Anger is one of the sinews of the soul; he that wants it hath a maimed mind, and with Jacob, sinew-shrunk in the hollow of his thigh, must needs halt. Nor is it good to converse with such as cannot be angry, and with the Caspian Sea never ebb nor flow. This anger is either heavenly, when one is offended for God; or hellish, when offended with God and goodness; or earthly, in temporal matters. Which earthly anger, whereof we treat, may also be hellish, if for no cause, no great cause, too hot, or too long.
1. Be not angry with any without a cause. If thou beest, thou must not only, as the proverb saith, be appeased without amends, having neither cost nor damage given thee, but, as our Saviour saith, be in danger of the judgment.
2. Be not mortally angry with any for a venial fault. He will make a strange combustion in the state of his soul, who at the landing of every cockboat sets the beacons on fire. To be angry for every toy debases the worth of thy anger; for he will be angry for anything, who will be angry for nothing.
3. Let not they anger be so hot, but that the most torrid zone thereof may be habitable. Fright not people from thy presence with the terror of thy intolerable impatience. Some men, like a tiled house, are long before they take fire, but once on flame there is no coming near to quench them.
4. Take heed of doing irrevocable acts in thy passion. As the revealing of secrets, which makes thee a bankrupt for society ever after: neither do such things which done once are done for ever, so that no bemoaning can amend them. Samson's hair grew never to be repaired. Wherefore in thy rage make no Persian decree which cannot be reversed or repealed; but rather Polonian laws, which, they say, last but three days: do not in an instant what an age cannot recompense.
5. Anger kept till the next morning, with manna, doth putrefy and corrupt; save that manna not corrupted at all, and anger most of all, kept the next sabbath. St. Paul saith, Let not the sun go down on your wrath; to carry news to the antipodes in another world of thy revengeful nature. Yet let us take the apostle's meaning rather than his words, with all possible speed to depose our passion, not understanding him so literally that we may take leave to be angry till sunset: then might our wrath lengthen with the days; and men in Greenland, where day lasts above a quarter of a year, have plentiful scope of revenge. And as the English, by command from William the Conqueror, always raked up their fire and put out their candles when the curfew bell was rung, let us then also quench all sparks of anger and heat of passion.
6. He that keeps anger long in his bosom, giveth place to the devil. And why should we make room for him, who will crowd in too fast of himself? Heat of passion makes our souls to chap, and the devil creeps in at the crannies; yea, a furious man in his fits may seem possessed with the devil, foams, fumes, tears himself, is deaf and dumb in effect, to hear or speak reason: sometimes swallows, stares, stamps, with fiery eyes and flaming cheeks. Had Narcissus himself seen his own face when he had been angry, he could never have fallen in love with himself.
-- Thomas Fuller, "Of Anger," 1642
February 24, 2010
Poem: "They Had Torn Off My Face at the Office" by Ted Kooser
They had torn off my face at the office.
The night that I finally noticed
that it was not growing back, I decided
to slit my wrists. Nothing ran out;
I was empty. Both of my hands fell off
shortly thereafter. Now at my job
they allow me to type with the stumps.
It pleases them to have helped me,
and I gain in speed and confidence.
-- Ted Kooser, "They Had Torn Off My Face at the Office," Sure Signs, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1980: p. 87
The night that I finally noticed
that it was not growing back, I decided
to slit my wrists. Nothing ran out;
I was empty. Both of my hands fell off
shortly thereafter. Now at my job
they allow me to type with the stumps.
It pleases them to have helped me,
and I gain in speed and confidence.
-- Ted Kooser, "They Had Torn Off My Face at the Office," Sure Signs, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1980: p. 87
February 21, 2010
Poem: Two Shijo by Chong Ch'ol
The tree is diseased;
no one rests in its pavilion.
When it stood tall and verdant, no one passed it by.
But the leaves
have fallen, the boughs are broken; not even birds perch there now.
----------
What happens if you pull down
beams and supports?
A host of opinions greet the leaning, skeleton house.
Carpenters
with rulers and ink keep milling around.
-- Chong Ch'ol (1536-1593), translated and collected by Kevin O'Rourke, in Shijo Rhythms, Eastward Books, Seoul, 2001: pp. 44-47
no one rests in its pavilion.
When it stood tall and verdant, no one passed it by.
But the leaves
have fallen, the boughs are broken; not even birds perch there now.
----------
What happens if you pull down
beams and supports?
A host of opinions greet the leaning, skeleton house.
Carpenters
with rulers and ink keep milling around.
-- Chong Ch'ol (1536-1593), translated and collected by Kevin O'Rourke, in Shijo Rhythms, Eastward Books, Seoul, 2001: pp. 44-47
February 20, 2010
Artwork, "Reaching for Your Star" by Donald Gensler
-- Donald Gensler, Reaching for Your Star, mural (2003), 37th and Mt. Vernon, Philadelphia, PA
Excerpt, "Gitanjali" by Rabindranath Tagore
1
Thou hast made me endless, such is thy pleasure. This frail vessel thou emptiest again and again, and fillest it ever with fresh life.
This little flute of a reed thou hast carried over hills and dales, and hast breathed through it melodies eternally new.
At the immortal touch of thy hands my little heart loses its limits in joy and gives birth to utterance ineffable.
Thy infinite gifts come to me only on these very small hands of mine. Ages pass, and still thou pourest, and still there is room to fill.
...
81
On many an idle day have I grieved over lost time. But it is never lost, my lord. Thou hast taken every moment of my life in thine own hands.
Hidden in the heart of things thou art nourishing seeds into sprouts, buds into blossoms, and ripening flowers into fruitfulness.
I was tired and sleeping on my idle bed and imagined all work had ceased. In the morning I woke up and found my garden full with wonders of flowers.
-- Rabindranath Tagore, Gitanjali, Collier Books: New York, 1971, pp. 23, 96-97.
Thou hast made me endless, such is thy pleasure. This frail vessel thou emptiest again and again, and fillest it ever with fresh life.
This little flute of a reed thou hast carried over hills and dales, and hast breathed through it melodies eternally new.
At the immortal touch of thy hands my little heart loses its limits in joy and gives birth to utterance ineffable.
