Dear Abbie: The Non-Advice Column

Father and Daughter

Posted on May 21, 2024 by Abigail

Having recently read the memoir of Hannah Tillich, largely concerned with her marriage to Paul Tillich, renowned theologian – with close-up views of how he pursued his own erotic opportunities at the cost of their marital romance – one upshot was that I became less interested in reading Paul Tillich. Had he managed to reconcile his ontological focus on the “ground of being” with the personal God of the Bible? I was not able to detach that fine question from my sense of the seducer whose question it had been.

Do the lives of great men – of the greats – have to attain the heights of their thought? I don’t know if the lives have to be comparably great, but if you’re writing about God and our human selves, the writer’s life has relevance. And particularly if a hurtful pattern affecting an intimate love persists, or gets worse, over a lifetime of thinking about the Ultimate. I found that I couldn’t pick up his most cited work: The Courage to Be. I was just glad I wasn’t married to him.

Those reflections brought to mind another thinker with whom I was actually and ineluctably connected: Henry M. Rosenthal, my father. In the last year of his life, my father was at work on a book titled The Consolations of Philosophy: Hobbes’s Secret; Spinoza’s Way. He died just after completing the Hobbes section, which includes some footnoted responses to questions I raised while he was writing it. Part II, on Spinoza, bore no mark of our conversations (and does not, I think, suffer from their absence).

For a number of years after my father’s death, the manuscript languished in the hands of the co-executor, to whose wishes I’d deferred up to the moment of my being diagnosed with cancer. Then I felt duty-bound to step up and put the book together. My task would be to supply introductions that would situate the book in the context of recent, relevant philosophic work on Hobbes and Spinoza, also to write the appropriate words about my father’s life.

At that point, my own life was becoming an uphill climb. In the mornings, I would report to a Manhattan hospital for radiation treatments for breast cancer. In the afternoons, I would repair to the New York Public Library at 42nd Street to read up on “the literature” – the recent work on the two seventeenth-century thinkers with whom my father’s book was concerned. By then, my own book, A Good Look at Evil, had come out with Temple University Press, which meant I had an editor to whom I could show my father’s manuscript when these preliminaries were done.

I consulted with the family lawyer who advised me first to get to the point where the contract was in hand and ready to be signed before seeking my co-executor’s signature and, only then, to advise my editor that it would be required.

Since there was no guarantee that, after the radiation treatment, I would recover from the cancer, I also enlisted a collegial friend – who’d been one of my father’s philosophy students – to take over the project if I didn’t live to complete it.

As it happens, I didn’t die then, the needful agreements were secured without incident, the book drew a number of laudatory reviews and – though deeply relieved at this outcome – after all that I felt no call to revisit the experience or the book. What stayed in my mind was the moment when I’d finished the last of the Intros and the biographical Preface. I was alone in the house in Maine that I’d co-inherited. Putting the pen down, I walked outside and down the marina to the water’s edge. It was sunset time, the close of the day. There was a pink half-circle in the sky, as if the very sky wore a halo, and I seemed to hear my father say to my mother – as he might have – slapping a country hat against his knee, “She did it! The kid did it!”

All that is background to my recent interest in revisiting HMR’s Consolations of Philosophy, if only to see how it compared to Paul Tillich’s thinking on ultimate topics. So far, what I found is that the originality and depth of its insights are partially concealed by the condensed, aphoristic complexity of the style. The good reviews, the interest it had drawn from recognized scholars, had not been of my making. The deep chords it had struck in qualified readers were indeed there – and I had not put them there. But he was never going to edge Paul Tillich off the playing field.

One of the favorable reviews had come from Thomas Altizer, a well-known theologian. When I met him, some time after his review appeared, he said to me, and I quote:

“I am a sonovabitch. I am a sonovabitch. There’s only one thing I care about – and that’s God. And your father – was a man of God.”

So my efforts on behalf of this book, and belief that my father was a deeply interesting man, were certainly well-founded. But in his written work, which included decades of journals that I later went through in hopes of producing a book that could distill their insights, he still refused to come out into the discursive daylight. Finally I just had his unpublished materials archived at the American Jewish Historical Society.

On the first day of his admission to the Maine Coast Memorial Hospital in Ellsworth, Maine – where he would die at the end of a week of hospitalization – the intelligent young physician leaned over him to ask how he felt. He answered, in the last full sentence I heard him say,

I feel real resuscitated.

The Theologian’s Wife

Posted on May 14, 2024 by Abigail

At the time I was at Columbia University, as a graduate student in philosophy as well as an Assistant in the Religion Department, Paul Tillich – a theologian of world stature in the twentieth century – was just a few blocks up the street at Union Theological Seminary. Although Tillich was said to be quite friendly and accessible, I felt no prompt to go up to Union to meet him. Great men don’t necessarily need a visit from me. Besides, this one was widely known to be – if you’ll pardon my language – an ass pincher.

Susan Sontag, not then well known as the public intellectual she became, was also in the Religion Department, as an instructor, and we shared a large, populous office that had several desks in it besides ours. About meeting Tillich, she told me that all you needed to do, when it was time to leave, was back out the door. No doubt she was right, but I didn’t see how the physical challenge of walking out of an office backward harmonized with the spiritual challenge of thinking about God in the company of a great man.

