Night Thoughts

By Shawn Wallace

This “acerbic yet compassionate” meditation on humanity by the acclaimed actor and playwright offers “curiosity, thoughtfulness, sharp logic, deep emotion” (Publishers Weekly, starred review).
 
Beloved actor and Obie Award–winning playwright Wallace Shawn has been an incisive commentator on civilization and its discontents for decades. Now, having recently passed the age of seventy and watched Donald Trump claim the presidency, he offers a late-stage critique of his species, which he sees as being divided between the lucky and the unlucky.
 
In Night Thoughts, Shawn takes the lucky—himself included—to task for their complacency while offering fascinating reflections on “civilization, morality, Beethoven, 11th-century Japanese court poetry, and his hopes for a better world, among other topics” (Publishers Weekly, starred review).

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: May 22, 2017
• ISBN: 9781608468133

Book preview

Praise for Night Thoughts

With impeccable logic, [Shawn] gently, but lethally, skewers the complacency of the lucky while highlighting the plight of the less fortunate, including the Muslims living in the slums of European cities, the maid of a wealthy friend, and a boy at a dance who shoots someone flirting with his girlfriend.

—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

• • •

Praise for Essays

Lovely, hilarious and seriously thought-provoking.

—Toni Morrison

Wallace Shawn writes in a style that is deceptively simple, profoundly thoughtful, fiercely honest. His vocabulary is pungent, his wit delightful, his ideas provocative.

—Howard Zinn

It’s short and easy to read but incredibly thought-provoking and novel in its own subtle, idiosyncratic way.

—Glenn Greenwald

Wallace Shawn’s essays are both powerful and riveting. To have such a gentle and incisive soul willing to say what others may be afraid to is considerably refreshing.

—Michael Moore

From a low-earning playwright’s troubles to reflections on why the Palestinians are justified in their resentment of Israel. Wallace Shawn: Fearless!

—GQ, Best Books of 2009

Full of what you might call conversation starters: tricky propositions about morality . . . politics, privilege, runaway nationalist fantasies, collective guilt and art as a force for change (or not). It's a treat to hear [Shawn] speak his curious mind.

—O, The Oprah Magazine

"Wallace Shawn’s career as a playwright has been uncompromisingly devoted to proving, again and again, that theater is an ideal medium for exploring difficult matters of great consequence. The qualities that make his dramatic work so challenging, startling, unsettling, sensual, mind-and-soul expanding, so indispensable, are equally in evidence in the marvelous political and theatrical essays collected here. The basic faith of politically progressive people, that human beings are full of decent impulses perverted by political and economic malevolence, is in Shawn’s writing held up to the liveliest, sharpest scrutiny imaginable; not, as in so much reactionary art, to shift blame from oppressor to oppressed, or from artifice to Nature, not to insist that we’re innately, inescapably incapable of change, but rather as a scrupulous accounting of the slippery ethics, dream logic, fear-ridden resistance to progress, disturbing desires, of the greatest problem confronting all our hopes for a better, transformed world: Us, the actors in our collective drama. His essays are without sentiment and entirely resistant to the easy comforts of despair. Complexities are rendered delightfully plain, obfuscations are unsnarled and illuminated, clarity and rational thought are organized to plumb mysteries, and mysteries are respected and celebrated. Shawn’s language, his unmistakable, original voice, felicitous, is unadorned, elegant, immediate, true. He’s also a brilliant interviewer, as everyone who’s seen My Dinner with André (which is just about everyone) knows. And, of course, he’s very funny."

—Tony Kushner

Wallace Shawn is a bracing antidote to the op-ed dreariness of political and artistic journalism in the West. He takes you back to the days when intellectuals had the wit and concentration to formulate great questions—and to make the reader want to answer them.

—David Hare

also by the author

Essays

Grasses of a Thousand Colors

The Designated Mourner

The Fever

My Dinner with André (with André Gregory)

Night

Thoughts

Wallace Shawn

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Haymarket Books

Chicago, IL

© 2017 by Wallace Shawn

Published by

Haymarket Books

P.O. Box 180165

Chicago, IL 60618

773-583-7884

[e-mail] / www.haymarketbooks.org

ISBN: 978-1-60846-813-3

Trade distribution:

In the US through Consortium Book Sales and Distribution,

www.cbsd.com

In the UK, Turnaround Publisher Services, www.turnaround-uk.com

In Canada, Publishers Group Canada, www.pgcbooks.ca

All other countries, Ingram Publisher Services International,

[e-mail]

This book was published with the generous support

of the Wallace Action Fund and Lannan Foundation.

The text and display of this book are composed in Kepler Standard.

Cover design by Rachel Cohen. Cover photography by Tom Knox.

Library of Congress CIP Data is available.