Thy infinite gifts come to me only on these very small hands of mine. Ages pass, and still thou pourest, and still there is room to fill.
...
81
On many an idle day have I grieved over lost time. But it is never lost, my lord. Thou hast taken every moment of my life in thine own hands.
Hidden in the heart of things thou art nourishing seeds into sprouts, buds into blossoms, and ripening flowers into fruitfulness.
I was tired and sleeping on my idle bed and imagined all work had ceased. In the morning I woke up and found my garden full with wonders of flowers.
-- Rabindranath Tagore, Gitanjali, Collier Books: New York, 1971, pp. 23, 96-97.
Excerpt, "Tokyo Story" by Yasujiro Ozu
Scene 161. A room. KYOKO is getting ready to go to school. NORIKO comes in.
NORIKO
Here's your lunch.
KYOKO
Thank you so much for everything.
NORIKO
I've only been a bother to you. You must come up to Tokyo now on your vacation.
KYOKO
Must you really go back today?
NORIKO (arranging her dress)
Yes, I'm afraid I have to.
KYOKO
I'm sorry I can't see you off at the station.
NORIKO
That's all right. Now be sure and come to Tokyo.
KYOKO
I'm so glad you stayed. I think they might have stayed a little longer, too.
NORIKO
But they're busy.
KYOKO
They're selfish. Demanding things, then leaving right away.
NORIKO
But they have their own affairs.
KYOKO
But you had yours, too.
NORIKO
But, Kyoko--
KYOKO
They are selfish. Wanting her clothes right after her death. I felt so sorry for poor Mother. Even strangers would have been more considerate. That's no way to treat your parents.
NORIKO
But, look, Kyoko. At your age I thought as you do. But children do drift away from their parents. A woman has her own life, apart from her parents, when she is Shige's age. She meant no harm, I'm sure. It's only that everyone has to look after himself.
KYOKO
I wonder. Well, I won't ever be like that. That would be just too cruel.
NORIKO
It is. But children get that way... gradually.
KYOKO
Then -- you too...
NORIKO
I may become like that. In spite of myself.
KYOKO
Isn't life disappointing?
NORIKO
Yes, it is.
KYOKO (smiling now)
You take care of yourself.
NORIKO
Thank you. Goodbye.
KYOKO goes to the veranda and looks toward the garden, then calls out.
KYOKO
I'm going now, father.
Then she goes to the entryway. NORIKO comes with her.
-- "Tokyo monogatari (Tokyo Story)," screenplay by Yasujiro Ozu and Kogo Noda (film released 1953), screenplay translated by Donald Richie and Eric Klestadt, 2003
NORIKO
Here's your lunch.
KYOKO
Thank you so much for everything.
NORIKO
I've only been a bother to you. You must come up to Tokyo now on your vacation.
KYOKO
Must you really go back today?
NORIKO (arranging her dress)
Yes, I'm afraid I have to.
KYOKO
I'm sorry I can't see you off at the station.
NORIKO
That's all right. Now be sure and come to Tokyo.
KYOKO
I'm so glad you stayed. I think they might have stayed a little longer, too.
NORIKO
But they're busy.
KYOKO
They're selfish. Demanding things, then leaving right away.
NORIKO
But they have their own affairs.
KYOKO
But you had yours, too.
NORIKO
But, Kyoko--
KYOKO
They are selfish. Wanting her clothes right after her death. I felt so sorry for poor Mother. Even strangers would have been more considerate. That's no way to treat your parents.
NORIKO
But, look, Kyoko. At your age I thought as you do. But children do drift away from their parents. A woman has her own life, apart from her parents, when she is Shige's age. She meant no harm, I'm sure. It's only that everyone has to look after himself.
KYOKO
I wonder. Well, I won't ever be like that. That would be just too cruel.
NORIKO
It is. But children get that way... gradually.
KYOKO
Then -- you too...
NORIKO
I may become like that. In spite of myself.
KYOKO
Isn't life disappointing?
NORIKO
Yes, it is.
KYOKO (smiling now)
You take care of yourself.
NORIKO
Thank you. Goodbye.
KYOKO goes to the veranda and looks toward the garden, then calls out.
KYOKO
I'm going now, father.
Then she goes to the entryway. NORIKO comes with her.
-- "Tokyo monogatari (Tokyo Story)," screenplay by Yasujiro Ozu and Kogo Noda (film released 1953), screenplay translated by Donald Richie and Eric Klestadt, 2003
February 18, 2010
Excerpt, "Why Not Socialism?" by G.A. Cohen
You and I and a whole bunch of other people go on a camping trip. There is no hierarchy among us; our common aim is that each of us should have a good time, doing, so far as possible, the things that he or she likes best (some of those things we do together, others we do separately). We have facilities with which to carry out our enterprise: we have, for example, pots and pans, oil, coffee, fishing rods, canoes, a soccer ball, decks of cards, and so forth. And, as is usual on camping trips, we avail ourselves of those facilities collectively: even if they are privately owned things, they are under collective control for the duration of the trip, and we have shared understandings about who is going to use them when, and under what circumstances, and why. Somebody fishes, somebody else prepares the food, and another person cooks it. People who hate cooking but enjoy washing up may do all the washing up, and so on. There are plenty of differences, but our mutual understandings, and the spirit of the enterprise, ensure that there are no inequalities to which anyone could mount a principled objection.
It is commonly true on camping trips, and, for that matter, in many other non-massive contexts, that people co-operate within a common concern that, so far as is possible, everybody has a roughly similar opportunity to flourish, and also to relax, on condition that they contribute, appropriately to their capacity, to the flourishing and relaxing of others. In these contexts most people, even most anti-egalitarians, accept - indeed, take for granted - norms of equality and reciprocity. So deeply do most people take those norms for granted that no one on such trips questions them: to question them would contradict the spirit of the trip.
You could imagine a camping trip where everybody asserts their rights over the pieces of equipment, and the talents, that they bring, and where bargaining proceeds with respect to who is going to pay what to whom to be allowed, for example, to use a knife to peel the potatoes, and how much they are going to charge others for those now peeled potatoes which they bought in an unpeeled condition from another camper, and so on. You could base a camping trip on the principles of market exchange and strictly private ownership of the required facilities.
