I sometimes go to ShopGoodwill and look at the books. Not because I’m shopping, but because I like to look at the weird selections or unusual juxtapositions of the lots.
This a small collection of wisdom I have gleaned from this process this year.
The Sense of Beauty
Do not judge your work by the painful parts.
George Santayana, who wrote the 1896 book The Sense of Beauty, called it a wretched potboiler when reflecting on its creation.
The Sense of Beauty is the oldest title in this unpurchased lot of non-fiction. It essentially is a collection of George’s lectures that he gave during his Harvard class. He had to write it to get tenure, so it wasn’t from his passion. This may be the first book written on the philosophy of aesthetics in the US. It centers around his ideas of aesthetics being a naturalistic function.
He doesn’t see his book on beauty as being beautiful in hindsight. Perhaps because, as he theorizes in the book, beauty is objectified pleasure, and his memory of this experience was not very pleasurable.
How many times do I look at something as I’m creating it and, in the moments I’m feeling frustration, anger, or disgust, feel as if I’m making something ugly? I feel as if there is no beauty before me. I’m judging the beauty by part of the experience. Stepping back from that moment, perhaps the entire experience will be beautiful. Or perhaps in 54 years, I’ll tell someone this was a wretched project-just like George did.
Civilization and its Discontents
Id repression is vital for a functioning society.
Our beastly brains crave instinctual pleasure, but Freud said civilization’s discontent comes from realizing that chasing pleasure is no way to live.
Civilization and Its Discontents is the only book not originally written in English from this lot. The Austrian founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, wrote his most influential and widely read book in his native German in 1930. This was eight years before his escape from occupied Austria.
He said that the pleasure principle pulled the id toward acting on any perceived pleasure and away from pain… you know, like an animal instinct. As the individual grew and matured, the reality principle would rear up internally and stifle those instinctual desires by correctly calling them not good for society. It would repress some of that instant gratification that the id wanted in its effort to keep us a social species and keep us from destroying ourselves. That repression of selfish and uninhibited desires creates a subconscious resentment.
It’s a hard time. People are acting on societally harmful pleasure-principle instincts. They say the right of theirs to control others supersedes others’ rights. Then they cite reality-principle reasons to do anti-social things to marginalized people. “Think of the children,” they say. “But… not those children.”
But our best selves question our instincts. We realize it’s lizard brains that might feel nervous about the lizards down the street. They might look different or accept fewer bugs as payment for similar lizard-jobs. We might feel that if they acted on their id’s command, they might hurt us!
But growing up into the reality-driven ego, we realize we need neighbors if we want the best lizard cities. And perhaps the ones who are still mad are the ones who have not stopped acting on their id’s command—the ones who haven’t grown a reality-driven ego that recognizes the value of society.
’Cuz ultimately, the pleasure we can build together will be better, even if delayed gratification is awfully hard for those who haven’t learned what the rewards of diversity can be.
New Lives for Old
You’re forever different, but keep the good from who you were.
Change never asks if we’re ready. It just arrives and expects us to keep up.
Margaret Mead once warned that you can never return to the old ways and have them be as good as they were.
She wrote of the people who looked into the past like this and asked questions like:
“How soon will people realize that the old ways were the best? Learn to borrow rakes and hoes over the backyard fence, and learn to live a proper life by always deferring consuming until tomorrow anything that we can possibly save today?”
To her, it was clear this was an unrealistic fantasy.
One has only to listen to this deluded Utopia—which is all that is possible to build out of the ghost of former ways—to know that it is a ghost as fleshless and inadequate as the way of life once was full-bodied.
New Lives for Old is the only book from the lot written by a woman. In 1928, Mead arrived on Manus Island in Papua New Guinea, where she lived among the 240 people, give or take, of the village of Peri. She studied, learned, and returned over the years. But when she came back in 1953, everything had changed.
During WWII, the island became a strategic site for Australia, then Japan, then America and the Allies.
Medicine and modernity had arrived, with global conflict and commerce in tow. The houses of Peri still stood strong, with generations of skill honed for the exact world they had lived in before. But they were empty. That world had ended. The families had built new homes to match their new lives. The old ways and wisdom had been replaced, not by gradual evolution, but by the relentless pressure of outside forces.
I think about that when I feel change coming for me, when the transformation is demanded, not chosen. When survival asks for reinvention, I try to remember that my past selves built sturdy foundations too, and that I owe them my respect—that I can adapt without abandoning who I am.
I do not want to be so transformed by external societal values that I lose myself. I can’t return to the version of me who didn’t know what I know now, but I can choose not to become a ghost of myself in that process.
Totem and Taboo Chapter 2
Who are scapegoating with your negative feelings?
Ambivalence comes from the German word for simultaneous conflicting feelings. Literally: ambi- “both,” valentia “strong,” from Latin.
Ambivalence was first coined in 1910 by the really terrible Eugen Bleuler, along with other words that are important to me, like autism.
Ambivalence is not apathy. I am not apathetic that this man with terrible values coined terms that I now use to emphasize nuance or explain my life experience. I’m horrified… and thankful.
In Freud’s Totem and Taboo, he talks about his observations of emotional ambivalence. He notes that we often hold mixed feelings about almost everyone in our lives, but the cognitive dissonance is so painful that we must dissociate from the parts of us that don’t fit the narrative we’re trying to tell.
If you are unable to acknowledge that there’s good in every bad and vice versa, you’re going to canonize your heroes without seeing their flaws and demonize strangers—projecting fears somewhere more convenient because it doesn’t make your cognitive dissonance itch.
But remember, there are no angels and no devils in the people you see. A man can see things about brains nobody knew how to describe at the time and also have opinions that are reprehensible. I am strong because I hold them both.
Following Curiosities:
- Another Goodwill book hunt, but smaller this time
- Do I still have the list of this one to finish the last 3?
- Post Family Tarot cards – particularly no angels no devils.
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