The Year of Magical Thinking

by Joan Didion

The Year of Magical Thinking ended up grabbing me and not letting me go. I’m not really sure I liked the book, but I most definitely appreciated it. I couldn’t put it down.

Joan Didion offers an honest and courageous account of her experience as she tries to work through the trauma of dealing with a comatose daughter and the sudden death of her husband.

This is not a subject many authors try to tackle. We live in a society that is very afraid of death and especially of grief. I can’t decide whether my discomfort with the book was based upon the sort of ingrained fear the subject brings up, or whether I genuinely just don’t approach death in the same heavily intellectual way she does. I’ve had many friends and a beloved parent die, but not a spouse or child, so I cannot possibly compare my experience of loss to hers.

She claims that nobody knows how to deal with those who are grieving these days and I think she is probably right. I don’t. She says that Emily’s Posts advice is as good as any she has seen. Very practical and without knowingly being scientifically acccurate - scientifically accurate. Posts Book of Manners was written at time when people experienced loss much more frequently than we do now so were more accustomed to grief.

You’d think in our day and age of psychological saavy, we’d better know how to deal with grief, but we don’t. It was tremendously courageous for Didion to share hers so publically and honestly. Definitely worth reading.

(I plan to pass it on through Bookcrossing in one form or other. If you are a Bookcrosser, in the U.S. and would like to read it and would be willing to pass it along afterward, I’d be happy to send it to you. Just let me know.)

Merton - A Film Biography

I have been fascinated with Thomas Merton ever since my Catholic Days. I read the Seven Storey Mountain like a dutiful Catholic and think it is so interesting that he disliked that story so much. He didn’t like his story being turned into a Catholic fairy tale.

I think it is also quite interesting that he believed America was already getting Nazi tendencies in the 1960s. He’s so well-respected now. But while he was alive, people called him a communist and the Catholic administration tried to silence him.

Originally, most of what I knew about Buddhism came from Merton’s writings. He did so much to bring eastern philosophy to the west.

The film offers a brief biographical sketch of Merton’s life as well as interviews with people who knew Merton, including the Dalai Lama and Thich Nhat Hanh. There is also a bonus feature from the Thomas Merton Foundation called “Remembering Thomas Merton” which was very interesting.

Very informative film. What a great find at the Half Price Bookstore.

Peaceful Warrior

by Victor Salva

I enjoyed this movie far more than I thought I would.

I read The Way of the Peaceful Warrior years ago. At the time I thought it was kind of hoakie. But I guess the difference now is that I’ve managed to move beyond a literal view of everything and have become far more comfortable with the immense power of the imagination Once upon a time I would have argued that Jesus was literally able to walk on water while simultaneously arguing that Jonah was not actually swallowed by a whale. Both views are literalistic in that they take a side for or against factual reality.

Nowadays I realize that to ask whether or not these events were factually true completely misses the importance of the telling of the event. What I was all hung up on when I first read The Way of the Peaceful Warrior was that I didn’t believe Socrates could actually do the stuff Millman proported he did. But today I realize that to question whether Socrates was actually able to jump on top of a building or not misses the power of the telling of that story, too.

Nick Nolte made a great Socrates.

Demian

by Hermann Hesse

Demian by Hermann Hesse is not on my reading list. But it was a quick read and quite satisfying as far as novels go.

Hesse wrote this book in 1917 just after WWI. Being a German and a pacifist, he got himself into all kinds of trouble with this novel because of the nationalistic sentiments in Germany that eventually gave rise to Hitler.

In Drama of the Gifted Child, Alice Miller makes use of Demian several times using Emil Sinclair as an excellent example of a child raised by narcissists. With my recent interest in narcissism I’ve been wanting to read Demian ever since reading Miller’s thoughts on it several months ago.

In Drama of the Gifted Child, Miller quotes Hesse (from Demian):

“Like most parents, mine were no help with new problems of puberty, to which no reference was made. All they did was take endless trouble in supporting my hopeless attempts to deny reality and to continue dwelling in a childhood world that was becoming more and more unreal. I have no idea whether parents can be of help, and I do not blame mine. It was my own affair to come to terms with myself and to find my own way, and like most well-brought up children, I managed it badly.”

Demian is somewhat autobiographical. Hesse’s parents were Pietist missionaries. The parents of Emil create a so-called “world of light” and moral order. When the child disobeys this moral order, through something like a fib for instance, the child is made to see himself as “bad”. The parents need to create such a “pure” and orderly household is the result of denying their own “depravity”, likely due to growing up in the same sort of household as they have created. This creates narcissism because all the parent can see is the “goodness” or “badness” of the child’s behavior rather than the child himself. If the child continues to deny his “badness” as his parents have taught him to do, he is likely to become narcissistic, too. The only way out of the narcissistic vicious circle is a willingness to quit denying the “badness” and to recognize it as part of oneself.