Recently that long-ago question took on new life for me as I read a memoir by Hannah Tillich, his widow. Here’s the tale as told in From Time to Time. Hannah first met Tillich at a costume party in 1919, just after Germany had lost the First World War. There was nothing special about his looks (“he looked motheaten”) but, once they were alone and he started to talk, “he seemed to me the only human being among the clowns and knights, the nymphs and dwarfs.” Some “playful, sensuous meetings” later, he would be the one to whom she would surrender her virginity.

At this juncture, the story gets unexpectedly complicated. Despite the overwhelming quality of her bond with Tillich, she goes ahead with a first marriage to another man. As she said to an inquirer, she did not quite trust Tillich. Though she finds nothing wrong with the first husband and much to like about him, once pregnant, she leaves him and goes to live with Tillich! The first husband persists in his unrequited and betrayed love until their child dies, for which (unfairly in her view) he blames Hannah.

Her divorce from the first husband and lifelong marriage with Tillich follows. Yet something in her never recovers from Tillich’s having spent the whole of their wedding night away from his bride, in the company of friends at a seductive bachelor party. At intervals, they do rekindle their passionate joy in each other as well as a deep intellectual communion. Yet he takes lovers, as does she, in accord with the vaunted superiority-to-bourgeois-values of that era. It’s a style she falls into but proves unable to sustain when it comes to the women with whom he gets infatuated. She rather hates them, despite her “emancipated” principles.

Meanwhile, Tillich is gaining recognition as a thinker of stature and they move through a succession of favorable university appointments in theology. In the Germany of that perilous time, communists and Nazis are battling in the streets. Hannah had seen Hitler at one of his rallies and didn’t see anything specially alarming about him. However, at Hannah’s insistence, Tillich goes to a Hitler rally and moves up close to get a look at him. “He came home shudderingly impressed by the demon in Hitler’s eyes. Paulus felt the spell of the little man with the uncultured voice and the brutality of his wordy assault. He sensed great danger.”

Her husband’s personal virtue shines especially as the Hitler regime gains power, acting with uncanny speed to find, capture and “remove” Jews and political dissenters. While people in their circle are wondering whether and when to leave Germany, Paul refuses to resign as he has been invited to do. He “would not leave [his academic position] of his own volition. They had to throw him out. But nobody, nobody in the world could change his spiritual and intellectual convictions, neither his father, his wife, nor a whole world in turbulence.” He returns only after the war “without hostility against individuals, but he gave a speech about the anti-Semitism of the Germans that made the women in the audience weep.”

They come to America where he accepts a succession of university posts, at Union Theological Seminary, Harvard and finally Chicago – the city where he will die. Sadly, in the years of their American sojourn, he keeps so distant from her, while continuing his infidelities, that she becomes finally disaffected and embittered. Abandoned by him, she turns to the disciplines of Yoga and meditation. It’s a resort to which he too finally turns, and they share a rekindled friendship as his life force ebbs.

Theologically, I am just getting to know Tillich and can’t say much about his thought. In the one book of his I’ve read, Biblical Religion and the Search for Ultimate Reality, he tries to overcome the contradiction between an impersonal Ultimacy (the “ground of being”) and the personal God of Biblical faith. Whether he continued his effort to merge the impersonal features of divinity with the personal God of history, or whether they came apart for him at the end, is unclear from what I’ve read so far, whether in her memoir or in this one of his many books.

What do I personally make of this strange story? It might be a bridge too far for one human being to try to comprehend ultimate things – “the ground of being” – and at the same time figure out how to live in the relative realities of our world. To a thinker of Ultimacy like Tillich, petty questions of personal betrayal and broken commitments might have taken second place. In his mind, questions like that might be reserved “for the women”– the way observant Jewish women are delegated to handle the separation of dishes into those set aside for meat and the ones set aside for dairy.

I would say, to the great theologians, the pathbreakers, the intellectual pioneers who proceed as if the women are out of it –

don’t be quite so sure.

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Speaking of Women

Posted on May 7, 2024 by Abigail

tell me if the lovers are losers …

tell me if any get more than the lovers …

in the dust … in the cool tombs.

Carl Sandburg, Cool Tombs

Recently a dear friend lost her beloved husband to leukemia. Coincidentally, I’d just finished reading a pair of memoirs, each by a woman novelist, centered around the death of a husband with whom the writer’s life and work had been lovingly intertwined. They were Gail Godwin’s Evenings at Five and Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking.

Both books deal with the great question: how to live when your heart is broken. Alongside the question, and around it, lie the broken-off pieces of your beloved’s recent life, which you have to pick up and dispose of somehow. Meanwhile you get the steady, impervious march of bureaucratic demands. It’s hard to get into this life and they make it a good deal harder to get out.

Meanwhile, I’d also been thinking about a different woman, a college friend who had died unexpectedly a few years before. For decades after graduation, we hadn’t seen each other. Then one day, she reappeared when I was sitting alone in the fountain restaurant of New York’s Metropolitan Museum.

“You don’t remember me,” she said, “but years ago you loved me very much and I loved you very much.”

“Renee!” I gasped, recognizing her under the thin veil of the years. She took the other seat at my table. I told her all that had happened to me since graduation – the whole long, unbelievable story. She took it in with the entire womanly attention that reminded me of her French and Jewish background. Then she told me parts of her own story. She’d stayed married to the college sweetheart I remembered. And, unbeknownst to him, from time to time she took lovers.

