Recently, I’ve been reading books I first read when I was in high school. Having just finished Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, which was a real slog, I followed it with something much easier to get through.
Mary McCarthy’s The Group, first published in 1963, was a New York Times best seller for almost two years and was adapted into a hit movie in 1966 that marked the debut of Candice Bergen. The book and the movie tell the stories of eight young women friends, all from privileged backgrounds who graduate together from Vassar in 1933. The characters are treated with a somewhat satirical attitude as they navigate the social constructs of their time. There is also a hint of the autobiographical as Ms. McCarthy was, in fact, herself a member of that graduating class.
The issues that these young women faced in the 1930s (contraception, pre-marital and extra-marital sex, sexism in the workplace, mental illness, child-rearing and lesbianism, among others) were barely spoken of in the time of their stories. When the book was published and the movie released, these same issues were still sufficiently controversial to warrant attention. Today, discussing these issues is no longer verboten, but their topicality somewhat strangely continues.
While Vassar itself is not a part of the story, rather the common point from which the women’s stories begin, it provides a literary shorthand for the privileged or even elitist backgrounds of these characters. One of the Seven Sisters—a group of private liberal arts colleges in the Northeast, which have mostly been exclusive to women—Vassar is pretty much as good as it gets.
So I’m reading along in The Group, and a sentence jumps out at me. “That was the big thing they taught you at Vassar: keep your mind open and always ask for evidence, even from your own side.” A rather simple homily, but not so simple to employ practically in everyday life.
We’ve talked before about the evidence side of this equation, and it’s not a question of asking for it these days. Evidence, in the form of information about what individuals in positions of power and influence say and do, is presented that is too often biased or misleading at best and false at worst. Personally, I’ve come to despise the word “misinformation” as it suggests that there is some information in there somewhere, if one has the time, energy and resources to find it. Being manipulated or lied to is part of a mind game in almost any relationship or even any transaction with individuals or organizations, and that word does not carry the heft to describe the malignancy of so-called misinformation.
While it is quite true that a mind is a terrible thing to waste, it is also a terrible and very easy thing to close. Sometimes I have to use a doorstop to keep mine even partly open.
Our minds are often like those doors in hotels that are heavy and automatically close unless a packed suitcase is holding them open while we scurry to get the smaller bags inside the room. Even once the door is unlocked, it will put its weight into closing itself unless we intervene and overpower its ability to do what it was designed to do.
When I heard that the conclave had selected the new pope, my mind opened a little bit, unlocked so to speak, to find out more. I’m a heathen, so the question of who would occupy that office has only been of tangential interest to me. But when I heard that this new pope will be the first one from America, I confess that my mind straight to this:
Oh, dear Lord, another American on the international stage. What in the world were they thinking? Haven’t they had enough of American craziness this year? Or for longer than that, come to think of it? No, that’s not we need, certainly not now. Wasn’t there some reasonably nice guy from Italy or maybe Asia who could do a fairly good job and not take the Catholics back to the Inquisition?
I’m trying to keep an open mind on this guy. We’ll probably soon see more evidence of what he’s about. But on some of these other folks? Well, the evidence is in, and the mind game is over.
My mind is neither open nor closed. It’s simply made up.