The story of Demian is Emil’s struggle to break away from this parental pattern. Abraxas, the God of both good and evil his first step out of the pattern: the first attempt to integrate both good and evil into one entity rather than maintaining a dualism. But this is very difficult to do because there is a strong tendency to want to go back to the “purity” of childhood (mom and apple pie)- the denial of what is bad - rather than recognizing it as part of oneself and ones family (or society).

Hesse rightfully felt that if his society was not able to break out of this pattern, a horrific event would make it necessary. Germany was suffering a cultural decline and a depression - both brought on in part by the Peace Treaty of Versailles. Hitler comes along and is easily able to find a scapegoat for these conditions because German society was still caught up in Lutheran ideas of dualistic piety. Hitler promises to lead Germany back into a “pure” state of being by getting rid of what is “bad”.

I’ve heard people compare the conditions of pre-Hitler Germany to what is going on in the U.S. When you think of all of the groups being demonized by the fundamentalist right, it really does seem similar. And that’s just plain scary.

But I earnestly think this “pious” group is much smaller than what existed in Germany in 1917 when Hesse wrote this book. There are millions of Republicans that do not support this fundamentalist right piety. I live in one of the most conservative counties in the U.S. and more and more people around here believe Bush is getting way off base. I noticed that Republican Senator Hagel from Nebraska reprimanded Bush for not meeting with Sheehan. More than 1/2 of all Americans do not believe the war has made us safer.

But this could all be wishful thinking on my part. Many Americans refuse to recognize that America is not always as pious as “mom and apple pie”. They continue to believe the “evil is out there” and hold onto the old view that good must overcome evil. (The continued denial of evil.)

As Max Demian tells Emil, the situation will take care of itself: “Perhaps it will be a very big war, a war on a gigantic scale. But that, too, will only be the beginning. The new world has begun and the new world will be terrible for those clinging to the old.”

The actual war lies within us, not “out there”. Until we recognize and seek to resolve the inner struggle, we will continue to seek out wars.

Letter to a Great Grandson: A Message of Love, Advice, and Hopes for the Future

by Hugh Downs

This is another one of those books I have no idea why I picked up. Of course I know of Hugh Downs. Who my age (41) doesn’t? What I didn’t know much about were his views on life. But his book was sitting on the new arrivals shelf at the library and I felt compelled to check it out. And again, I’m really glad I did. I feel so lucky reading so many interesting books right in a row.The book is a letter to Down’s great grandson who is about 3 months old when it is written. I love the idea of this! Could you imagine being Down’s grandson as an adult and having this book to pass on to your kids and their grandkids? What a gift.

Downs divides up the stages of life into 12 decades, offering bits of wisdom and advice based upon his own experience, and also his thoughts of what life will be like for his great grandson during these periods. For some reason, it makes me want to connect Downs with one of my very quiet Uncles who seems to have this sort of wisdom tucked away within him.

Of course I zeroed in on his religious advise:

“I am no an atheist. To me, atheism is a dogmatic religion. A dedicated atheist has a firm belief, to which he clings as tenaciously as a fundamentalist clings to his belief in fundamentalism. And atheism’s major flaw is that it tries to prove a negative. Thus it does violence to logic. Science will never prove that there is a God. Nor that there isn’t.”

Works for me! And very well said, too! I’ve been trying to say this all throughout this blog, but have never managed to come close to anything this concise!

In later pages, he goes on to say:

“…while my beliefs are fairly fluid, my faith is solid. There is a difference between faith and belief. If you believe something that others can prove wrong, your belief is not something you can trust….Subjective truths escape the errors of logic and the limitations of science. Faith is of the fabric of subjective truth…. Let me give an example of subjective truth: if you and I are in an argument about whether infant mortality is higher in Mississippi than in Massachusetts, one of us is right and the other is wrong. Research can find out which one of us is right. But now imagine an argument about whether I prefer horseback riding to scuba diving, or the other way around. I know which I prefer, and no amount of argument, no amount of library or field research, can have any connection with a truth that I know. Religious faith has its roots in this realm. Religious beliefs, however, are vulnerable.”

This explains better than I have been able to do why I say I’d still be a Christian even if it was proved that Jesus never existed. While some people might retain their Christianity as a refutation to such a claim, my Christianity does not rely on this belief. I know that the basic tenets of Christianity are important to me. It’s that simple. The existence or non-existence of Jesus or God have nothing to do with it. Nobody else has to believe this for me to know it is true for me.

Downs is incredibly optimisitc. Although he is not yet an ancient, he does offer some ideas for what it might be like to be one, and what it might take to get to this stage of life. (He had a strong interest in geriatrics in his younger years - receiving degrees in Geriatric Medicine and Gerentological Social Work. He chaired the Research and Education Committee of the Geriatrics Advisory Council of the Mount Sinai Medical Center. Downs sites studies of centarians that show a couple of commonalities: “not one of them was bitter, or hate-filled, or complaining… And while they were mentally agile and in some cases quite sharp, none of them was physically robust.”

It was a nice short little book. A little longer than a letter, maybe.