“Are you very shocked?”

“No,” I lied. (Of course not. Don’t you know how worldly I am?) Years before, when we were undergraduates in a different America, I’d asked Renee – sotto voce and very confidentially – if she thought it right for two people to sleep together before they married.

“Oh, Edward and I have been sleeping together for years! Are you very shocked?”

“No,” I lied back then too. Of course not.

When her daughter called to tell me of Renee’s death, I took the long train trip out to her memorial service. It included an amazing lineup of testimonials, from people I never heard of, whom she had quietly gone to enormous lengths to help! Greeting her grieving husband, I said to Edward that I’d never known that Renee was “a lamed vovnik, one of the righteous, one of the 36. She kept it from me!” (In rabbinic legend, the world is only permitted to continue because, in every generation, 36 righteous persons are found, typically living in obscurity.)

Our lives are mysterious. It was not till the other day, when the topic of Renee came up at our morning brunch – and I was telling Jerry that her sudden death and discovered double life left me with an unsolved question – that the answer suddenly struck me.

Her childhood, lived during World War II in France, had not been an ordinary one. She and her mother fled through the rural depths of the country, moving from house to house, sheltered from the Nazis by French peasants. “They sympathized with Jews?” I asked her, prepared to be pleasantly surprised.

“Oh no,” replied Renee, in her commonsensically French tones, as if to say, of course not. “We paid them!”

Now at last it came to me how to put the puzzle pieces – the 36nik with the double life – together. Her childhood, made emotionally safe because lived close to a loving mother, had passed in hiding. So for her, the hidden life had got confused with the safe life!

There was one other thing I told Renee that day at the Museum. I told her that I’d met Jerry, a new love who would probably be my husband soon. And then I told her one other thing: Jerry had had a dream that included a visitation from my first love of many years before, the communist in Paris.

When Jerry described what he wore in the dream, I recognized the man whom I’d seen again on a recent trip to Paris that I’d taken the year prior to meeting Jerry. In his present life-phase, he dressed differently from how he had in youth. More aristocratic, a bit foppish. Since I’d never liked the way he dressed, neither as a self-declared revolutionary, nor as a stylish aristocrat, I hadn’t described his sartorial changes to Jerry.

In Jerry’s dream, wearing the getup of which Jerry had not been told, he said to Jerry that I was “a wonderful woman,” whom he could not have risen to the challenge of marrying, but that my experience with him had been of emotional use to me. I had learned something. (At this point, I forget what.) Anyway, in the dream he told Jerry that he could now fade back, because Jerry could do the job of true lover and husband in the way it was designed to be done.

“Oh,” said Renee, instantly understanding how I would take it. “That’s permission!”

The lives of women

require considerable decoding.

In the unisex currents of our day –

nothing supplies that decoding.

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Anti-Semitism’s Secret Springs

Posted on April 30, 2024 by Abigail

Before October 7, 2023, the anti-Semite was a type I seldom encountered. I can remember the very first time the phenomenon came my way in an academic setting. A philosophic colleague of my late father was scheduled to give a talk at Columbia University. My father had facilitated his transfer from a philosophy department at a pampered suburban college to the more real-world department at Hunter College of the City University of New York. The colleague’s Columbia talk was to address some issue in the philosophy of religion.

I planned to attend because Roy had become a family friend. From time to time, he and his wife would come to dinner at my parents’ New York apartment and, at least once in summer, they visited my parents where they had a home in Maine. More recently, Roy had given one of the eulogies at my father’s memorial service.

Most who attended were likely as appalled as I was by Roy’s talk at Columbia. What he did was lift certain incidents from the dense and varied pages of Hebrew Scripture (the “Old Testament”) to paint a portrait of Biblical people – and Jews by extension – as blind bigots. Seen from the current state of Biblical scholarship, Roy’s speech was crudely unsophisticated. But it made a virtue of its scholarly weakness, delivering its findings as if the speaker had approached his text naïvely and was now trusting us, seated with him at the seminar table, to share his astonishment at all he’d just found out.

One thing I knew:

It was not a speech

he would have delivered

had my parents been alive.

Likely, it was a trial run. Soon he’d be giving that speech, or one like it, all over town. Roy got to be well known for the speech. And he seemed not one wit deflated – energized rather – by the anger and disappointment voiced by Jewish professors at the event I attended.

On the trip home, I had to change from the west side subway to the east side line. While waiting for the Lexington Avenue express, I took the opportunity to ask God a few questions.

First, looking upward to where my eyes met the dark, shadowy, recessive ceiling of the lower platform where I stood, I asked,

What is a Jew?

Though the response that came to mind was silent, it was detailed and precise. A Jew is someone who has a passion for God. But for a God of a certain kind. Not the One in whom one gets absorbed, homogenized and blended. Rather, the Jewish passion is for a God separate from the Jew who loves God. It’s that separation – that very distance – that allows God to see us. We become visible precisely because not everything is One. God can see the sorts of things we need (like toothpaste, for one example) and how we meet our needs. In the separation opened up by our non-homogeneity with the Creator, there is space and time sufficient for all the surrounding beings and people. In that setting, our choices unfold, step by step, one after another, chronologically. It’s the narrative of us. Our stories unfold visibly.

Oh, I see.

