Friday, February 11, 2022
4:40 a.m. Hard to settle down to see if there is going to be a conversation, when every time I pull out the journal, Lila meows. But I don’t think she wants anything special, even attention. I think she’s just vocal, and perhaps is wondering why she is in a strange house with her own things there, but not her usual servants.
Guys, anything special today? Thanks for yesterday’s, which rang true for at least one of our friends.
You might set your slide-switches, and we’ll see.
Okay. Focus, receptivity, clarity, presence, as usual. Go ahead.
The question of worth – self-worth – really ought to be separated from the question of achievement. We realize, this goes against the grain of the culture you grew up in.
I suppose this is from my rereading Bogart: Tough Without a Gun. The most celebrated actor in history, and it wasn’t enough. It isn’t that he wanted more money, or greater celebrity, or even still more movies to act in. It is – or seems to be, looking as we must from the outside – that he couldn’t quite envision the meaning of his life in terms other than achievement. After all, he did achieve. Nobody can say he didn’t pay his dues, in dozens of films of no particular importance. And he had the talent, and a professionalism, and an indefinable something. He had all that, did all that, and still wasn’t satisfied.
But – could he have been? I wonder sometimes, if someone comes in to fill an important role – an Alexander, a Caesar, a Napoleon, or an Emerson, a William James, a Jung, or a Bogart or Bacall or Bergman – you get the idea, people who make a huge mark in whatever field – aren’t they maybe overshadowed, all their life, by the unconscious knowledge of what they’re there to do?
You’re saying there are two kinds of people in the world, those who count and those who don’t?
You know I’m not saying that. But I am wondering if there may be those who come to lead an “ordinary” life, at least externally, and those who come to make a major external contribution.
Say that were so. What would it imply to you?
I guess that people would have very different things nagging at them. A Bogart wouldn’t necessarily know why it was important to him that he have that career; he would only know that it was. Someone not similarly drawn might never even consider their self-worth to be connected to their eternal achievement or lack of it.
And, as usual, most people will fit between those poles. It is an acceptable polarity: What do you do with it?
Simple: I ask you to take off from it in whatever way appeals to you.
You realized long ago that the happiest society was one that provided many different routes to satisfaction, so that most people could be satisfied with their lives in connection with at least one thing. For some, their family; for others, a hobby or skill; for others, group associations; for others, competition in some form. The more possible ways to rise to the top of a pyramid, the more people can be happy. By contrast, if there were only one game in town, how could there be more than one winner, and perhaps an elite below that level, and most people as relatively losers! Not a lot of satisfaction there.
So a banker doesn’t have to be a successful politician to be fulfilled, or a champion golfer, or a contented member of a tennis club, etc. I get that. But what about internal v. external?
We realize that this is the nub of the question, but it is better to prune the shrubbery around the question first.
Sure. Our usual modus operandi.
Now, when you consider internal v. external, it may help if you do a thought-experiment. What would the situation be if you were in Stalin’s Russia, or Mao’s China?
I don’t know that I can really have a sense of what life in either situation would have been like. It’s pretty foreign from my experience. Probably I just have a vague idea composed of propaganda and snippets of history and people’s gulag reminiscences. Hard to imagine the outer life, let alone the inner life, in such societies.
Then, imagine external life in America in the 1920s or 1950s. Make the situation as defined as you wish – urban or rural, east or west, etc. How do you imagine you would have functioned after either world war?
Well, let’s say the ’50s. I was born in 1946, so I have some memories of that time, though God knowns it seems long enough ago.
Suppose you had been a young adult in 1950.
Well, okay.
Where are you?
Some city, I guess. San Francisco, maybe. But this isn’t really working, is it?
Perhaps not. Perhaps another time.
[Feline distractions were interfering. Get used to it! But perhaps we will revisit this topic tomorrow, or anyway next time.]