Reckonings
Nonfiction
Mānoa Books, 2025
$20.00, 82 pages ISBN: 979-8987371879
What is the value of a life? Let’s get specific – the value of a human life. After living a human life for seventy-seven years Thomas Farber, author of over thirty works ranging from fiction to screenplay, had an insight. The kind of insight that comes from merely paying attention, and from, I would offer, living that life in possession of some kind of empathy. How could he not, after all? He is a writer, and to write well means having at least some interest, some predilection toward other humans. This is important to mention, because, as we shall see, not everyone does.
The insight, he recalls in the opening lines of Reckonings, happened while watching humans at a local café.
...“outta the blue” as they say, it dawned on me that everyone I could see—older guy with upscale cowboy boots writing a novel;
very senior citizen again saying she’d just turned ninety-three; barista José affectionately calling me pinche Pelon; woman reading
Sri Aurobindo’s The Life Divine—these regulars, not to mention the panhandlers, university students, parents with children
heading past the homeless / unhoused to the bakery collective...just like that it dawned on me: all sentenced to death. Mortal, that
is to say.
I imagine Farber sitting at a small circular table imagining their lives, in all their fullness and dullness, self-absorbed interiority and heroic generosity, passing him on this day of days when the insight lands, when he was ready, maybe.
No one chooses to be born, and no one can help being what they are.
Farber’s Reckonings is written like the resonance of thought after you sit with it awhile, told in story-fashion as if you were sitting together, discussing the meaning of life and other well-worn yet unproductive paths. His reflections on human nature augmented by characters in his life; parents, writers, actors. People who manifest, I believe, the care and thoughtfulness in using the years they were given on this planet to do something meaningful. Which brings up Farber’s antithesis.
Donald J. Trump, sixth month of his second time around as president of our oligarchy-autocracy-democracy hybrid. Status report:
DJT’s stern—abusive?—father Fred (1905–1999). Young Donald a bully, mean to other children? In need of being “shaped up,”
sent off to military academy at age thirteen. Paternal bequest? Wealth, deceitfulness, racism, payoffs to the mob. And, as mentor
exemplar, vicious Roy Cohn (1927–1986). Always attack. Distract, deflect, delay. Hence (?) grownup Donald for decades stiffing,
self-promoting, sullying. Swindling.
Good choice. It’s easy to think highly of humanity when the person being observed is manifestly amiable. It’s another thing altogether when the subject is “another incarnation of that all-American archetype, salesman who sells ‘himself’ to himself.” When humility is excised, especially in a national leader, all that is left is debilitating hubris.
Farber’s language and tone are not only appealing to the ear, but also to one’s sense of humor. In what I can only describe as anti-hyperbolic synecdoche (anti-, because the resume he builds from DJT’s antics would seem an exaggeration were they describing just about anyone else), Farber eviscerates number forty-seven’s (easy to do; just report the facts) “autoeroticism of power,” the end result of his moral blindness, his denial of death, and so, his denial of the human.
And this, I think, is Farber’s point.
DJT (I use the initials, as does Farber, because I cannot easily bring myself to write his name) didn’t choose who he was, nor can he help being what he is, but he can help how he deals with other humans. No one can help being what they are. “People just can’t help themselves. Of course you’re still free, being who you are, to choose what to affirm or oppose in others.” So, it seems to Farber that this second insight is no excuse for being an asshole.
Farber contrasts the banality of a sadly one-sided human archetype with real, normal people. Again, the writer’s job, acceptance with humility, reminding us of who we are in the face of facile authoritarianism.
Despite having worked steadily at giving so many books away, still more than a thousand in my garage library. On the shelves, the
life’s work of so many gifted writers. How lucky I am to have had such teachers, compatriots, companions!
This is what expands the human heart and mind. It is something that is foreign to people like DJT who have traded the joy of humanity for an obsession. In his denial of death, of the only thing in life he cannot prevent, he is addicted to naming buildings after himself. In this, he “pre-embalms himself for posthumous fame.”
Farber’s book calls for a reckoning, to be sure. A calling to account of the powerful who do not act, govern, or serve the people. But, I wonder, maybe it is more than that. Maybe this book is a calling to account of Farber’s own, and by extension ours as well, response to the prospect of the demise of the powerful:
But if he was all alone in the ocean, and if he was crying out for help, arms flailing, going down a second time...yours truly
standing on the beach beholding something so insanely improbable...though loathsome, he’d still be...a human being. In the
moment, such a person going under right before my eyes, would I try to save him? Well: for sure I’d need time to weigh the
options.
DJT’s hypothetical demise? Coming to terms with his own boundaries? What would I do? The very choice could make us question our own humanity.