Murder

Night. A hotel. A dark room on a high floor. Outside the hotel, miles of empty city streets, silent, gray, like gray fields in winter. Inside, I’m alone in a very cold room with a buzzing minibar. Through the window, far below in the street, I can see a couple of thin, solitary, wandering

Reviews for Night Thoughts

[Lisa Ridge · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Wallace Shawn has a lot of thoughts. There's some poignant wisdom here, but also some rambling tangents. But I could listen to him talk all day.

[pomo58 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

In Night Thoughts Wallace Shawn offers his ideas and opinions based on both his studies and his life experience. Those ideas and opinions are about the state of the world: physically, politically, and with regard to the idea of morality.There is little to truly argue against as far as his observations are concerned. Only the most arrogant would claim that what came before has not affected what is currently, or that what came before wasn't built to a very large extent on the labors of those who were not justly compensated, if they were compensated at all. The real place where people can begin to disagree is with the very part that will determine the world's future: can an extremely large gap between the "lucky" and the "unlucky" be sustainable without destroying the world?Shawn makes many points that will, and should, make the reader uncomfortable. He excludes no one from observation and then, even when pointing out the worst that the "lucky" have done, makes a case for not fully trying to make them some type of evil. He acknowledges their humanity at the same time that he acknowledges the humanity, often neglected, of the "unlucky."Some will not reflect beyond the kneejerk reaction of defending their position in the world, usually by trying to diminish Shawn personally rather than refute his ideas. Some will say Shawn didn't take things into account in his assessment but they did not read the book very closely because Shawn does give credit where credit is due. He readily acknowledges what great minds and thinkers have done, but he also acknowledges that by treating some kinds of knowledge as lesser we diminish ourselves. But those with these kinds of responses are the ones not willing to reflect honestly so they claim, incorrectly, that Shawn simply didn't take into account or ignored the "greatness" of those who came before, when Shawn did no such thing. But weak minds make weak arguments, ignore them.I would recommend this to anyone willing to try to grasp some uncomfortable truths as well as some uncomfortable ideas. The truths are pretty much irrefutable while the ideas certainly follow logically but are not the only ideas that could follow logically, and that is where the beauty of this book really is located. If you have honestly engaged and thought about what you were reading you will still be thinking about what you read long after closing the book. For those who truly believe they are exceptional because of where they happened to be born, or to whom, or any of the many other purely lucky advantages one can be born into, you may not like this book. It requires looking both inward and outward and doing so honestly. A belief in your exceptional status based on your luck pretty much means you will take offense to these truths.Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via Edelweiss.

[br77rino · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Musings on wealth and the historical underpinnings of the wealthy in this short set of essays. This is very much in sync with his movie, "The Fever."Shawn is simultaneously guilty for his wealth and unwilling to just give it up. He admires comfort, and says in his twenties he found a pleasurable life a good thing to aspire to. But it gnaws at him, in the back of his mind, and constantly.He muses that in reading about murderers and victims, he puts himself in the shoes of the murderer.He talks of the fertility of the Nile, and bemoans how niggardly it was of them not to share the food surpluses with their luckless brethren in the surrounding deserts. So, he assumes that God or Nature just randomly scattered people about, and only the "lucky" ones ended up in the good places, like along the Nile. It shows an ignorance of science, specifically archaeology and biology."For the lucky ones on the banks of the Nile, the lucky ones who were right there at the right place at the right time when the river overflowed." He doesn't understand that people would have moved there, grown there, because it was good. It wasn't some fluke of luck. He speaks critically of his Marxist teachers."...many of these teachers...were rather decadent characters...who despised the generally applauded virtues of heroism, manliness, and devotion to "the group." ...the example many of them set us was one of languid self-indulgence and unembarrassed pleasure-seeking.""Morality...refers to a very simple thought: we shouldn't accept this principle that strong inevitably triumphs over weak."He returns again and again to his "lucky" theme."'the lucky' are...a very large number of the citizens of the U.S. and Great Britain and most European countries...whether they know it or not, their relatively comfortable lives are made possible by the twist of luck that arranged for them to be born in prosperous countries..."There is Zero acknowledgment or even consideration that it could be due to the history of Western thougnt and philosophy. All that wrestling with the ideas of government and society, of beauty and justice, century after century, is utterly ignored. He's talking as if people the world over are completely interchangeable, histories and behaviors and adaptations irrelevant, just blobs of flesh scattered about.Some sense:"...the person who says, ''I'm better than you," is taking a serious step in a very dangerous direction. And the person who says, "Even if I'd had your I would never have done what you did," is very probably wrong. "..."Gorgeous and delicious fruits, grown by seductive geniuses, sit on the plates of these lucky people but remain uneaten. A process of decay has infected the lucky...leading many...to turn...against...the cultivation of the intellect..."It is overall an admirable piece of self-study by a wealthy, indulged leftist.