Well, if that’s the Jew,

what is an anti-Semite?

An anti-Semite is someone who hates God – in God’s historical aspect. And of course hates the Jew for reminding the hater of the storied reality of the human self.

That revelation, if such is what it was, fitted my personal experience. Often I’ve been able to sense when someone, a friend say, was about to become an anti-Semite. Not always of course, since Roy did surprise me. But I’ve sensed when the pieces of that person’s life were ceasing to cohere, or to impart a reason to go on. The hatred of the God who sees that and, so to speak, has allowed it to happen, can easily be deflected onto the Jew whose relation to God presupposes human visibility.

The anti-Semites now swarming over campuses like Columbia’s, wear masks, often as not. No doubt they share the fond belief that, if their faces are hidden,

God can’t see them!

All I can say is, shrewd move, fellas. You’ve really got God fooled now!

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The “New York Intellectuals” and Me

Posted on April 23, 2024 by Abigail

Recently I’ve been reading a book titled Arguing the World: The New York Intellectuals in Their Own Words, by Joseph Dorman. It’s based on the author’s interviews with surviving members of a group that played a significant part in the thought-world – the intellectual culture – of twentieth-century America.

These intellectuals were the children of immigrants who struggled to eat enough and be warm enough to survive, in cold-water tenements, at danger-fraught jobs in the Lower East Side’s garment district. As young men, most went to City College, where tuition was free or nominal. Another stratum, a bit less hard-pressed, went to Columbia University. My father graduated from Columbia’s future-intellectual-star class of 1925, along with his closest friend, influential literary critic and essayist Lionel Trilling. Also in that class were cultural critic Jacques Barzun, art historian Meyer Schapiro, radio personality and Book-of-the-Month Club judge Clifton Fadiman, former communist and author of Witness Whittaker Chambers and so on with other names – at one time nearly household names.

Diana Trilling, wife of Lionel Trilling, is one of the people interviewed in Arguing the World. In her memoir, she recalls that my father was considered by his classmates to be their “genius.”

I don’t know if he was actually the class genius, or not. But he was one reason why I wasn’t fascinated by public intellectuals that I later met. They were not as interesting as he was.

For most of the group whose story is told in Dorman’s book, it goes like this. They enter adulthood as the economy collapses in the Great Depression of the 1930s. To them it seems clear that the fault for this lay in the capitalist system, whose downfall is imminent, which will precipitate the world-wide revolution predicted by Karl Marx. After which the downtrodden poor will inherit the earth – banishing all poverty, inequality and injustice.

In City College, there were alcoves in the cafeteria where different varieties of Marxist assembled to eat and argue over whose version of the Final Battle was the correct one. The Trotskyists? The Stalinists? Most of these young people were Jews and – though they scorned religion as “the opiate of the people” – they brought with them debating skills that had been honed in the Hebrew schools of their earlier days, where immersion in argument had been a defining feature of Jewish religious training.

So what happened? Did they stay Marxists? Most of them did not. What changed them? It was quite dramatic. They had looked to the USSR – Russia after the communist revolution – as the vanguard country, the one that would inspire and conspire with its admirers to bring about the worldwide revolution. However, in the late thirties, extraordinary public trials were held in Moscow. The defendants in the Moscow Purge Trials included the most prominent communists of their time. Yet one revolutionary leader after another “confessed” under oath to having betrayed the revolution. If the confessions were sincere, what could have led such men to reverse lifelong commitments? But if the confessions were coerced? Well, that was creepier still!

Then Leon Trotsky, a communist who’d openly contested Stalin’s leadership of the party in Moscow, was brutally assassinated in the home where he had taken refuge in Mexico. Murdered for holding a dissident view of how the revolution should be conducted? Wasn’t that just what they all did with each other in the City College arguments at alcove 1?

Finally, Joseph Stalin, leader of the communist party and the Russian state, concluded a pact – an economic and political agreement with provisions both public and secret – with Adolf Hitler in 1939!

The Hitler-Stalin Pact was the last straw for most of the New York Jewish intellectuals. Step by step, they began to notice that the USA – the land to which their parents had journeyed with such effort and travail – was better, in fact much better, than the imaginary alternative on which, as young rebels, they’d projected their hypothetical visions.

They became – not revolutionaries – but liberals.

Since my parents had traveled a parallel trajectory, I read this story – filled in by its survivors in their final years – with recognition and interest. There was Meyer Schapiro, the celebrated art historian. His wife Lillian had been my pediatrician. As I’d been told, I cried for the first six weeks after I was born. Lillian recommended that my mother put a telephone book (they were thick and heavy in those days) under me. It hadn’t helped. I must have stopped when finally I got tired of crying. I sent Meyer Schapiro one of my earliest articles. It was on Hegel’s method. He called to tell me that he’d been teaching his students a similar method, of use in dating art works!

There was Sidney Hook, the pragmatist and political philosopher. He spoke at a meeting I attended – really just to hear Hook. Afterward, we talked a little. He did not know that my mother had died. (My father’s journal records Rachelle, my young mother, advising Hook, back in his young radical days, to take up writing because political action was wearing him thin!) “Rachelle too?” he said to me, learning of her death, shaking his head. About my father and his best friend Lionel Trilling, Hook said, “Henry was Lionel’s Jewish education! Before that, Lionel was …” trailing off … I finished the sentence for him, “English!” And we both laughed.

