for me to think of him facing death.
Whether I’m right or wrong about the guy, I’ve drawn two meaningful lessons from my dead-end letter addressed to him—one personal and the other cultural, maybe even a touch political.
Part of the fifty-year-old blues involves wondering if you’ve achieved what you ought to have achieved, and if you still have time enough to do so. The big worry is that your future is already in your past. But when I think about even the most powerful person in the world deprived of what matters most to me, the love and beauty all around us, it shrinks the vanity in me, the very vanity that precipitated the crisis. You could say that it shrinks the Donald Trump in me. It brings into sharp focus the I love you and I’m sorry where my salvation lies.
As for the cultural (and maybe political) lesson, perhaps the greatest danger that Trump poses is that he’ll bring us down to his level, in which case whatever damage he causes will prove irreparable. So, it can’t be a matter of wanting whatever he has. Just the opposite. The health of our collective soul lies in a culture that looks down in pity and disgust on those whose concept of freedom is making others their bitch.
In Plato’s Republic, Socrates says that tyrants must “live their whole life without ever being friends of anyone, always one man’s master or another’s slave. The tyrannic nature never has a taste of freedom or true friendship.” He goes on to calculate that the philosophical life is precisely 729 times happier than the tyrannical life. If anything, that number strikes me as low.
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Scott Samuelson is the author of several books, including the upcoming To Taste: On Cooking and the Good Life.
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