Now, most people would hate that. Most people would be more drawn to the first kind of camping trip than to the second, primarily on grounds of fellowship, but also on grounds of efficiency. (I have in mind the inordinate transaction costs that would attend a market-style camping trip. Too much time would be spent bargaining, and looking over one's shoulder for more lucrative possibilities.) And this means that most people are drawn to the socialist ideal, at least in certain restricted settings.
To reinforce this point, here are some conjectures about how most people would react in various imaginable camping scenarios:
a) Harry loves fishing, and Harry is very good at fishing. Consequently, he catches, and provides, more fish than others do. Harry says: "It's unfair, how we're running things. I should have better fish when we dine. I should have only perch, not the mix of perch and catfish that we've all been having." But his fellow campers say: "Oh, for heaven's sake, Harry, don't be such a schmuck. You sweat and strain no more than the rest of us do. So, you're very good at fishing. We don't begrudge you that special endowment, which is, quite properly, a source of satisfaction to you, but why should we reward your good fortune?"
b) Following a three-hour time-off-for-personal-exploration period, an excited Sylvia returns to the campsite and announces: "I've stumbled upon a huge apple tree, full of perfect apples." "Great," others exclaim, "now we can all have apple sauce, and apple pie, and apple strudel!" "Provided, of course," so Sylvia rejoins, "that you reduce my labour burden, and/or furnish me with more room in the tent, and/or with more bacon at breakfast." Her claim to (a kind of) ownership of the tree revolts the others.
c) The trippers are walking along a bridle path on which they discover a cache of nuts that some squirrel has abandoned. Only Leslie, who has been endowed from birth with many knacks and talents, knows how to crack them, but she wants to charge for sharing that information. The campers see no important difference between her demand and Sylvia's.
d) Morgan recognises the campsite. "Hey, this is where my father camped 30 years ago. This is where he dug a special little pond on the other side of that hill, and stocked it with specially good fish. Dad knew I might come camping here one day, and he did all that so that I could eat better when I'm here. Great. Now I can have better food than you guys have." The rest frown, or smile, at Morgan's greed.
Of course, not everybody likes camping trips. I do not myself enjoy them much, because I'm not outdoorsy, or, at any rate, I'm not outdoorsy overnight-without-a-mattress-wise. There's a limit to the outdoorsiness to which some academics can be expected to submit: I'd rather have my socialism in the warmth of All Souls College, Oxford, than in the wet of the Catskills, and I love modern plumbing. But the question I'm asking is not: Wouldn't you like to go on a camping trip? Rather: Isn't this, the socialist way, with collective property and planned mutual giving, rather obviously the best way to run a camping trip, whether or not you actually like camping?
The circumstances of the camping trip are multiply special: many features distinguish it from the circumstances of life in a modern society. One may therefore not infer, from the fact that camping trips of the sort that I have described are feasible and desirable, that society-wide socialism is equally feasible and equally desirable. There are too many major differences between the contexts for that inference to carry any conviction. What we urgently need to know is precisely what are the differences that matter, and how can socialists address them? Because of its contrasts with life in the large, the camping trip model serves well as a reference point for purported demonstrations that socialism across society is not feasible and/or desirable, since it seems eminently feasible and desirable on the trip.
Two principles are realised on the trip - an egalitarian principle, and a principle of community. The egalitarian principle in question is one of radical equality of opportunity. Equality of opportunity removes obstacles to opportunity from which some people suffer and others don't, obstacles that are sometimes due to the enhanced opportunities that the more privileged people enjoy.
“Community" can mean many things, but the requirement of community that is central here is that people care about, and, where necessary and possible, care for, one another, and care that they care about one another.
...
Any attempt to realise the socialist ideal runs up against entrenched capitalist power and individual human selfishness. Politically serious people must take those obstacles seriously. But they are not reasons to disparage the ideal itself. I agree with Albert Einstein that socialism is humanity's attempt "to overcome and advance beyond the predatory phase of human development". Our attempt to get beyond predation has thus far failed. I do not think the right conclusion is to give up.
-- G.A. Cohen, Why Not Socialism?, Princeton University Press, 2009.
It is commonly true on camping trips, and, for that matter, in many other non-massive contexts, that people co-operate within a common concern that, so far as is possible, everybody has a roughly similar opportunity to flourish, and also to relax, on condition that they contribute, appropriately to their capacity, to the flourishing and relaxing of others. In these contexts most people, even most anti-egalitarians, accept - indeed, take for granted - norms of equality and reciprocity. So deeply do most people take those norms for granted that no one on such trips questions them: to question them would contradict the spirit of the trip.
You could imagine a camping trip where everybody asserts their rights over the pieces of equipment, and the talents, that they bring, and where bargaining proceeds with respect to who is going to pay what to whom to be allowed, for example, to use a knife to peel the potatoes, and how much they are going to charge others for those now peeled potatoes which they bought in an unpeeled condition from another camper, and so on. You could base a camping trip on the principles of market exchange and strictly private ownership of the required facilities.
Now, most people would hate that. Most people would be more drawn to the first kind of camping trip than to the second, primarily on grounds of fellowship, but also on grounds of efficiency. (I have in mind the inordinate transaction costs that would attend a market-style camping trip. Too much time would be spent bargaining, and looking over one's shoulder for more lucrative possibilities.) And this means that most people are drawn to the socialist ideal, at least in certain restricted settings.
