He can’t pay his bills but he has a second home . . . Whassup with that?

I just read Life in the Middle Ages, a reflective set of memoir-essays by James Atlas, who we discussed a few years ago in the context of his book about biography-writing, The Shadow in the Garden. Life in the Middle Ages came out twenty years ago, when Atlas was in his mid-fifties. The book is suffused with gentle regrets about his life and an awareness of how little time was left to him—which all makes me kinda sad since I’m almost 60!—actually will be 60 once this post appears—and, yeah, I think all the time about the dwindling number of years ahead of us. Atlas himself lived only to 70; to his credit, he completed his excellent Shadow in the Garden book in his late sixties. So he lived a full life, professionally speaking, even though in Life in the Middle Ages he expresses many regrets about his career setbacks.

I think the real problem with Atlas’s career has nothing to do with him; he just happened to enter a field—general-interest writing about literature—that was declining. Less people interested in literature, the gradual collapse of the economic model for newspapers and magazines, ease of mechanical reproduction so less need for live bodies doing the writing . . . put that all together, and Atlas in his career basically joined a decades-long game of musical chairs. When the chairs keep being removed, it’s natural to blame yourself, but it’s more just that he was caught in the wrong game. Which makes me sad because I love reading about literature. I think it would be cool to have been James Atlas, although I guess not in the later years when his audience declined, along with the rest of the audience for the sort of thing he was writing.

The other funny thing about Atlas’s book is that he talks about being broke—not poor, as he and his family seem to have all the possessions they might want, except for a fancy car (I don’t get why he wants a BMW or Jaguar, I guess it’s some sort of boomer thing?), but broke enough that they never have quite enough money to pay the bills, they’re always on the edge with credit card debt, he calls himself “lower upper middle class”—but then he keeps talking about the summer home they own in Vermont.

I can understand people being rich enough to have two homes, and I can understand people being broke enough to struggle to pay their bills every month—but it’s hard for me to picture both of these at once!

But then I had two thoughts which made it all clear to me:

1. The United States of America is kinda like James Atlas: We’re the richest country in the history of forever, we can have pretty much whatever we want (except that not everybody gets a BMW or Jaguar), and our national debt keeps going up, up, up. So, yeah, it’s possible to live the good life and have that second home, even though you can’t really pay your bills.

2. I’ve always been fortunate enough to have enough money to pay for whatever I want—I mean, not always, there’s a reason I ask for research grants to pay salaries for postdocs etc., but at a personal level, I can afford unlimited celery and Jamaican beef patties, pay to get my flat tires changed as needed, fly to faraway places, etc.—but I’m in an Atlasian mixture of debt and riches when it comes to time:

I have tons of free time, as is evidenced by (a) that I’m spending a half hour writing this blog post and (b) that I spent a couple hours earlier this week reading Atlas’s book, for no other reason than I felt like it. And this wasn’t even the only pleasure book I read over the Thanksgiving weekend. But I’m also in a continual time debt, a veritable treadmill of time commitments. I’m in the middle of writing 5 books and a few dozen research articles, and I keep taking on new projects. No way I can do all of these! But, as with Atlas and his finances, somehow I keep going.

So, from that point of view, my comfortable finances are an anomaly. Debt financing is the usual way of the world.