More often than not, I begin my mornings with a cat in my face and a bleary eyed reach to grab my phone and check the time. If it’s an appropriate time to get up (anytime after 5) I might actually get up. Usually before doing so, I’ll do a quick scroll through the dating apps (did anyone new show interest), a peek at facebook, email, and check to see if anyone read any of my blog in the hours while I was asleep (damn that ego – and the answer is almost always a no). I’ve read that these practices are not the best way to start the day. I can remember a stuffy writing professor urging us to sit down and write before we consume anything (news, novels, poetry, or conversation). Most mornings, the thing I read, I mean actually read, is what I’ve written the day before (damn that ego). Among my current shameful neuroses is the concern that retreating in to myself the way I have is turning me in to a narcissist (this is when any of my ex girlfriends can chime in “turning in to?”) If we have these competing devils and angels whispering in our ears, if the personality types are to be believed, I have to acknowledge that my generally pleasant, helpful, caring, and dare I say jovial, demeanor is probably a reaction to (if not compensation for) a darker more narcissistic side. Writing has been a way to let that little asshole roam free a bit… From Tate’s poem, “you look like a god sitting there. Why don’t you try writing something.”
This morning, I woke up bleary-eyed at 2:30 and reached for phone, saw I had an email from the job I no longer have, realized it was way too early, stressed a bit about said email, fell back asleep. I woke up at 5-ish with cat in face, etc. etc. fell back asleep. Woke up one last time… cat sprinting around the room, scratching at a bookcase, eventually on top and over me and in my face…. I reached for the phone, one web hit at 1 am, two people interested on the dating apps, didn’t check Facebook. With coffee and breakfast (for me and the cat) underway, I did not settle in to my own narcissism by reading my own writing. Instead, I took up an article from 2015 in the Atlantic “How an 18th-Century Philosopher Helped Solve My Midlife Crisis” by Alison Gopnik.
Unemployed, unattached, and caught somewhere between wanting to live in a van as the cat and I travel the country; buying a Victorian home with a beautiful, kind and artistic woman – where the two of us entertain interesting people as though we had a Parisian salon; or maybe just the simple white picket fence type of lifestyle – understanding what someone else’s midlife existential crisis looked like it might be an appropriate way to spend the waking hours on this cold and rainy Memphis Wednesday. Wow, that was a mess of a sentence – Hemingway would surely disapprove. Gopnik’s essay, like so many of these types of essays, begins with her personal story, which I found touching, and moves through her quest for discovery (of self and subject). At age 50 , in the midst of a distinguished academic career, she realized she had lost all sense of her identity.
And then, suddenly, I had no idea who I was at all.
My children had grown up, my marriage had unraveled, and I decided to leave. I moved out of the big, professorial home where I had raised my children, and rented a room in a crumbling old house. I was living alone for the first time, full of guilt and anxiety, hope and excitement.
I fell in love—with a woman, much to my surprise—and we talked about starting a new life together. And then my lover ended it.
Joy vanished. Grief took its place. I’d chosen my new room for its faded grandeur: black-oak beams and paneling, a sooty brick fireplace in lieu of central heating. But I hadn’t realized just how dark and cold the room would be during the rainy Northern California winter. I forced myself to eat the way I had once coaxed my children (“just three more bites”), but I still lost 20 pounds in two months. I measured each day by how many hours had gone by since the last crying jag (“There now, no meltdowns since 11 this morning”).
Gopnik continues:
My doctors prescribed Prozac, yoga, and meditation. I hated Prozac. I was terrible at yoga. But meditation seemed to help, and it was interesting, at least. In fact, researching meditation seemed to help as much as actually doing it. Where did it come from? Why did it work?
I had always been curious about Buddhism, although, as a committed atheist, I was suspicious of anything religious. And turning 50 and becoming bisexual and Buddhist did seem far too predictable—a sort of Berkeley bat mitzvah, a standard rite of passage for aging Jewish academic women in Northern California. But still, I began to read Buddhist philosophy.