To reinforce this point, here are some conjectures about how most people would react in various imaginable camping scenarios:
a) Harry loves fishing, and Harry is very good at fishing. Consequently, he catches, and provides, more fish than others do. Harry says: "It's unfair, how we're running things. I should have better fish when we dine. I should have only perch, not the mix of perch and catfish that we've all been having." But his fellow campers say: "Oh, for heaven's sake, Harry, don't be such a schmuck. You sweat and strain no more than the rest of us do. So, you're very good at fishing. We don't begrudge you that special endowment, which is, quite properly, a source of satisfaction to you, but why should we reward your good fortune?"
b) Following a three-hour time-off-for-personal-exploration period, an excited Sylvia returns to the campsite and announces: "I've stumbled upon a huge apple tree, full of perfect apples." "Great," others exclaim, "now we can all have apple sauce, and apple pie, and apple strudel!" "Provided, of course," so Sylvia rejoins, "that you reduce my labour burden, and/or furnish me with more room in the tent, and/or with more bacon at breakfast." Her claim to (a kind of) ownership of the tree revolts the others.
c) The trippers are walking along a bridle path on which they discover a cache of nuts that some squirrel has abandoned. Only Leslie, who has been endowed from birth with many knacks and talents, knows how to crack them, but she wants to charge for sharing that information. The campers see no important difference between her demand and Sylvia's.
d) Morgan recognises the campsite. "Hey, this is where my father camped 30 years ago. This is where he dug a special little pond on the other side of that hill, and stocked it with specially good fish. Dad knew I might come camping here one day, and he did all that so that I could eat better when I'm here. Great. Now I can have better food than you guys have." The rest frown, or smile, at Morgan's greed.
Of course, not everybody likes camping trips. I do not myself enjoy them much, because I'm not outdoorsy, or, at any rate, I'm not outdoorsy overnight-without-a-mattress-wise. There's a limit to the outdoorsiness to which some academics can be expected to submit: I'd rather have my socialism in the warmth of All Souls College, Oxford, than in the wet of the Catskills, and I love modern plumbing. But the question I'm asking is not: Wouldn't you like to go on a camping trip? Rather: Isn't this, the socialist way, with collective property and planned mutual giving, rather obviously the best way to run a camping trip, whether or not you actually like camping?
The circumstances of the camping trip are multiply special: many features distinguish it from the circumstances of life in a modern society. One may therefore not infer, from the fact that camping trips of the sort that I have described are feasible and desirable, that society-wide socialism is equally feasible and equally desirable. There are too many major differences between the contexts for that inference to carry any conviction. What we urgently need to know is precisely what are the differences that matter, and how can socialists address them? Because of its contrasts with life in the large, the camping trip model serves well as a reference point for purported demonstrations that socialism across society is not feasible and/or desirable, since it seems eminently feasible and desirable on the trip.
Two principles are realised on the trip - an egalitarian principle, and a principle of community. The egalitarian principle in question is one of radical equality of opportunity. Equality of opportunity removes obstacles to opportunity from which some people suffer and others don't, obstacles that are sometimes due to the enhanced opportunities that the more privileged people enjoy.
“Community" can mean many things, but the requirement of community that is central here is that people care about, and, where necessary and possible, care for, one another, and care that they care about one another.
...
Any attempt to realise the socialist ideal runs up against entrenched capitalist power and individual human selfishness. Politically serious people must take those obstacles seriously. But they are not reasons to disparage the ideal itself. I agree with Albert Einstein that socialism is humanity's attempt "to overcome and advance beyond the predatory phase of human development". Our attempt to get beyond predation has thus far failed. I do not think the right conclusion is to give up.
-- G.A. Cohen, Why Not Socialism?, Princeton University Press, 2009.
Clip: "Two Solutions for One Problem" by Abbas Kiarostami
-- Two Solutions for One Problem, Abbas Kiarostami, 1975
February 16, 2010
Poem: "On Death, without Exaggeration" by Wisława Szymborska
It can’t take a joke,
find a star, make a bridge.
It knows nothing about weaving, mining, farming,
building ships, or baking cakes.
In our planning for tomorrow,
it has the final word,
which is always beside the point.
It can’t even get the things done
that are part of its trade:
dig a grave,
make a coffin,
clean up after itself.
Preoccupied with killing,
it does the job awkwardly,
without system or skill.
As though each of us were its first kill.
Oh, it has its triumphs,
but look at its countless defeats,
missed blows,
and repeat attempts!
Sometimes it isn’t strong enough
to swat a fly from the air.
Many are the caterpillars
that have outcrawled it.
All those bulbs, pods,
tentacles, fins, tracheae,
nuptial plumage, and winter fur
show that it has fallen behind
with its halfhearted work.
Ill will won’t help
and even our lending a hand with wars and coups d’etat
is so far not enough.
Hearts beat inside eggs.
Babies’ skeletons grow.
Seeds, hard at work, sprout their first tiny pair of leaves
and sometimes even tall trees fall away.
Whoever claims that it’s omnipotent
is himself living proof
that it’s not.
There’s no life
that couldn’t be immortal
if only for a moment.
Death
always arrives by that very moment too late.
In vain it tugs at the knob
of the invisible door.
As far as you’ve come
can’t be undone.
February 15, 2010
Essay: Joan Didion, "On Self Respect"
Once, in a dry season, I wrote in large letters across two pages of a notebook that innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself. Although now, some years later, I marvel that a mind on the outs with itself should have nonetheless made painstaking record of its every tremor, I recall with embarrassing clarity the flavor of those particular ashes. It was a matter of misplaced self-respect.
I had not been elected to Phi Beta Kappa. This failure could scarcely have been more predictable or less ambiguous (I simply did not have the grades), but I was unnerved by it; I had somehow thought myself a kind of academic Raskolnikov, curiously exempt from the cause-effect relationships which hampered others. Although even the humorless nineteen-year-old that I was must have recognized that the situation lacked real tragic stature, the day that I did to make Phi Beta kappa nonetheless marked the end of something, and innocence may well be the word for it. I lost the conviction that lights would always turn green for me, the pleasant certainty that those rather passive virtues which had won me approval as a child automatically guaranteed me not only Phi Beta Kappa keys but happiness, honor, and the love of a good man; lost a certain touching faith in the totem power of good manners, clean hair, and proved competence on the Stanford-Binet scale. To such doubtful amulets had my self-respect been pinned, and I faced myself that day with the nonplussed apprehension of someone who has come across a vampire and has no crucifix at hand.
Although to be driven back upon oneself is an uneasy affair at best, rather like trying to cross a border with borrowed credentials, it seems to me now the one condition necessary to the beginnings of real self-respect. Most of our platitudes notwithstanding, self-deception remains the most difficult deception. The tricks that work on others count for nothing in that well-lit back alley where one keeps assignations with oneself; no winning smiles will do here, no prettily drawn lists of good intentions. One shuffles flashily but in vain through ones’ marked cards the kindness done for the wrong reason, the apparent triumph which involved no real effort, the seemingly heroic act into which one had been shamed. The dismal fact is that self-respect has nothing to do with the approval of others – who we are, after all, deceived easily enough; has nothing to do with reputation, which, as Rhett Butler told Scarlett O’Hara, is something people with courage can do without.
