A C H A P E L TA L K
by Maximilian J. Klein ’18 May 21, 2018
The Buzzards Hovering Over Us AFTER FIVE YEARS at Groton, there are almost no
classes that I’ve taken here that I’ve gotten absolutely nothing out of. There are many that I took just for requirements and many for which my only focus was getting homework done on a nightly basis. But all of them gave me at least something more to carry around in life. The classes I would say have given me the most have been my various literary classes: English, Spanish, Latin, and Greek. And of all the works I’ve read, analyzed, and written papers about, the most powerful for me was As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner. I won’t reveal what happens, but for those who haven’t read it yet, the plot is essentially about a family’s journey to go bury the recently deceased mother. I liked this book so much, because it portrays psychology at its purist. Every chapter is told in a stream of consciousness from a different character’s point of view, and the essential job of the reader at the end is to piece together the disjunction of experiences in order to find out what the true story is and what is still lacking at the end. Last week, the night before my AP literature exam, I reread all of my essays from the past two years so I could have something interesting to write about on the test. I found the paper for As I Lay Dying that I wrote for Mr. Goodrich last year, and I was reminded of a powerful image from the book. While they are transporting their mother’s body on a wagon, her week-old corpse releases the stench of death, attracting vultures, which fly above the wagon. But only one family member, Darl, acknowledges them. The rest sit around, contemplating their own goals, not mentioning a word of the buzzards or the horrendous smell coming from the coffin. Then Darl leans over to his brother and tries to alert him to the reality of their situation: “See them? High above the 64
Groton School Quarterly
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Fall 2018
house, against the quick thick sky, they hang in narrowing circles. From here they are no more than specks, implacable, patient, portentous.” Instead of snapping out of his “self-imposed immaturity” as Immanuel Kant would put it, Darl’s brother gets angry and unresponsive. Seeing this again also reminded me of a joke told by David Foster Wallace in a speech entitled “This Is Water:” “There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, ‘Morning, boys. How’s the water?’ And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, ‘What the hell is water?’” These two anecdotes got me thinking that the ultimate purpose of a critical, questioning, and subversive life must entail first to ask what is the water we are all swimming in, and then to point out the buzzards that are constantly flying above us. I feel these two anecdotes describe very well how much mental effort people can go through to avoid facing problems straight on. This exists quite obviously on the personal level in normal, everyday interactions, such as if someone blames failing a test on how much sleep they got the night before, without realizing that it was because they were underprepared. But this exists on the macrolevel in culture, politics, economics, and other large realms of society. This is not necessarily always bad. But we do have to honestly face the consequences of such evasive action and name the buzzards in the sky for what they are. And on the political realm, these buzzards do have a name: capitalism. Now, so that I don’t alienate too many of you, I want to emphasize that I do not think capitalism is some culmination of all evil. On the contrary, capitalism has indeed been the most liberating force in human history