As an essayist, I welcome all words that will fit appropriately in my essays. There are several million people who write better essays than I do, including Christopher Hitchens. Hitchens is in love with the words he writes and the longer and more obscure terms suit him greatly. My essays are less esoteric and deal with the real world as I find it in my later life.
You may recall that I write essays as a means to repair the damage to my brain caused by a stroke in 1997. According to the official historian, Jenny Masis, this essay is number 612 since I embarked upon the brain repair department. It also means that I have been writing essays for nearly 14 years and if the truth were known, the essays are a good bit of work but I find them rewarding as well.
Jenny Masis is the person who cleans the house every two weeks but who is also under Judy’s guidance the official filer and the apprentice at computer work. When Jenny tells you that this is the 612th essay that has been written at this desk, you may take it to the bank. In all of those essays there are two words that have never been used and they are probably never to be used as long as I am in charge of my mental faculties. Those words are “proactive” and “surreal.” Let us take each one of them individually and reveal my reasons for disliking them.
Let us start with “proactive.” The dictionary says that “proactive” means taking action and making changes before they need to be made. The synonyms are “sensible” and “reasonable.” My comment on “proactive” is that there is a redundancy here. The first syllable is “pro” which means in advance of things and active, which means that some corrective action should be taken. If we come down to the real reason why I dislike “proactive,” it is that it was used repeatedly by one of my colleagues at AT&T. He was a preacher’s son from Iowa, and considering that I knew this person more than 25 years ago, I still regard him as a colossal horse’s ass. The fact that he used “proactive” turned me off that word and ever since, I have seen no reason to put that word into my vocabulary.
Now we turn to the word “surreal.” The dictionary definition of the word “surreal” is “marked by the intense irrational reality of a dream; unbelievable, fantastic, etc.”
The synonyms for “surreal” are as follows: strange, funny, weird, unreal, idiosyncratic, etc.
I have a lot more sympathy for the word “surreal” than I do for “proactive.” But my lack of enthusiasm is encouraged by the fact that “surreal” has a dream like substance to it.
I have been non-sighted or blind for more than six years. I find that getting along as a non-sighted person in the sighted world has a surreal characteristic to it. Taking a shower without ever seeing the soap is a surreal experience. The same goes for walking up and down steps. I am able to take care of all of my personal needs, for example, needing occasional help. I am able to dress myself. Admittedly, I don’t try any Windsor knots in my neckties.
When it comes to operating in the dark, as blind people are required to do, I find that there is a dream like quality to life lived in darkness. Perhaps the only advantage that arises from the darkness is when the electricity fails. In that circumstance, I am able to navigate a good bit better than sighted persons. But that is no recommendation for people to become un-sighted or blind.
In short order, it will be six and one-half years since the surgeons at Wills Eye Hospital in Philadelphia told me that unfortunately they could do no more to bring back my eyesight. I was not surprised by this announcement because glaucoma quickly wraps its grimy arms around the eyes of members of the Carr family. Secretly I did not welcome the news but I accepted it matter-of-factly because it meant no more trips, of which there were hundreds, to the eye physicians. Shortly after reaching home from my last trip to Philadelphia, I wrote the story called “Sing No Sad Songs for this Old Geezer.” That was my first attempt at telling my friends and casual acquaintances that I disliked pity and all of the unhappiness that goes with that term.
Dr. Beamer, my cardiologist, said to me a week or two ago that I had “accepted blindness” and that I had “moved on.” That is pretty much exactly what I had in mind. For example, I find that I like to go to the Whole Foods market and to a restaurant here in Millburn because they never consider pity as the base to our relations. The exchanges in both cases are fairly ribald, which again, suits me well.
Obviously I am not happy with being blind, but I am continually reminded that perhaps there are others who are much worse off. Aside from the blindness issue, I suppose I should be concerned with the fact that age, now in my 90th year, is creeping up on me.
When I joined the American Army and left to report to Jefferson Barracks, I made a fundamental mistake in that I told my mother that I would be fighting on the same side as the British, and she should not worry about me. My mother hated everything that England stood for. She told me at that point, “Son, in that case you must do the best you can.” Those were her last words of the interview on the driveway which concluded with my leaving my home to catch the streetcar to go to Jefferson Barracks.
Surrealness did not make allowances for the inclusion of reality as doing the best you can. But in any case, what I conclude here is that the word “surreal” is a fairly nice word but I do not ever intend to use it in writing an essay or even in writing an email. If any of you are in need of a word to adorn your literary efforts, you have my permission to use “surreal” with great abandon. On the other hand, “proactive” is a different situation and for the better part of 30 years I have disliked the fellow who used it endlessly. “Proactive” and “surreal” are, in baseball terms, free agents and they will never appear in anything that I write. This is merely an attempt to get on the record the fact that both words are up for grabs because I will never use them again.
E. E. CARR
December 4, 2011
Essay 612
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Kevin’s commentary: In point of fact, I went to the folder on my computer where I keep the entire archive of Ezra’s Essays and searched the whole thing for the word “proactive.” It appeared three times. Once in 2005, in an essay called “POTPOURRI OF THOUGHTS Medit 11, 6-5-05,” then again in 2009 in a word entitled “THREE LITTLE WORDS” which is incidentally the title of a very nice little song by an artist named Frankmusik. More on topic, both of these former two essays use the word “proactive” only in the context of this previous colleague of Pop’s, and his overuse of this word. Pop has been campaigning, in essay form, against the word “Proactive” for eight and a half years. That’s dedication. Hell, that’s proactive dedication.