To Be Superior

Mike Pohlman and me

It was the sixties: sit ins, free love, Viet Nam, The Beatles, Kennedy, civil rights, communes and real change.

I got an email from an old friend, a very literate and learned man who has read myriad books, traveled the world, penned and published a couple of books, earned a Master's Degree and taught children about the magic of reading. It was he more than anyone else who encouraged me to read and ultimately to write.

We joined a book club in the eighth grade and met authors  like Isaac Asimov and Arthur Clark. Mike would give book reports that would hold the class captive and the teacher would have to tell him to sit down because he could have gone on the whole hour and we would have loved it. We spent all of our junior and senior high school years together. Then college split us up and finally a break in college for me put me back in Saginaw for a while and Mike and I reconnected. Then, marriages and jobs split us up again, but only temporarily.

We exchanged letters (they were in envelopes and bore stamps issued by the United States Postal Service) at one point of our lives, great quantities of words and ideas about life, love and politics. We did this while we were young and just piercing the membrane of the insular sac of our own dreams and ambitions. Some of the letters were dark with stormy visions of the inhumanity of man to his fellows, some were superior and filled with disdain for the common folk around us. There were things to do, children to create, houses to build and ambitions to nurture into reality. Compromise was for the weak and malleable who bathed in their own uncertainty. We knew what was right and made covenants to lead man to a higher plane.

The email today used words that had a different flavor. There was a sentence that lit up like a flashing neon sign from a film noir. "You are disgracefully sentimental by the way. That's not bad. Just true."
I looked at the sentence for a long time. I wanted to make sure I knew how I felt about it. Then, after carefully considering the words and the source I decided that I quite liked it. Guilty, as charged.
©Herb Ratliff, May 12, 2012

My friend and I used to read a poem aloud by D. H. Lawrence called,

To Be Superior.

How nice it is to be superior!
Because, really, it's no use pretending, one really is superior, isn't one?
I mean people like you and me.

Quite! I quite agree.
The trouble is, everybody thinks they're just as superior
as we are; just as superior.

That's what's so boring! people are so boring.
But they can't really think it, do you think?
At the bottom, they must know we are really superior
don't you think?
don't you think, really, they know we're their superiors?

I couldn't say.
I've never got to the bottom of superiority.
I should like to.



Herb Ratliff, May 25, 2012