To do without self-respect, on the other hand, is to be an unwilling audience of one to an interminable documentary that deals one’s failings, both real and imagined, with fresh footage spliced in for every screening. There’s the glass you broke in anger, there’s the hurt on X’s face; watch now, this next scene, the night Y came back from Houston, see how you muff this one. To live without self-respect is to lie awake some night, beyond the reach of warm milk, the Phenobarbital, and the sleeping hand on the coverlet, counting up the sins of commissions and omission, the trusts betrayed, the promises subtly broken, the gifts irrevocably wasted through sloth or cowardice, or carelessness. However long we postpone it, we eventually lie down alone in that notoriously uncomfortable bed, the one we make ourselves. Whether or not we sleep in it depends, of course, on whether or not we respect ourselves.
To protest that some fairly improbable people, some people who could not possibly respect themselves, seem to sleep easily enough is to miss the point entirely, as surely as those people miss it who think that self-respect has necessarily to do with not having safety pins in one’s underwear. There is a common superstition that “self-respect” is a kind of charm against snakes, something that keeps those who have it locked in some unblighted Eden, out of strange beds, ambivalent conversations, and trouble in general. It does not at all. It has nothing to do with the face of things, but concerns instead a separate peace, a private reconciliation. Although the careless, suicidal Julian English in Appointment in Samara and the careless, incurably dishonest Jordan Baker in The Great Gatsby seem equally improbably candidates for self-respect, Jordan Baker had it, Julian English did not. With that genius for accommodation more often seen in women than men, Jordan took her own measure, made her own peace, avoided threats to that peace: “I hate careless people,” she told Nick Carraway. “It takes two to make an accident.”
Like Jordan Baker, people with self-respect have the courage of their mistakes. They know the price of things. If they choose to commit adultery, they do not then go running, in an access of bad conscience, to receive absolution from the wronged parties; nor do they complain unduly of the unfairness, the undeserved embarrassment, of being named co-respondent. In brief, people with self-respect exhibit a certain toughness, a kind of mortal nerve; they display what was once called character, a quality which, although approved in the abstract, sometimes loses ground to other, more instantly negotiable virtues. The measure of its slipping prestige is that one tends to think of it only in connection with homely children and United States senators who have been defeated, preferably in the primary, for reelection. Nonetheless, character – the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life – is the source from which self-respect springs.
Self-respect is something that our grandparents, whether or not they had it, knew all about. They had instilled in them, young, a certain discipline, the sense that one lives by doing things one does not particularly want to do, by putting fears and doubts to one side, by weighing immediate comforts against the possibility of larger, even intangible, comforts. It seemed to the nineteenth century admirable, but not remarkable, that Chinese Gordon put on a clean white suit and held Khartoum against the Mahdi; it did not seem unjust that the way to free land in California involved death and difficulty and dirt. In a diary kept during the winter of 1846, an emigrating twelve-year-old named Narcissa Cornwall noted coolly: “Father was busy reading and did not notice that the house was being filled with strange Indians until Mother spoke out about it.” Even lacking any clue as to what Mother said, one can scarcely fail to be impressed by the entire incident: the father reading, the Indians filing in, the mother choosing the words that would not alarm, the child duly recording the event and noting further that those particular Indians were not, “fortunately for us,” hostile. Indians were simply part of the donnee.
In one guise or another, Indian always are. Again, it is a question of recognizing that anything worth having has its price. People who respect themselves are willing to accept the risk that the Indians will be hostile, that the venture will go bankrupt, that the liaison may not turn out to be one in which every day is a holiday because you’re married to me. They are willing to invest something of themselves; they may not play at all, but when they do play, they know the odds.
That kind of self-respect is a discipline, a habit of mind that can never be faked but can be developed, trained, coaxed forth. It was once suggested to me that, as an antidote to crying, I put my head in a paper bag. As it happens, there is a sound physiological reason, something to do with oxygen, for doing exactly that, but the psychological effect alone is incalculable: it is difficult bin the extreme to continue fancying oneself Cathy in Wuthering Heights with ones head in a Food Fair bag. There is a similar case for all the small disciplines, unimportant in themselves; imagine maintaining any kind of swoon, commiserative or carnal, in a cold shower.
But those small disciplines are valuable only insofar as they represent larger ones. To say that Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton is not to say that Napoleon might have been saved by a crash program in cricket; to give formal dinners in the rain forest would be pointless did not the candlelight flickering on the liana call forth deeper, stronger disciplines, values instilled long before. It is a kind of ritual, helping us to remember who and what we are. In order to remember it, one must have known it.
To have that sense of one’s intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference. If we do not respect ourselves, we are the one hand forced to despise those who have so few resources as to consort with us, so little perception as to remain blind to our fatal weaknesses. On the other, we are peculiarly in thrall to everyone we see, curiously determined to live out – since our self-image is untenable – their false notion of us. We flatter ourselves by thinking this compulsion to please others an attractive trait: a gist for imaginative empathy, evidence of our willingness to give. Of course I will play Francesca to your Paolo, Helen Keller to anyone’s Annie Sullivan; no expectation is too misplaced, no role too ludicrous. At the mercy of those we cannot but hold in contempt, we play roles doomed to failure before they are begun, each defeat generating fresh despair at the urgency of divining and meting the next demand made upon us.
It is the phenomenon sometimes called “alienation from self.” In its advanced stages, we no longer answer the telephone, because someone might want something; that we could say no without drowning in self-reproach is an idea alien to this game. Every encounter demands to much, tears the nerves, drains the will, and the specter of something as small as an unanswered letter arouses such disproportionate guilt that answering it becomes out of the question. To assign unanswered letters their proper weight, to free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves – there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect. Without it, one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home.
-- Joan Didion, “On Self Respect,” collected in Slouching Towards Bethlehem, 1968.
