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Question: “What must one do to be sane?”
Freud’s Answer: “Love and Work.”
Freud had many foolish notions, but this answer is one of the deepest truths I know.
We are a nation of Egoists. We wrap ourselves in our iPhones and Facebook (and Daily Kos), we measure ourselves in our reflections, our likes, and our tribes. We are trapped in our games and the performance of our Selves. I’m not saying that we’re all arrogant narcissists, just that we grow into mature personae, and these set into comfortable grooves. As children, we look fresh-faced in every direction, all the world’s an adventure, every door beckons with new possibilities. As adults, we hunker down and focus on our goals and responsibilities, life becomes all schedules and habits. Your ego writes a soap opera or sitcom, and casts you as the star. Each episode has mostly the same characters, set, themes and goals. It takes a lot of effort and energy just to hold all of that together, to keep your game face on, and keep going.
Love and Work are crucial because they make us stretch past our known selves. When you commit your heart to something bigger than yourself, it challenges you. If you truly love another, you put up with their differences, you work to understand them, you learn to love what you find difficult. You make room in yourself to allow their full individuality. And you’re both balancing together, letting Us encompass and transcend Me vs. You. Because, if you’re not growing like that with some shared sacrifice, you’re heading for breakup or divorce. But, if you’re doing it right, you’ll find parts of yourself you never saw before.
Work is something similar, with less piercing passion and heartbreak. Work can mean the world to you, but you usually express that less operatically. You still commit for years or decades, to goals larger than yourself, to methods you only had a part in choosing. As with love, you need to choose wisely and be lucky, to find a career that suits you and a team you believe in and can fully commit yourself to.
I don’t know how many of us find a healthy career like that. Far too few, I think. Our skewed capitalism and consumer culture, our schools and curricula, are built around profit, greed and yesterday’s answers. We need a culture of organic humanism, of diversity and equity, and the US is nowhere near that. And yet we’re lucky here, in that the US has more of those humanist values in our American Dream than many other countries. Dollars rule us all, but many dreamers find their own way up.
We are all mostly or somewhat trapped in our egos. Love and Work — when they are healthy, when they challenge and nurture your individuality — are the universal medicines to grow beyond ourselves, they are the remedies that we all most need. If you can’t stretch beyond your known self, you will double down and dig deeper in that same old hole, you will languish inside your repetitions and addictions.
“He not busy being born is busy dying” — Bob Dylan
An Ego is a fine place to begin. God (or someone) has been generous with mine, and I have found in it the courage to keep swimming through these troubled waters, and to keep my chin above them, mostly. Love and Work, though, are about more than survival, they are sacred creeds. They are the seeds of cities and civilization, science and art, romance and families. Ego keeps me alive and striving; Love and Work make my life worth living (in spite of Covid, Republicans, and myriad other plagues). What do books offer us? Books teach us how to dream, how to see into hearts unlike our own, how to travel through worlds beyond our ken.
George Saunders is a marvelous writer, who bookgirl first turned me on to. He is smart, sensitive, witty, and always finds new angles of storytelling, and fresh ways to see. In his latest book, he examines four of the Russian masters who inspire him:
For the last twenty years, George Saunders has been teaching a class on the Russian short story to his MFA students at Syracuse University . . . Paired with iconic short stories by Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Gogol, the seven essays in this book are intended for anyone interested in how fiction works and why it’s more relevant than ever in these turbulent times . . . The process of writing, Saunders reminds us, is a technical craft, but also a way of training oneself to see the world with new openness and curiosity.
A Swim in a Pond in the Rain is a deep exploration not just of how great writing works but of how the mind itself works while reading, and of how the reading and writing of stories make genuine connection possible.
Seth Meyers (@2:48): You read these books from a modern perspective and you don’t have a ton in common with the life of these characters you’re reading, but you do have a deep empathy for them. Is that one of the things you try to really press on your young writers, how important it is to really feel what these characters are feeling?