I remember writing Trilling’s wife Diana after her memoir, The Beginning of the Journey, came out. There are 13 indexed references to my parents, all rather nasty. I wrote her a letter in defense of my parents, out of filial piety. She never answered. At the time, I thought that was shabby on her part. Now I learn from this book that she was quite debilitated at the time of writing her memoir, needing magnifying instruments in order to read. She devoted her last energies to her memoir. Perhaps she never read my letter.

I knew Hannah Arendt and Jacob Taubes at Columbia, both of whom make an appearance in this book. They all made their way, by their own trials and errors, into the intellectual conscience of this country.

This morning I read that a rabbi at Columbia University has advised Jewish students, and perhaps professors too, to stay home. For their own safety, not to set foot on the campus where I, and the generation before me, walked about in full freedom. I never thought of Columbia as a model community, nor its earlier times as halcyon days. Despite earning my masters with doctoral eligibility at Columbia, I went on to take my PhD at Penn State where there was less prestige to be had but more philosophical interest for me at that time. But decisions of that stripe are intra-academic. They assume that one can go where intellectual interest leads. They are made without conscious concern for physical safety.

Such decisions are quite different from the ones you make about coming or going where your purpose is just not to meet head on –

the youth-coming-to beat-you-up
who are now defacing Alma Mater.

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The Real-Life Whodunits

Posted on April 16, 2024 by Abigail

Sherlock Holmes pictured in Strand Magazine, 1891, drawing by Sidney Paget.

Every few months, Jerry and I fly out to California (no longer a fun thing to do in current travel conditions) to get neuropathy treatments for me. The treatment, available only at a clinic out there, is innovative and appears to ameliorate my present walking handicap in modest but incrementally noticeable degrees. It’s a newly developed protocol that may now be near the stage of getting approved for insurance coverage. If that happens, it will become available to a wider public and more widely known. The transition to that new stage is partly under way now and may explain some of what happened during my five days of treatment last week.

My cordial relations with the whole dedicated neuropathy treatment team had been one of the aspects of the care provided that I particularly cherished. They all cared. They respected each other’s professionalism and dedication. They approached the conditions to be treated with skill and their patients with kindness. That the treatments led to measurable improvement, in statistically significant numbers of patients, is clear from the pending upgrade.

That being the context, it will be clear why the incidents I’m about to describe were so disconcerting.

The poet Francis Thompson writes some lines to remind our secular age that –

The angels keep their ancient places

Turn but a stone, and start a wing!

‘Tis ye, ‘tis your estrangèd faces

That miss the many-splendored thing.

If, as the poet claims, the “angels keep their ancient places,” so too – though he does not write about it – do the devils!

Let me illustrate. In the clinic’s transition phase of expansion, the staff is being asked temporarily to divide its working time between the facility I know and a new one about an hour’s drive away. As is the way with transitions, not everything runs as smoothly as it once did. Nor can every real-time decision wait for the whole staff to consider and accept it. In my own case, I was handed off to a Second Therapist (hereafter ST) different from the Creative Founder (CF) by whom I’m usually treated.

So how did that go? For the two hours that I dealt with ST, he explained to me why I was unlikely to experience any cumulative benefit from the clinic’s neuropathy treatments! To back this up, he gave what sounded like an expert’s enumeration of what he said were all the relevant factors in my case. The impression ST left was that CF, his boss, had been trading on placebo effects and grandiose hopes. Hopes persuasive but hollow – except in the case of people in whom the neuropathy was far less advanced than it was in my case.

What effect did ST’s private message have on me? Predictably, devastating. There is something in the human cognitive apparatus that accords to bad news more credibility than good news. Besides, wasn’t ST the colleague most trusted by CF, the institute’s founder with whom I normally worked? And wasn’t it credible that the CF’s creative optimism could have carried him to the point of projecting a range of applicability for his discovery – for his innovative treatment – greater than the evidence in fact warranted?

On the following day, CF was my therapist. Of course, I asked him about every objection raised by ST – only taking care to credit these objections to an unnamed third party, someone who might have been a bystander without connection to CF’s team. CF found each and every objection laughably out of date and uninformed. None of the objections had been seriously raised since the 1970’s. Unruffled and consistent, CF then went over my case, in broad outline and in detail, giving his reasons for each step he had taken, including specific adjustments and revisions, as his own grasp of the systemic problems deepened. Both Jerry and I listened and were able to confirm from our own observation the recent step-by-step symptomatic changes he described as he’d come to a better understanding of the peculiarities of my case.

By that evening, Jerry and both felt satisfied with CF’s explanations as well as what I could confirm experientially. I said to Jerry that ST may have had other reasons, possibly connected to the pending expansion (which could lead him to leave the team) to translate personal discomfort into his weird undermining of my trust in the therapy itself.

Thursday, when I was again entirely in the hands of ST, the sessions passed without any more undermining “confidences” of the sort I’d been given on Tuesday.

