Point of View Honk If You . . .

“All of a sudden, it got more exciting — don’t you feel that too?” I said the Friday of Memorial Day weekend to Jen Landes, our arts editor. “I mean, our chances of being in an accident have just increased a thousandfold! All of a sudden, the stakes are raised, the level of intensity has soared. As in wartime or in lovemaking, or in lovemaking during wartime, the blood is flowing, no longer congealed by winter’s icy clutch. In the next few weeks I’m going to be really alive, giving full rein to my emotions rather than simply going through the motions.”

And with that, I was out the door and wheeling into traffic just in time to see a woman who’d rolled through a stop sign near the flagpole remonstrating vehemently with blameless drivers heading east and west on Main Street. “It is you, madam, you who are at fault!” I was about to call out, but she, still raging, was gone, thus denying to me what Philip Roth has called the ecstasy of sanctimony. Choler interruptus.

And then, of course, there’s the local news of late: They say they own us, that they can do what they want with their property, they say they can make as much noise as they want on arriving and taking off. Oh, ecstasy of sanctimony! Does not the communal good exert a more worthy claim to conscience than the license invoked by “haves” equating license with liberty? The gorge rises, the heart pounds, the tongue lashes. This is really living, and whom do we have to thank for it, for having revivified our torpid souls? Them! So, I urge you, don’t rush to judgment — even though it’s fun. Rather than vilified, they are more to be pitied perhaps. Working so hard as they do, they have little time to relax and think of the greater good. And so I say, as the season begins, “Honk if you love peace and quiet.”

Having had a taste of excitement, then, we decided to go whole hog, and spend a day in the city. Soon we were swept up in it, in the huddled masses, yearning for falafels.

But, wonderful to tell, there was ease there, a calm we’d almost forgotten. The sun was out in the city and it was, we agreed, as we walked along, a nice place to be. We struck up conversations easily, wished others well in parting, and returned here at peace, our heart rates having returned to normal and our sense of brotherhood renewed.