Earlier this year I canceled my subscription to the New Yorker. The damned thing comes on like a snowstorm, all prose and folly, a blizzard of words. It's impossible to read it all in the time allotted, and the following week it comes around and hits you again. It seemed so bourgeoisie to subscribe and yet not read it all, almost unethical. I felt ashamed of the issues lying about, drifts of them languishing, reminding me of my inattention, my dilettantism. So I canceled.
Usually I feel better after a decision. Not so here. I missed it. Friends would occasionally remark on New Yorker stories they'd read, and while I'm never bothered when a friend talks about a television show (I haven't lived with a television since moving to college), I felt sorely left out. This mattered more. Here was compendium of our best writing by our best writers, the mouthpiece of our culture's mind, our collected ideas about who we are and what we are about. But I had willingly, willfully, set it to mute.
So today I re-subscribed. There was no one to stop me, to throw themselves, open-armed, before me, pleading sense and reason. I figure I'll read it at the gym while climbing my one hundred twenty-five stories on the stair mill (thirty minutes of slightly breathless vertical effort that always lands me, oddly, in the same place).
Batten down the hatches.
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