On Friday, the final day, I was again scheduled to work with CF – save for a brief interruption for a meeting, during which time ST would take over. What could go wrong? Only this: when CF returned, ST did not step back from the treatment table. Instead, he conveyed, by body language, that he was not going to relinquish control. Rather than confront his subordinate, CF decided to say that he’d be back when ST had completed the particular treatment modality ST was then employing, which would take another twenty minutes to complete. But when, after twenty minutes and CF returned, ST finally stepped back from me, he did not step out of the room! Much to my surprise, he lingered in the entrance chatting over my head with CF, about subjects unrelated to my treatment process and plainly irritating to me. When, at one point, I asked him to leave, he did not leave. And CF did not insist that he do so. ST stayed until the treatment ended – which it did earlier than had been promised. Jerry, who’d expected to be present for the final review and homework instructions, was surprised that all was over by the time he returned.

On Tuesday, ST had shaken my trust in the Creative Founder’s therapeutic credibility. After Wednesday, my confidence was restored. On Friday, ST jeopardized my trust in the Creative Founder’s moral reflexes – what you might call “character” – the normative fitness that we all strive for. It’s one of the fragile “extras” that grace a human life. It can be lost, irreparably. Or, after a loss, it can be recovered. That’s the romance of life.

* * *

That evening, our hotel was hosting an extended family assembled for a wedding in the beautiful, multicolored dress of their native India. For a moment, Jerry and I watched the bride and groom as they posed for the photographer, looking fully the part of hero and heroine in the eternal romance of the world.

It made clear the real trouble with what had happened that week at the clinic.

It spoiled the romance of the world.

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Book Matters

Posted on April 9, 2024 by Abigail

“Young Girl Reading” Seymour Joseph Guy, 1877

Wired for Love: A Neuroscientist’s Journey through Romance, Loss, and the Essence of the Human Condition

By Stephanie Cacioppo

This is one of a succession of books, based on neuroscience, that I’ve been reading over the past month or two. Neuroscience is the cutting-edge discipline in which philosophers, developmental and social psychologists, as well as cognitive researchers in allied fields are nowadays engaged in pioneer work.

That being the cutting edge, it’s astonishing how dissimilar – even contradictory – are the findings that different researchers have come up with.

Here’s the hard-edged Daniel Dennett, whose life and work are encapsulated in his recent memoir, I’ve Been Thinking. According to Dennett, no correspondence can be assumed to hold between what we experience (whose cause is electrical impulses in our brain) and how the world really is. We’ve no neuro-scientific reason to believe that the red color of the cardinal bird or the bird itself – glimpsed briefly, heart-catchingly perched on our porch – was actually there. In principle, our impulses could give us the same visual scene even if we were mere brains in vats.

Martha Nussbaum also draws on neuroscience in her Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions but she’s more willing than Dennett to grant a degree of realism to our brain events. The emotions, as she reads the evidence, are as seriously informative as our perceptions are. That said, the human progress from infancy to adulthood remains an uphill climb, with nature leading us through one crisis after another. We go from our ultra-dependent infancy, to a next stage where we get insufficient independent space to explore and grow, and then on to shame, disgust, jealousy and envy. Though it remains possible to emerge as a grateful, empathic, wonder-filled, mature adult – that precious balance is hard to achieve and precarious. It’s touch and go, all the way up and all the way through.

Against such carefully researched, rather dire warnings, from these well-respected philosophers, I’ve read two accounts from well-credentialed neuroscientists that are – contrastingly and startlingly – upbeat! One is The Spiritual Child: The New Science on Parenting and Lifelong Thriving by Lisa Miller, who’s initiated research programs in developmental psychology of wide international and inter-cultural scope. Her finding is that adolescents all over the world, from varied religious backgrounds, go through a period of spiritual searching. In these quests, they try to work out their own, individual relation to the Ultimate. At the end of it, they may or may not return to the religious tradition of their parents. But their initial desire is to make that decision for themselves. The statistical finding of Miller’s researchers is that, if the youthful quest is encouraged rather than disparaged, the adolescents become more effective and satisfied adults.

And finally – saving the best news for last – there is Stephanie Cacioppo’s Wired for Love. The author is an internationally recognized authority on the neuroscience of social connections. What she reports finding, using magnetic resonance imaging and many other precise techniques, meticulously described in her book, is that there are “regions of the brain” … including “more sophisticated parts … involved in conceptual thinking, metaphorical language, and abstract representations of the self” activated by romantic love. Romeo and Juliette type love! Love for the one and only. There is a kind of self-expansion in romantic love. And there are well-confirmed, measurable health benefits.

So who’s right? They can’t all be right. Or can they? I suspect that a good deal hangs on how one makes the call in such a case. Long ago, our family friend William Ivins, then curator of prints and art authority at the Metropolitan Museum of New York, showed us a succession of engravings by copiers from Germany, France and Italy, each purporting to reproduce a certain art work. Each copy showed the unmistakable influence of a particular cultural way of seeing the same art work. The German one looked “German,” the Italian one looked “Italian,” and so forth.

The question is, as Bill Ivins summed it up,

“What did that

damn thing

look like?”

Posted in book reviews | Tagged book matters, Stephanie Cacioppo’s Wired for Love: A Neuroscientist’s Journey through Romance Loss and the Essence of the Human Condition | 1 Comment

Overloaded

Posted on April 2, 2024 by Abigail

Within the past three days, here’s what’s been happening: I’ve ridden and absorbed advice from an insightful mare named Star, talked for a long-distance hour to an Israeli cousin in Vermont whose life has required her to make her way through thickly tangled layers of family fate, shared an hour of Torah Study by zoom with fellow students surprised by the death of a member of our group, spoken for an hour’s long-distance call to Chicago with a woman with whom I’ve been friends since we first met on our Fulbright year in Paris, and lastly had a trans-Atlantic visit by zoom this morning with a British philosopher friend in the U.K.

