I can't sleep…
And how could you ever
get what you want
when you would need to believe
in something other than
the past—friends, mornings, walks,
the spider-branchwork
of cold trees—
— Joanna Klink, from “On Surmising” in “The Nightfields” (Penguin Books, July 7, 2020)
There is no end of advice these days on how to be a good person, how to make good decisions, how to be mindful and compassionate, how to have boundaries, how to be open, how to be assertive, how not to be self-effacing, how to be politically invested, how to live in the now, how to live in a world that demands immediacy, how to think about the future, how not to think too much about the future, how not to think. For a certain kind of person — the person who, usually, strives to be a responsible parent, a sensitive friend, an upright citizen, a person who tries to care about their community — it can be impossible not to succumb to the incessant urge to mimic someone else’s supposed balance and feeling of wellness in life. What do we even know about them really? […]
Listening to patients, it feels to me like we’ve reached a real pitch of delirium regarding generalized advice, prescriptions, moral codes for behavior and images of some supposedly achievable balance. This infinite pedagogical universe was recently, and aptly, named the shame-industrial complex; poured out from every angle of life on social media, pushed by algorithms. In this vertigo we’ve forgotten that no one knows, or has ever known, what it really means to be an adult. Also that pleasure is hard-won, small, ephemeral; singular to each person. Wishes are historically overdetermined — meaning it really is your pleasure, and your pleasure only…
What I found, after much work in analysis, is that there is no justification possible, no matter how hard I tried to find it. I want what I want because I want it. You have to live with your choices which are more-or-less inexplicable to others…
We are contradictory creatures, wondrously and terrifyingly so.
— Jamieson Webster, from “I Don’t Need to Be a ‘Good Person.’ Neither Do You.” (The New York Times · August 25, 2023). Jamieson Webster (@jamiesonwebster) is a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst and a professor at the New School. She is the author, most recently, of “Disorganization and Sex.”
Portrait via Peter Rollins
You have never had it. All the things that have ever deeply possessed your soul have been but hints of it – tantalizing glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear. But if it should really become manifest – if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself – you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say, “Here at last is the thing I was made for.” We cannot tell each other about it. It is the secret signature of each soul, the incommunicable and unappeasable want, the thing we desired before we met our wives or made our friends or chose our work, and which we shall still desire on our deathbeds, when the mind no longer knows wife or friend or work. While we are, this is. If we lose this, we lose all.
— C.S. Lewis, from The Problem of Pain (HarperOne, May 28, 2009)
Quote: Thank you The Hammock Papers
maybe we try too hard to be
remembered, waking to the
glowing yellow disc in ignorance,
swearing that today will be
the day, today we will make
something of our lives. what
if we are so busy searching
for worth that we miss the
sapphire sky and cackling
blackbird, what else is missing?
maybe our steps are too straight
and our paths too narrow and
not overlapping…
— Naomi Shihab Nye, from “Suggestion” in “Time You Let Me In: 25 Poets Under 25:
Notes:
December 29, 1941.
I’m at the age where I cease to reform my tastes:
I accept what I find—within—without shame.
— Patricia Highsmith, “Patricia Highsmith: Her Diaries and Notebooks: 1941-1995.″ Anna von Planta (Editor). (Liveright, November 16, 2021)
Notes: