Sunday, January 30, 2022
3 a.m. I find myself suddenly awake, and having been thinking of the story told in “Five Came Back.” Is it that you’d like to discuss it, or something arising from it? Or is it just that I slept a lot yesterday and don’t need any more at the moment? Yet even as I write that, my eyes begin to hurt, so I guess this is a false alarm, and I’ll go back to bed. But maybe later we could talk about that documentary series, and about Maurice Walsh and his stories, and about The Age of Eisenhower and President Carter, and life on the sidelines.
5:10 a.m. All right, let’s begin. FRCP.
Let’s proceed along the lines you had in mind earlier without inquiring too closely how it got there.
I have been assuming it was your idea.
As we said, without inquiring too closely. In this case we would prefer to focus on the thoughts and their meaning rather than on the thoughts and their context or origins. You watched certain movies, read certain books, replayed certain memories, followed certain trains of associations. Let us look at where that brought you, rather than what brought you there in just that way, a journey we have traced with you, conceptually, more than once. That is, rather than reexamine the possible ways in which the shared and personal subjectivity bring a given issue to the fore, let’s examine this particular issue itself.
Understood. And I assume that if what we look at has no relevance for others, we’ll leave it as a private session.
Or if it becomes uncomfortably personal, yes. But you’ll find that most things, no matter how personal, have at least certain aspects that would be of interest – sometimes of vital interest – to others, because although everyone’s life is different, the differences are more of degree than of kind. Quite different manifestations arise from various causes, the difference being more in life circumstances than in essence.
You mean, I think, differences in character, manifestations of sex, age, race, caste, etc. when you say life circumstances. But we’re all motivated by combinations of personal and shared subjectivity manifesting through us.
Yes. Isn’t that what we said? In any case, list the things you listed last night.
- “Five Came Back” looked at the pre-war, wartime, and post-war experiences of five Hollywood directors who enlisted the use of their talents for the war effort:
- Frank Capra
- John Ford
- John Huston
- George Stevens
- William Wyler
- President Carter, by Stuart Eizenstat, recently read.
- The Age of Eisenhower, that I am in the early part of.
- The novels of Maurice Walsh, one of which, The Spanish Lady, I am re-reading.
- Not an idem like a book or film, but a generalized sense of dissatisfaction, of being morose and unfocused most of yesterday.
There are other things influencing you as well, that you would not think to list, but any list can usually be expanded. What does this list have in common?
That isn’t hard to see. It’s all about 3D life on the one hand, and me as observer from the sidelines, on the other.
That’s one way to slice it. Another would be to look at it as past v. present. The films, the books, describe a 3D situation that no longer exists. Your own mood is in the present moment.
That’s a strange distinction. I would always be observing from a present moment; books and films would always be describing moments past (imagined or reconstructed, and either fiction or non-fiction).
Yes, but would you realize that? It is obvious once pointed out, but was it, beforehand?
Maybe not. So?
Another way to slice it is a little harder to phrase, and a little closer to what we want to look at with you. Books, films, people’s lives, always involve a personal subjectivity dealing with an aspect of the shared subjectivity. That’s just what life is. But looking at it with the fact in mind may shine a different light on things.
For instance, the film series about the five directors. What did it attempt to describe?
- Their experiences.
- How those experiences changed them.
- What the product of these experiences did in “the outside world.”
Three interconnecting but distinct areas, you see. And we mention this because it is true for you and for everybody who could ever read these words. Your 3D life is you, and it is your second- and third-tier decisions, and it is your effect on the shared subjectivity.
Now, don’t just brush by this as self-evident – this is meant more for potential readers than for you yourself, Frank – but stop, and consider it, because usually you do not think of your life in just this way. Your life is:
- It is the experiences you live, including your own running commentary on your life.
- Your decisions, on a continuing basis, as to who and what you wish to become from this moment forward. Often you wish to continue rather than to change; nonetheless it is a decision, conscious or unconscious, explicit or implicit.
- Your impact on your world. Nobody leaves the world untouched by his or her life. Nobody. It has nothing to do with fame or power or accomplishment. It is a simple fact that by taking up space in 3D, you affect the world.
Are we back to Jimmy Stewart playing George Bailey?
Not a bad parable – as the documentary demonstrated. And did it not proceed to demonstrate just these three things?
Yes, I can see it did. First it told of his life in its essentials: what happened. It told of the repeated frustration of Bailey’s every expectation and hope, and showed that he continued to be the decent human being he was: his second-tier decisions. And after he looked at the world as it might have been if he had never lived, he saw the unexpected ways his life had touched others.
But you see, a loss of perspective – by George Bailey or by you or your friends – easily follows any attempt at summing up your life that does not incorporate all three aspects.
Look at it this way:
- Your experiences plus your decisions, without your effect: a sense of futility.
- Your experiences and your effect: a sense of futility.
- Your decisions and your effect: a sense of futility.
In each case the source of, the reason for, the sense of futility will seem different, but the net will be the same. If you cannot consider all three things, you cannot get anything like a fair and balanced view. Or – as we have said once or twice or a hundred times – you never have the data to judge your own life.
Let’s go into it a bit.
If you concentrate on your own life as it has come to you, and you remember to consider what you have thought, felt, decided, resolved, you may still wind up thinking your life utterly insignificant, or perhaps marginally important to a few people, but really, hardly worth the trouble. Anyone measuring self against the whole rest of reality is likely to feel a bit overmatched!
Or, if you look at your life as it unfolded, and your effect on the world, but neglect to consider your own on-going efforts at self-creation, you are likely to be dissatisfied no matter what your effect may have been: Churchill in old age deciding that what he had achieved amounted to nothing.
Or, if you look at your life as intention and execution, disregarding or minimizing the influence of the world (that is, looking at it as if what you did or didn’t do was all that matters), you can scarcely fail to be discontented, regardless.
In all these instances, it is the opposite of a realization that all is well. Indeed, “All is well” will seem necessarily untrue. It is because you are not looking at things straight.
Now let’s look at what happens when you consider only one, rather than two, of the three factors.
- You, your experience, seen in a vacuum. Is this not Hamlet’s “tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”? No continuity but the lapse of time, no meaning but whatever may be patched on by looking at the outside world as the important thing and the individual as a tiny contributor.
- Your continuing resolutions, seen without considering your starting-point or your interaction with the world. Must it not look ineffectual, the record of a string of good intentions divorced from real 3D consequences and consisting of only theoretical non-3D circumstances?
- Your effect on the world as if you were one Lego among thousands of millions; slightly individual but basically interchangeable.
Again, how can you feel that all is well if your one-eyed view says otherwise?
All very interesting as usual, and as usual you come at it from an unexpected angle. Today’s theme, then: “Perspective”?
As good as any. “Three criteria,” perhaps, or “Three criteria for judgment.” But you’ll think of something.
Our thanks as always.