I have never bought a copy of The New Yorker. I have read a number of articles over the years, and mostly liked them, and I have often thought about subscribing, without ever finding the courage to do it. The other day I saw an old issue on the table of a café. For I moment I decided to grab it, put it in my bag and read it on the flight home. Then I thought of what my father would think.
My father runs a construction company. He has done that for his whole life after taking over from my grandfather who took over from his father in law. When my grandfather died my father was 32, he took over a company with more than 100 workers and a complicated financial situation. Back in those days, employing people was a pride and a responsibility[1]. Construction, like manufacturing, needs people of all kinds. The entrepreneur - in the Italian North-East trained on the shop floor more often than in school - a few engineers and architects, middle managers - if you are big enough, which is rare - and workers[2].
Visiting the construction sites is a daily ritual. Owner and workers know perfectly well about their different roles, and what that means. There is no illusion of equality and yet no tangible feeling of the opposite. As you arrive, the most visible symbol of status is left in the parking lot. Once in, differences fade. Your shoes carry the same mud, your hands are dirty with the same dust. You drink the same coffee - in the old days often mixed with red wine - and the fanciest place you can retreat to is a container turned office, where cigarette butts rest sadly in small plastic cups.
It is partly the job and party, I guess, the town. I come from a small provincial town in the north of the country where everybody goes to public school and we don't really have an intellectual class. There are lawyers and doctors and other people with a degree. In my family, it is me and my mum - an English teacher. My father started but never finished. Education is not measured in habits or social circles - that's more of a big city thing. It is rather a matter of taste: the books you read, the place you visits, what you know of history and art.
Contemporary art is where I often draw the line between education and intellectualism[3]. "Education" is the ability to appreciate the beautiful. Intellectualism requires a jump in sophistication, the one required to appreciate most contemporary art. You go to a museum or a gallery - by itself a deliberate act - and walk through art pieces whose meaning is rarely confined to what the eye can see. Classical art is more democratic and more popular, religious art in particular. It is exhibited or directly painted in churches that you can simply visit. Churches themselves are pieces of art meant to be seen and visited by everyone. Even today when most visitors are there more for the frescos than for the mass, churches attract the blue-collar tourists, the one arriving by bus with their home made sandwiches, the ones that don't really care about staying at an Airbnb so that they can experience local cafes at brunch time.
My love-and-shame relationship with The New Yorker is all here. It is the struggle between what I like and what I fear becoming. I have moved abroad, I live in a city, I have recently been to the cinema to watch a documentary about some Japanese female divers from a remote fishing village. What do I have left in common with the workers in my father's construction company?
Where the gap between my father and them was more about wealth mine is more about taste. Food and restaurant tastes, wine choices, books, the nearly complete elimination of tv from my life. Maybe all of this is normal and that's just the way it works when you decide to leave your hometown and do something else with your life.
Maybe. I remember a story I used to listen to when I was a child. It was the story of this boy who is too good and then one day he wakes up with a pair of wings growing out of his back. He is becoming an angel. He then starts doing all kind of bad things, but he overcompensates and he becomes a devil instead, with tail and all. Finally, he manages to get back to normal. From that day he will again be a good boy, but when it is time to go to bed, just once in a while, he will skip brushing his teeth. That subscription can wait.
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[1] Since we are in 2017, the company doesn't employ that many people anymore. A couple of full-time staff in then office and contractors for the actual work. Since we are in Italy, the company is always on the brink of death. Everything related to the old days is coloured by nostalgia.
[2]An under-explored topic in the transition from a manufacturing economy to a service and information one is the erosion of social diversity at the company level. In tech companies most people have similar status and education, there is little difference between them. When that exist, like in the case of uber drivers, it's pushed out of the company.
[3] Not meant in a derogatory way.