As a result, what I would really like would be to sit cross-legged in deepest silence for at least 12 hours.

That said, is there – can there possibly be? – any upshot that would harmoniously combine these consequential but quite disparate encounters? Can I somehow pull it all together?

Let’s start with Star. She’s a “lead mare” who, in the wild, would take charge of the herd. She’s vigorous. You can’t go to sleep or daydream on her. Her messages (as translated by the young woman horse-whisperer trotting alongside) were strong, decisive and unambiguous. She’s apparently pegged me as a rather decisive character too. Says I should not pretend otherwise.

Next my Israeli cousin. When I first met her, at the home of her parents (my first cousin and his wife) in Tel Aviv, she was a long-legged, tanned beauty. When I last saw her in person, at the Bar Mitzvah of her sister’s son, she was still a beauty, though not of course (on that ritual occasion) showing so much leg. She’s older, has turned out highly competent, and multi-talented. Through the years, we’ve met only at long intervals. Her grownup pathway has traversed large, tragic losses. I’m grateful that, after all the life-storms, we still could talk in so loving and trustful a way.

At Saturday morning Torah Study, the group spoke up about our lost study companion, each in turn remembering. One by one, the speakers proved almost startlingly eloquent. We decided to write up what we’d spontaneously said and give the written record to his bereaved family.

With my Fulbright friend last night, we’d begun as woman friends before real life (aka “Life”) had happened to either of us. In Paris, we read Simone de Beauvoir’s Deuxieme Sexe at a time when American young women thought of feminism only as the movement that, long before our time, had got women the right to vote. All my American women friends in Paris read The Second Sex in French (it hadn’t yet been translated) and together pondered it. Before de Beauvoir, we hadn’t thought of our feminine situation as something requiring a political remedy.

So, last night, I asked my friend, what happened to each of us when we came home from Paris? How did reality compare with what we expected – or hoped – would happen?

For each of us, when we returned to our respective home cities, it was as if we’d walked into an up-and-down raking-over by enemy fire. The life we resumed turned out far, far harder than we’d anticipated. Yet she and I had each begun with shared romantic hopes – unlike our other women friends in Paris – and we’ve each essentially retained the attitude that we had at the beginning.

What about my English philosopher friend? Although not himself Jewish – of quite bloodthirsty Viking descent from what he tells me – we share a common concern about the shattering storm of anti-semitism that’s swept the planet since October 7. We agreed that God had made him non-Jewish so that his published anger and concern would not be discounted as special pleading.

So the three days have all been fine. The trouble is that any one of the encounters I’ve cited would have supplied enough emotional impact and food-for-thought to last me over the past three days and beyond.

As things stand, and as I’m constituted – with my thin skin and few natural filters –

too much of a good thing

is still

too much!

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Introduction to Womanhood

Posted on March 26, 2024 by Abigail

Lately, I’ve been going through a medley of sources on Woman’s condition.

Est-ce que vous ne plaignez pas

le sort des femmes?

asks a character in a play by Alfred de Musset way back in 1833. Do you not pity the lot of women?

I am not sure if I pity women more, or men more, but there is, I am pretty persuaded, something pitiable about the female and male conditions in our culture at the present moment.

To see this, let me set out a few initial suggestions about the shaping of a human life. First of all, we live and get our bearings in a world of desire. Assuming I can access my desires directly – they not being learned about from somebody else or come by at second hand – and assuming I’m old enough to act on a legal, grownup preference, here’s how it goes when we live and get our bearings in a world of desire.

First, so far as I can tell, there is something I want to be or do more than anything else. I mean something feasible. (When I was little, I wanted to be a deer. That’s not feasible.) Ordinarily, I’m not absolutely sure that x is my predominant desire, but I’m as sure as I can manage to be at this point in my life. At the setting-out point, let’s say.

So what now? I act on it, or act in such a way as is most likely to fulfill that desire. Now what? Obstacles present themselves, blocking or forcing deviations from the straightest path to the desideratum. The obstacles may come from within me, or from outside, or both. That’s to be expected. This is not a smooth world. It’s the terrain of resistances. In coping with them, I may have to scale back my ambition, or go to Plan B, its nearest replacement, whether the fall-back proves provisional or permanent. But I’ll never know whether Plan A was achievable, if I don’t set out trying to achieve it.

Along the way, as I course-correct and persist, I’ll be testing the sincerity of my desires and what they actually come to, in real-life terms. Meanwhile, should some duty, unsought but inescapable, relegate my original hopes to the memory bin, I’ll still know why and how that happened. I will keep the story of my life in view. I will live a sincere life.

Among the books that figure in my recent researches about women is a collection accurately titled Short Story Masterpieces by American Women Writers. These fictional stories proceed chronologically, first in late-nineteenth-century settings. The one I’ve read most recently, takes place around 1920. So far, I’ve read half of them. In the stories I’ve read, cultural norms, including those affecting women, had fixity. Feminism is not a theme. The women writers are almost breathtakingly intelligent, observant, and uncowed. They see what they see and they tell it straight. They don’t tilt the scene so as to favor their female characters. The sympathy of these writers, one senses, has to be earned. Nobody is more perfect than reality permits, or gains something without paying the price of it. These constraints allow the writers to shape characters we will remember with the precision imposed by reality. They were just so and not otherwise.