George Saunders: Yeah, I think that’s the whole beauty of the story. In real life, you’re walking down the street and somebody walks by, and you quickly glance at them and you make some projections, and you like ‘em or don’t like ‘em, you dismiss ‘em. But in the world of the story, guided by somebody like Chekhov, you turn around and you get to go into that guy’s head, and you stay there for fifteen pages. If you’re reading a great story you basically become that person, even if in real life you wouldn’t have liked them or you would have been bored by ‘em. So there’s something really lovely about that. To be reminded, one, that other people are just as real as you are; and two, that if you could occupy somebody’s reality for a few minutes, you’d actually feel more tender towards them.
I think that’s the great lesson of literature: Life goes by so fast; but a story is almost like in The Matrix when time slows down and you get to inhabit somebody else and go, “Oh, this is how her mind works, this is how this person suddenly became angry.” It’s not something you get to do in real life, but in stories it’s like a scale model of the way that people live, and I think in the end, at least when I’m reading it, it makes me a little more tender towards people, and then also a little more alert to the beauty of the world, just for maybe fifteen minutes afterwards.
Seth Meyers: Can you talk about how stories enter, I believe you said they sort of enter our mind as a memory?
George Saunders: Yeah, I think neuroscientists are saying that when you read a good story, it’s coming in basically by the same route as an actual memory, and I think it’s stored in a similar way too. So this means that if you have an energetic reading life of good stories you’re getting all these ancillary lives, lives that you don’t have time to live, and you’re also being reminded that things have been other ways, things are other ways right now than the story that we’re telling in our minds.
I think it’s consciousness expanding, it gives you a chance to see — well, what it actually does, is it works against the delusion that you’re the most important thing in the world. The idea that we all inherit from birth, which is that: It’s the Seth Meyers show, really it is, that everybody out there is just for your amusement. We kind of intellectually know that’s not true, but basically we live as if it is true. So when you read a good story you’re kind of being lured out of yourself, and you’re having someone else’s experience. If nothing else you snap back to yourself and go “Oh my god, everybody else is as real as I am, and they’re also having these powerful thoughts of their own identity.”
That is how books grow us sideways. We live inside of our egos, they are our clothes and our armor. When we pour ourselves into love and work, we enlarge ourselves, and our egos grow through our passions and our quests. This may leaven our egos with more kindness and comprehension of others, with nobler principles and goals.
Books are something else. They allow us to put aside our ego-armor, our pride and pettiness, so that we can invest our full attention in someone else’s passions and quests. We can stop defending our persona, the meanings and scores of our private worldview, and open ourselves to the feelings and meanings of another’s world. We can fully absorb otherness, and let our mundane, much-worn selves sleep.
This is a clear-eyed empathy Americans usually lack, and an openness that Facebook, Fox News, and our whole media and social media spin-cycle has no use or place for. But we so need more of this. Thank god we have books, and other readers.
Here are two books that enchanted me into a slightly different Brecht.
The Wizard of Earthsea. I’m so glad I read this when I was nine, my mind so fresh and unformed. No other book has smashed into my imagination quite so hard, and taken me so completely out of all I knew before reading it. It helped that Ged was just a boy like me, unsure and barely comprehending the adults around him. Ursula LeGuin is such an empathetic writer, she paints Earthsea so compellingly through Ged’s childish eyes, as he gradually explores all the poetry and magic she wove into this world.
Team of Rivals. When I was a schoolboy, I hated history, it felt so boring. Just a dry recitation of facts and dates, with no grand understanding or heart to animate it. History and I have both improved considerably since then. I’ve grown more patient with academic books, and historians have learned to tell their tales better. Barbara Tuchman always brings her worlds to life. But this book has two particular aspects that touched me: it showed me further into America, and it showed me a man who helped to save America. After reading this book, I am convinced that no other President could have gotten this country through our Civil War, as close to whole and healthy as Lincoln managed too. This book made me prouder to be an American. A very well-told tale, that you should read.
Which books have grown you sideways, taking you into brave new worlds and hearts, or showing you fresh ways of seeing or thinking?
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