I had not been elected to Phi Beta Kappa. This failure could scarcely have been more predictable or less ambiguous (I simply did not have the grades), but I was unnerved by it; I had somehow thought myself a kind of academic Raskolnikov, curiously exempt from the cause-effect relationships which hampered others. Although even the humorless nineteen-year-old that I was must have recognized that the situation lacked real tragic stature, the day that I did to make Phi Beta kappa nonetheless marked the end of something, and innocence may well be the word for it. I lost the conviction that lights would always turn green for me, the pleasant certainty that those rather passive virtues which had won me approval as a child automatically guaranteed me not only Phi Beta Kappa keys but happiness, honor, and the love of a good man; lost a certain touching faith in the totem power of good manners, clean hair, and proved competence on the Stanford-Binet scale. To such doubtful amulets had my self-respect been pinned, and I faced myself that day with the nonplussed apprehension of someone who has come across a vampire and has no crucifix at hand.
Although to be driven back upon oneself is an uneasy affair at best, rather like trying to cross a border with borrowed credentials, it seems to me now the one condition necessary to the beginnings of real self-respect. Most of our platitudes notwithstanding, self-deception remains the most difficult deception. The tricks that work on others count for nothing in that well-lit back alley where one keeps assignations with oneself; no winning smiles will do here, no prettily drawn lists of good intentions. One shuffles flashily but in vain through ones’ marked cards the kindness done for the wrong reason, the apparent triumph which involved no real effort, the seemingly heroic act into which one had been shamed. The dismal fact is that self-respect has nothing to do with the approval of others – who we are, after all, deceived easily enough; has nothing to do with reputation, which, as Rhett Butler told Scarlett O’Hara, is something people with courage can do without.
To do without self-respect, on the other hand, is to be an unwilling audience of one to an interminable documentary that deals one’s failings, both real and imagined, with fresh footage spliced in for every screening. There’s the glass you broke in anger, there’s the hurt on X’s face; watch now, this next scene, the night Y came back from Houston, see how you muff this one. To live without self-respect is to lie awake some night, beyond the reach of warm milk, the Phenobarbital, and the sleeping hand on the coverlet, counting up the sins of commissions and omission, the trusts betrayed, the promises subtly broken, the gifts irrevocably wasted through sloth or cowardice, or carelessness. However long we postpone it, we eventually lie down alone in that notoriously uncomfortable bed, the one we make ourselves. Whether or not we sleep in it depends, of course, on whether or not we respect ourselves.
To protest that some fairly improbable people, some people who could not possibly respect themselves, seem to sleep easily enough is to miss the point entirely, as surely as those people miss it who think that self-respect has necessarily to do with not having safety pins in one’s underwear. There is a common superstition that “self-respect” is a kind of charm against snakes, something that keeps those who have it locked in some unblighted Eden, out of strange beds, ambivalent conversations, and trouble in general. It does not at all. It has nothing to do with the face of things, but concerns instead a separate peace, a private reconciliation. Although the careless, suicidal Julian English in Appointment in Samara and the careless, incurably dishonest Jordan Baker in The Great Gatsby seem equally improbably candidates for self-respect, Jordan Baker had it, Julian English did not. With that genius for accommodation more often seen in women than men, Jordan took her own measure, made her own peace, avoided threats to that peace: “I hate careless people,” she told Nick Carraway. “It takes two to make an accident.”
Like Jordan Baker, people with self-respect have the courage of their mistakes. They know the price of things. If they choose to commit adultery, they do not then go running, in an access of bad conscience, to receive absolution from the wronged parties; nor do they complain unduly of the unfairness, the undeserved embarrassment, of being named co-respondent. In brief, people with self-respect exhibit a certain toughness, a kind of mortal nerve; they display what was once called character, a quality which, although approved in the abstract, sometimes loses ground to other, more instantly negotiable virtues. The measure of its slipping prestige is that one tends to think of it only in connection with homely children and United States senators who have been defeated, preferably in the primary, for reelection. Nonetheless, character – the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life – is the source from which self-respect springs.
Self-respect is something that our grandparents, whether or not they had it, knew all about. They had instilled in them, young, a certain discipline, the sense that one lives by doing things one does not particularly want to do, by putting fears and doubts to one side, by weighing immediate comforts against the possibility of larger, even intangible, comforts. It seemed to the nineteenth century admirable, but not remarkable, that Chinese Gordon put on a clean white suit and held Khartoum against the Mahdi; it did not seem unjust that the way to free land in California involved death and difficulty and dirt. In a diary kept during the winter of 1846, an emigrating twelve-year-old named Narcissa Cornwall noted coolly: “Father was busy reading and did not notice that the house was being filled with strange Indians until Mother spoke out about it.” Even lacking any clue as to what Mother said, one can scarcely fail to be impressed by the entire incident: the father reading, the Indians filing in, the mother choosing the words that would not alarm, the child duly recording the event and noting further that those particular Indians were not, “fortunately for us,” hostile. Indians were simply part of the donnee.
In one guise or another, Indian always are. Again, it is a question of recognizing that anything worth having has its price. People who respect themselves are willing to accept the risk that the Indians will be hostile, that the venture will go bankrupt, that the liaison may not turn out to be one in which every day is a holiday because you’re married to me. They are willing to invest something of themselves; they may not play at all, but when they do play, they know the odds.
That kind of self-respect is a discipline, a habit of mind that can never be faked but can be developed, trained, coaxed forth. It was once suggested to me that, as an antidote to crying, I put my head in a paper bag. As it happens, there is a sound physiological reason, something to do with oxygen, for doing exactly that, but the psychological effect alone is incalculable: it is difficult bin the extreme to continue fancying oneself Cathy in Wuthering Heights with ones head in a Food Fair bag. There is a similar case for all the small disciplines, unimportant in themselves; imagine maintaining any kind of swoon, commiserative or carnal, in a cold shower.
But those small disciplines are valuable only insofar as they represent larger ones. To say that Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton is not to say that Napoleon might have been saved by a crash program in cricket; to give formal dinners in the rain forest would be pointless did not the candlelight flickering on the liana call forth deeper, stronger disciplines, values instilled long before. It is a kind of ritual, helping us to remember who and what we are. In order to remember it, one must have known it.