Alongside the fictional stories, I’ve just finished a nonfiction book titled Dumped: Stories of Women Unfriending Women. It’s a contemporary collection of reports, of varying length, by women who tell how they were dumped – usually by women they thought were their closest women friends. Typically, the dumping is done without explanation. Mostly the writers were very hurt when this happened – and they still are. So far as I can see, in most cases no lesson was learned and no informing context supplied, not from the family background nor from the victim’s life purposes.

In contrast to the fictional stories from an earlier era, here the cultural backdrop has dropped out and the victimized women do not try to replace it. Perhaps some medley of psychological theories lie back of their hangdog passivity. They’ve been told to “get in touch with their feelings” and that’s all they know how to do. They don’t know what’s missing. They believe they can live lives devoid of the search for purpose, and ask no more than to have friends with whom to share their stationary lives.

Finally my researches touch the academic sphere. On the recommendation of an academic feminist, I’ve begun to make my way through a book titled, Gender Trouble. It’s by Judith Butler, who is said to have provided the foundations for current, cutting-edge theoretical thinking about women. So far as I can make out, the message of this book is that the category of “women” is so enmeshed in unequal power relations that it pretty much drops out of use for Butler. And so does “gender,” for similar reasons. All these distinctions are the shake-out of unfair power relations. Even to apply them, in a context beyond the local one, risks subsuming the relations – that are internal to disparate cultures – under the oppressive dominance of one’s own. Language itself can only be wielded provisionally, in temporary alliances for the purpose of achieving some practical, near-term victory over hegemonic oppressors.

What’s happened? What’s wrong with these developments? What’s missing?

The dumped women, who can’t figure out why their bosom buddies dropped them, were not living their stories. Their intimacies were static, their hurts static, their raw reports devoid of purpose. Where were you headed, girl? What threw you off your track? What was your track? I am not trivializing the pain. But even pain needs a context.

As for Judith Butler, she seems devoted to the project of dispensing with maps and methods for assessing which road to travel or the distance traveled. I do not know why this relentless, tireless, ubiquitous befogging has been deemed the cutting edge of feminist thought today.

Because I loved my mother, I have a natural sympathy for other women. However, with a woman who takes all the escape routes, directional arrows and exit signs off the path, I would keep my hand on my wallet.

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Seismic Shifts

Posted on March 19, 2024 by Abigail

Before the Curtain Call by Edgar Degas 1892.

While I was getting ready to write this column, several earth-shakings were rattling around me. For instance, I’ve just spoken by phone with a dear friend. She is facing the moment when the medical team has run out of Things to Try and her husband’s dangerous illness may be tipping off the Edges of The End.

Meanwhile, on another front, judging from my sources, the breaking news re the new American anti-semitism are so extreme, bizarre and unfathomably wicked that well-informed, credible observers are marking the end of the American-Jewish Vacation from History. It’s back. The damn thing is back. We thought we had left it behind.

And yet, and yet – despite this in the foreground and that in the background – my own story has lately acquired some unexpected features. These brand-new and still-to-be-assimilated features are what I’ll be reporting and sharing with you here.

For openers, I’ve become aware of God’s Presence to a degree from which I’ve felt blocked from realizing – self-shielded? – up to now. One of the accompanying changes is an intensification of perception. Particularly out of doors. Like the moving aside of a curtain to disclose the stage lit up behind it, this change has allowed me to notice a world more intensely colored and heart-catchingly beautiful than I’d been able to see before. Or perhaps had not seen since I was quite a small child.

A second change, just as surprising, is a new-found ability to roll with the punches. Here’s one example: in recent weeks, lo and behold! I’ve been unceremoniously dumped by a woman friend of twenty years. I don’t know if more “ceremony” would have made the dumping any better, but the lack of ceremony (peppered with a slew of phony excuses) makes it pretty abrupt. This is actually a new one in a lifetime of experience with women friends. Ordinarily, I’d call it shocking. The next thing I would normally have done is to brood over it, turning it up and over in my mind, trying to think of different ways to reconstruct and construe what happened.

Instead, I’m taking it in now the same way I take in plain facts like the changes in weather in the month of March. Where before I would have felt the dumping as my responsibility to repair or cure, instead mentally I let her go as soon as I saw what she was up to. Not worth thinking about. So … I don’t. Go figure.

Then there’s one more change, the third change, which may still be ongoing. At present, this one seems unfinished, though perhaps they all are. It’s hard to define, but it’s something like trust in the working-out of life, without having to keep it all under control, and without feeling never- sufficiently-caught-up.

As it happens, I took up riding again this week. Normally, if a horse dumps you, at least it won’t be with phony excuses. So I can describe the third change as a sense of riding with a looser rein. I note somewhat less background fear of the uncertainties of life, the ones that may lie ahead. More of a feeling of faith in the prospects of life, trust in the future in a broad sense, riding the flow-in-time-and-space, going along with the dynamics of life.

The upshot of all these changes? It seems to be an enhanced tolerance for my own life rhythm –

its ebb and flow,

its native nature.

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By Stephanie Cacioppo

Dear Abbie: The Non-Advice Column

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