Not only did she turn to Buddhism, but she revisited the philosopher David Hume, who at age 23 was struggling to write a book that he felt deep inside of him but couldn’t seem to get out. Of Hume she writes,
The effort was literally driving him mad. His heart raced and his stomach churned. He couldn’t concentrate. Most of all, he just couldn’t get himself to write his book. His doctors diagnosed vapors, weak spirits, and “the Disease of the Learned.” Today, with different terminology but no more insight, we would say he was suffering from anxiety and depression. The doctors told him not to read so much and prescribed antihysteric pills, horseback riding, and claret—the Prozac, yoga, and meditation of their day.
The rest of her essay is her journey as she tries to connect the dots between Hume and Buddhism – there are parallels and influences. She finds several intersections between Hume’s time in France and a few Jesuits who had first hand knowledge and experience with Buddhism. She writes extensively (for a short essay) on the Jesuit, Ippolito Desideri. His life is fascinating – I won’t go in to it here, but it’s the kind of wild spiritual and physical adventure that gets told in art house films. Gopnik, of course wraps everything up with a bit of a happy ending – she rediscovers herself, her joy, and her appreciation of her multitudes…. My summation does not do the article justice, and briefly, as I read, I wanted to learn more both about Hume and Desideri. This is where this post, and it’s long preamble takes its turn and becomes a bit more about me (damn that ego).
I’ve never read Hume, not entirely. I’m pretty sure his Treatise is one of the books I gave away before I moved – one of hundreds that sat in my house, pretentious and untouched. I do not have a particularly capable, curious, or disciplined mind. I’ve always known this about myself, and have tried to hide it. I have suffered from imposter syndrome for a long time. An English major who knows who Hume is, even knows the title of his major work, might even be able to say that Hume took on mind/body dualism. Given my propensity for snuggling up to the spaces between, my desire to give consideration to competing ideas – I should have read Hume. Shit, I’m tempted to download it, where it will sit unread on a pretentious and dusty shelf in the cloud. If I’m being honest…. my first barrier will be the language – I do not have the patience to unpack his words and arguments:
In all demonstrative sciences the rules are certain and infallible; but when we apply them, our fallible said uncertain faculties are very apt to depart from them, and fall into error. We must, therefore, in every reasoning form a new judgment, as a check or controul on our first judgment or belief; and must enlarge our view to comprehend a kind of history of all the instances, wherein our understanding has deceiv’d us, compar’d with those, wherein its testimony was just and true. Our reason must be considered as a kind of cause, of which truth is the natural effect; but such-a-one as by the irruption of other causes, and by the inconstancy of our mental powers, may frequently be prevented. By this means all knowledge degenerates into probability; and this probability is greater or less, according to our experience of the veracity or deceitfulness of our understanding, and according to the simplicity or intricacy of the question.
By the second or third sentence of that I wanted to pull my hair out or kill myself, not sure which. It reminds me of a Vonnegut quote:
Suicide has always been a temptation to me, since my mother solved so many problems with it. The child of a suicide will naturally think of death, the big one, as a logical solution to any problem, even one in simple algebra.
“Question: If Farmer A can plant 300 potatoes an hour, and Farmer B can plant potatoes fifty percent faster, and Farmer C can plant potatoes one third as fast as Farmer B, and 10,000 potatoes are to be planted to an acre, how many nine-hour days will it take Farmers A, B, and C, working simultaneously, to plant 25 acres?
“Answer: I think I’ll blow my brains out.”
Not being able to unpack things like Hume, at least not easily, makes me feel dumb. It makes me want to do something easier, makes me want to escape the mind and explore the physical (go for a walk, have a nice meal, have sex, see live music). This brings me to my other barrier to reading deeply and seriously. My father is one to sit and read and unpack. If I’ve had a lifelong rebellion, it has been against this. I can’t struggle with Hume and not hear the criticism, and not feel weak-minded. Like anything, that type of reading requires practice, and I grew a strong dislike for that type of practice when I was young. Somewhere between first and third grade I went from being a voracious reader to being a reluctant reader. The plums and peaches of words in books I had enjoyed and would eat until I was sick in the stomach (I seriously ate more than a dozen plums in a day and got sick from it) turned in to a mushy canned asparagus or dry lima beans that had neither flavor or texture. I had spurts where I enjoyed reading, but they were never sustained enough to build the muscle memory that would give me the patience to suffer through anything difficult or serious.