To have that sense of one’s intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference. If we do not respect ourselves, we are the one hand forced to despise those who have so few resources as to consort with us, so little perception as to remain blind to our fatal weaknesses. On the other, we are peculiarly in thrall to everyone we see, curiously determined to live out – since our self-image is untenable – their false notion of us. We flatter ourselves by thinking this compulsion to please others an attractive trait: a gist for imaginative empathy, evidence of our willingness to give. Of course I will play Francesca to your Paolo, Helen Keller to anyone’s Annie Sullivan; no expectation is too misplaced, no role too ludicrous. At the mercy of those we cannot but hold in contempt, we play roles doomed to failure before they are begun, each defeat generating fresh despair at the urgency of divining and meting the next demand made upon us.
It is the phenomenon sometimes called “alienation from self.” In its advanced stages, we no longer answer the telephone, because someone might want something; that we could say no without drowning in self-reproach is an idea alien to this game. Every encounter demands to much, tears the nerves, drains the will, and the specter of something as small as an unanswered letter arouses such disproportionate guilt that answering it becomes out of the question. To assign unanswered letters their proper weight, to free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves – there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect. Without it, one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home.
-- Joan Didion, “On Self Respect,” collected in Slouching Towards Bethlehem, 1968.
February 14, 2010
Poem: from "Vectors: 36 Aphorisms and 10-Second Essays" by James Richardson
1
The road reaches every place, the short cut only one.
2
Those who demand consideration for their sacrifices were making investments, not sacrifices.
3
Despair says, I cannot lift that weight. Happiness says, I do not have to.
4
Pessimists live in fear of their hope, optimists in fear of their fear.
5
What you give to a thief is stolen.
6
You've never said anything as stupid as what people thought you said.
7
Who gives his heart away too easily must have a heart under his heart.
8
I am saving good deeds to buy a great sin.
9
If the couple could see themselves twenty years later, they might not recognize their love, but they would recognize their argument.
10
Disillusionment is also an illusion.
11
Our lives get complicated because complexity is so much simpler than simplicity.
12
The wound hurts less than your desire to wound me
13
The best way to know your faults is to notice which ones you accuse others of.
14
No matter how much time I save, I have only now.
15
Water deepens where it has to wait
16
Ah, what can fill the heart? But then, what can't?
17
Opacity gives way. Transparency is the mystery.
18
Shadows are harshest when there is only one lamp.
19
All stones are broken stones.
20
To paranoids and the elect, everything makes sense.
21
The first abuse of power is not realizing you have it.
22
Each lock makes two prisons.
23
It's amazing that I sit at my job all day, and no one sees me clearly enough to say, "What is that boy doing behind a desk?"
24
There are silences harder to take back than words.
25
It's easy to renounce the world till you see who picks up what you renounced.
26
Writer: how books read each other.
27
Of all the ways to avoid living, perfect discipline is the most admired.
28
Happiness is not the only happiness.
29
If you want to know how they could forget you, wait till you forget them.
30
I'm hugely overpaid. Except compared to the people I work with.
31
Who breaks the thread, the one who pulls, the one who holds on?
32
All work is the avoidance of harder work.
33
You who have proved how much like me you are: how could I trust you?
34
Desire, make me poor again.
35
Experience tends to immunize against experience, which is why the most experienced are not the wisest.
36
All things in moderation, wisdom says. And says last, Do not be too wise.
-- James Richardson, from Vectors: 36 Aphorisms and 10-Second Essays
The road reaches every place, the short cut only one.
2
Those who demand consideration for their sacrifices were making investments, not sacrifices.
3
Despair says, I cannot lift that weight. Happiness says, I do not have to.
4
Pessimists live in fear of their hope, optimists in fear of their fear.
5
What you give to a thief is stolen.
6
You've never said anything as stupid as what people thought you said.
7
Who gives his heart away too easily must have a heart under his heart.
8
I am saving good deeds to buy a great sin.
9
If the couple could see themselves twenty years later, they might not recognize their love, but they would recognize their argument.
10
Disillusionment is also an illusion.
11
Our lives get complicated because complexity is so much simpler than simplicity.
12
The wound hurts less than your desire to wound me
13
The best way to know your faults is to notice which ones you accuse others of.
14
No matter how much time I save, I have only now.
15
Water deepens where it has to wait
16
Ah, what can fill the heart? But then, what can't?
17
Opacity gives way. Transparency is the mystery.
18
Shadows are harshest when there is only one lamp.
19
All stones are broken stones.
20
To paranoids and the elect, everything makes sense.
21
The first abuse of power is not realizing you have it.
22
Each lock makes two prisons.
23
It's amazing that I sit at my job all day, and no one sees me clearly enough to say, "What is that boy doing behind a desk?"
24
There are silences harder to take back than words.
25
It's easy to renounce the world till you see who picks up what you renounced.
26
Writer: how books read each other.
27
Of all the ways to avoid living, perfect discipline is the most admired.
28
Happiness is not the only happiness.
29
If you want to know how they could forget you, wait till you forget them.
30
I'm hugely overpaid. Except compared to the people I work with.
31
Who breaks the thread, the one who pulls, the one who holds on?
32
All work is the avoidance of harder work.
33
You who have proved how much like me you are: how could I trust you?
34
Desire, make me poor again.
35
Experience tends to immunize against experience, which is why the most experienced are not the wisest.
36
All things in moderation, wisdom says. And says last, Do not be too wise.
-- James Richardson, from Vectors: 36 Aphorisms and 10-Second Essays
February 12, 2010
Excerpt: Adam Phillips and Barbara Taylor, On Kindness
"...To live well, we must be able to imaginatively identify with other people, and allow them to identify with us. Unkindness involves a failure of the imagination so acute that it threatens not just our happiness but our sanity. Caring about others, as Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued, is what makes us fully human. We depend on each other not just for our survival but for our very being. The self without sympathetic attachments is either a fiction or a lunatic.
Modern Western society resists this fundamental truth, valuing independence above all things. Needing others is perceived as a weakness. Only small children, the sick, and the very elderly are permitted dependence on others; for everyone else, self-sufficiency and autonomy are cardinal virtues. Dependence is scorned even in intimate relationships, as though dependence were incompatible with self-reliance rather than the only thing that makes it possible. The ideal lover or spouse is a freewheeling agent for whom the giving and taking of love is a disposable lifestyle option; neediness, even in this arena of intense desires and longings, is ultimately contemptible.
