Making It by Norman Podhoretz

Author:Norman Podhoretz
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: [No data]
Publisher: New York Review Books
Published: 2017-03-11T05:00:00+00:00

6. IN AND OUT OF NIHILISM (AND UNIFORM)

I WOULD not have missed the excitement and joy of those five months in New York for anything, but when the bill was presented on December 15, 1953, they turned out to have been a very expensive time—more expensive than I could comfortably afford. The life of an army recruit would have been difficult for me to bear under any circumstances, as it is difficult for everyone to bear, and certainly if I had been plummeted from the condition of young-gentlemanhood I had enjoyed at Cambridge directly into the subhuman servitude which is for all practical purposes the condition of the military trainee, I would have suffered torment enough. At Cambridge I had had a somewhat adulterated taste of what the class system was like at the top; now I got an entirely unadulterated taste of what it was like at the bottom. What it was like down there was, not to put too fine a point on it, pure hell. It was a place where you were pushed around every minute of the day, forced to do backbreaking menial work, denied any physical comfort or liberty of movement, deprived of individuality, and treated with contempt. All this, as I say, would have been bad enough under any circumstances, but going into the army out of a condition of budding literary fame and growing self-confidence—the condition, in short, of being a somebody—made the experience as nearly unendurable as anything I have ever undergone.

All through the first freezing weeks I spent in the bleak wastes of Fort Dix, New Jersey—always hungry because there was never enough to eat, always exhausted because there was never enough sleep, badly constipated because there was never enough time to use the toilet properly, even after one had become relatively accustomed to sitting on it in an open row along with five other grunting men—I would marvel to myself at how easily and swiftly life could strip you down to nothingness, how it could rob you in a mere instant not only of everything you had but of everything you were. I had begun to acquire a name and overnight, literally overnight, they had taken it away and given me a number. I had finally found a world in which I knew how to move about with a bit of skill and grace, and they had seized me by the throat early one dark winter morning and hurled me into a world which in every detail seemed to have been constructed for the express purpose of rendering me inept: a world built to all my weaknesses and not a single one of my strengths. I was in a righteous, self-pitying rage with life for being able to do such a thing, to get away with it, and in a fury too with every veteran I had ever talked to, every book I had ever read about the army, and every movie I had ever seen. Why had they lied?

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.