For years I worked with the larger than life literary critic, Harold Bloom. He was the most well-read person I have ever met. He had read Hume, and every major religious tract, and pretty much every major work of literature in existence. His book “Stories and Poems for Extremely Intelligent Children” is exactly the type of anthology that would not have been for me. I was never expected to keep up with Bloom, and over the course of a lifetime of outshining many many minds that could never approach his, Harold had been able to talk, entertain, and illuminate without ever really putting you down. You knew you were outgunned, and so you just listened and learned. My ex-wife had read Hume. He was her favorite philosopher. This was not something we were able to connect over – I fell short. I avoid Hume, and others, because it’s a reminder of my limitations. I write about my limitations so as not to feel like a fraud, dilettante, or charlatan.
As a “writer,” my failings as a reader are particularly troubling. Harold was famous for saying “we read to discover minds more original than our own.” It’s true – how can we possibly approach our own joy, sorrow, pain, enthusiasm, terror, or awe in a novel way without having some understanding of what else has been said? What is unique to me is universal to the human experience and what is universal to the human experience can be felt uniquely by me. If that doesn’t make me feel special and completely irrelevant all at the same time, I’m not sure what will.
I started a different version of this blog years ago in reaction to Facebook and social media. I wanted a long and slow form of expression. I wanted to fight the efficiency of images. On Facebook, I might post a picture of my pasta dinner. Here (in addition to the picture), I might attempt to describe its creaminess and how the sauce didn’t quite come together and instead broke between the yellows of butter and the whites of heavy cream, or how the asparagus had the perfect firmness and how the sausage was crumbly and spicy and savory on the tongue. Here, I might talk about how prepping that meal reminded me of the times I made it for my daughter on nights when my wife was at school, or how I absolutely adored cooking with my ex-fiancee, B, as we drank wine and laughed and talked about our day.
Sometimes I want a more erudite life, one of books and philosophy and self-directed rigor. Sometimes I want to prove that I’m smart and curious. Sometimes I want to be able to question if that’s really who I am, or if I’m better suited to the physical plane, one of experience, touch, taste, and sound. I’m not sure if I need to understand the paradox of suffering (a principle of Buddhism), or if I need to have read Hume to feel the ideas Hume presents. As Gopnik surmises,
But here’s Hume’s really great idea: Ultimately, the metaphysical foundations don’t matter. Experience is enough all by itself. What do you lose when you give up God or “reality” or even “I”? The moon is still just as bright; you can still predict that a falling glass will break, and you can still act to catch it; you can still feel compassion for the suffering of others. Science and work and morality remain intact. Go back to your backgammon game after your skeptical crisis, Hume wrote, and it will be exactly the same game.
In fact, if you let yourself think this way, your life might actually get better. Give up the prospect of life after death, and you will finally really appreciate life before it. Give up metaphysics, and you can concentrate on physics. Give up the idea of your precious, unique, irreplaceable self, and you might actually be more sympathetic to other people.
I was hoping I could tie this one up with a pretty bow. That I could show some uniquely, yet universal a-ha understanding of life and its mechanics. That’s not where I am. I have more questions than answers, and I’m too lazy to read minds more original than my own and sometimes too narcissistic to step out of my own head. I know, as best as I can, that tomorrow the cat will be in my face, I’ll check the time, I’ll get up (without any major existential crisis about whether or not to get up). I’ll read, I’ll write, I’ll clean a bit. I’ll think about where I’ve been, what I’ve had and lost as well as where I might be going. I might think about Hume or Desideri. I might look in to what a van costs, or search for cheap and crumbling properties in the shadows of another city. I might research what it takes to be a poet for hire or where I can find a sugar mamma. I might even re-read this post and find a pretty rhetorical bow that fits better than this ending.