But we are all dependent creatures, right to the core. For most of Western history this has been widely acknowledged. Even the Stoics -- those avatars of self-reliance -- recognized man's innate need for other people as purveyors and objects of kindness. 'Individualism' is a very recent phenomenon. The Enlightenment, generally perceived as the origin of Western individualism, promoted 'social affections' against 'private interests.' Victorianism, individualism's so-called golden age, witnessed a fierce clash between champions and critics of commercial individualism. In the early 1880s historian and Christian activist Arnold Toynbee, in a series of public lectures on the Industrial Revolution, tore into the egoistic vision of man preached by prophets of free-enterprise capitalism. The 'world of gold-seeking animals, stripped of every human affection' envisaged by free marketeers was 'less real than the island of Lilliput,' Toynbee snorted. American Transcendentalists of the same period attacked the spirit of 'selfish competition,' and established communities of 'brotherly cooperation.' Even Charles Darwin, that darling of modern individualists, strongly rejected the view of mankind as primarily selfish, arguing for the existence of other-regarding instincts as powerful as self-regarding ones. Sympathy and cooperation were innate to man, Darwin argued in The Descent of Man (1871), and a key factor behind humanity's evolutionary success."
-- Adam Phillips and Barbara Taylor, On Kindness, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, New York, 2009: pp. 95-7.
Modern Western society resists this fundamental truth, valuing independence above all things. Needing others is perceived as a weakness. Only small children, the sick, and the very elderly are permitted dependence on others; for everyone else, self-sufficiency and autonomy are cardinal virtues. Dependence is scorned even in intimate relationships, as though dependence were incompatible with self-reliance rather than the only thing that makes it possible. The ideal lover or spouse is a freewheeling agent for whom the giving and taking of love is a disposable lifestyle option; neediness, even in this arena of intense desires and longings, is ultimately contemptible.
But we are all dependent creatures, right to the core. For most of Western history this has been widely acknowledged. Even the Stoics -- those avatars of self-reliance -- recognized man's innate need for other people as purveyors and objects of kindness. 'Individualism' is a very recent phenomenon. The Enlightenment, generally perceived as the origin of Western individualism, promoted 'social affections' against 'private interests.' Victorianism, individualism's so-called golden age, witnessed a fierce clash between champions and critics of commercial individualism. In the early 1880s historian and Christian activist Arnold Toynbee, in a series of public lectures on the Industrial Revolution, tore into the egoistic vision of man preached by prophets of free-enterprise capitalism. The 'world of gold-seeking animals, stripped of every human affection' envisaged by free marketeers was 'less real than the island of Lilliput,' Toynbee snorted. American Transcendentalists of the same period attacked the spirit of 'selfish competition,' and established communities of 'brotherly cooperation.' Even Charles Darwin, that darling of modern individualists, strongly rejected the view of mankind as primarily selfish, arguing for the existence of other-regarding instincts as powerful as self-regarding ones. Sympathy and cooperation were innate to man, Darwin argued in The Descent of Man (1871), and a key factor behind humanity's evolutionary success."
-- Adam Phillips and Barbara Taylor, On Kindness, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, New York, 2009: pp. 95-7.
February 11, 2010
Poem: "Breaking Out" by A.R. Ammons
I have let all my balloons aloose
what will become of them now
pricked they show some weight
or caught under a cloud lack
ebullience to feel through
but they are all let loose
yellow, red, blue, thin-skinned, tough
and let go they have put me down
I was an earth thing all along
my feet are catching in the brush
what will become of them now
pricked they show some weight
or caught under a cloud lack
ebullience to feel through
but they are all let loose
yellow, red, blue, thin-skinned, tough
and let go they have put me down
I was an earth thing all along
my feet are catching in the brush
Speech: Martin Luther King, "I Have a Dream"
-- Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., "I Have a Dream," Washington, DC, August 28, 1963
Excerpt: Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of Indignation
"The task of progressive men and women is helping the development of that dream of world change, as well as its realization, be it in a systematic or nonsystematic manner; be it at school, as a math, biology, history, philosophy, or language teacher; be it at home, as father or as mother dealing with sons and daughters; or be it in relationships with business associates. That is the task of men and women who not only speak of democracy but also live it, always seeking to make it better and better.
If we are progressives, and indeed open to the other, we must make an effort, humbly so, to narrow the distance between what we say and what we do as much as possible.
We cannot speak to our children, or in their presence, about a better world, one less unjust, more human, while we exploit those who work for us. At times, we may even pay better wages, but we can still fall for the old song of, 'reality is what it is, and I cannot save the world by myself.'
It is important to give testimony to our children that it is possible to be consistent, and even more, that being consistent is the final stage of our being whole. After all, being consistent is not a favor we do others, but rather an ethical manner of behaving. Thus, we must not be consistent hoping to be compensated, praised, or applauded.
Not always easy to achieve, consistency educates one's will, a fundamental faculty in our moving about the world. It is difficult to make decisions with a weakened will -- without direction we cannot opt for one thing or another; we cannot break away."
-- Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of Indignation, Paradigm Publishers, Boulder, Colorado, 2004: pp. 20-1.
If we are progressives, and indeed open to the other, we must make an effort, humbly so, to narrow the distance between what we say and what we do as much as possible.
We cannot speak to our children, or in their presence, about a better world, one less unjust, more human, while we exploit those who work for us. At times, we may even pay better wages, but we can still fall for the old song of, 'reality is what it is, and I cannot save the world by myself.'
It is important to give testimony to our children that it is possible to be consistent, and even more, that being consistent is the final stage of our being whole. After all, being consistent is not a favor we do others, but rather an ethical manner of behaving. Thus, we must not be consistent hoping to be compensated, praised, or applauded.
Not always easy to achieve, consistency educates one's will, a fundamental faculty in our moving about the world. It is difficult to make decisions with a weakened will -- without direction we cannot opt for one thing or another; we cannot break away."
-- Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of Indignation, Paradigm Publishers, Boulder, Colorado, 2004: pp. 20-1.
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