Think (1)

(part one of three)

In the first semester of my freshman year at Princeton University, I took an English course called Modern Drama. Under the supervision of an apathetic graduate student, twelve of us were sitting around a table and discussing our first assigned play, Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard.

“I think Chekhov was brilliant to make such a profound social statement in the form of a farce,” said one student.

“Even though it’s a comedy, he clearly has great compassion for his characters,” said another.

I was startled. “This is my first exposure to Chekhov,” I said. “I read this play without knowing anything about it beforehand. And so, I have to say I’m surprised to hear all of you refer to it as a comedy. I had no idea it was supposed to be funny. My sense of it was that it was deeply sad.”

A second-year student glared at me from across the table. “You didn’t realize it was a comedy?” she said. “Then what did you think about all those scenes with Pishchik groveling for money? What did you think about Gayev’s ode to his bookcase? What did you think about Yepikhodov and his accidents?”

I stared back at her dumbly.

“Well?” she said, drawing herself up self-righteously. “Didn’t you think?”

Well, no, actually; I didn’t. The assignment had been to read the play; it had never occurred to me that I was supposed to think about it. So far as I knew, art — dramatic or otherwise — was something that was supposed to be experienced and responded to on a feeling level. The idea of thinking about a play seemed as absurd as thinking about a painting or a symphony.

That student’s scathing comment was my first sign that I was now living in a very different universe. At Princeton, the proper response to anything — including a painting or a symphony — was to think about it, to analyze it. We were scholars, and that’s what scholars are supposed to do.

In art classes, we would analyze the structure and iconography of a painting. In music classes, we would examine a composer’s use of harmony and counterpoint. To me, this sort of work seemed not only tedious, but irrelevant. The important questions, it seemed to me, were “Why is this painting beautiful?” or “Why does this piece of music move me?” The answers to questions like these remained beyond the reach of scholarly analysis.

Because I’d always shown a talent for writing, it was generally assumed that I’d major in English at Princeton. My experience in Modern Drama put a quick end to that expectation. Not only did I have no aptitude for analyzing a piece of literature; I failed to understand why I was supposed to analyze a piece of literature. Clearly, literature was capable of being entertaining, emotionally powerful, and even thought-provoking. But I couldn’t see how it actually mattered, and I had little patience for people who did think so. This proved to be a particular problem during my upperclass years, when I found myself in a relationship with Marcia, an English major.

In those days before word processors, when school papers were generally drafted on a legal pad, one of the responsibilities of a romantic partner was to sit through the night at a typewriter and type up each freshly handwritten page.[1] It would be three o’clock in the morning, and I’d be squinting at a paragraph that Marcia had indecipherably scribbled in the margin. “What does this say?” I’d ask her. She’d press her nose against the page and read to me what she’d written: some apparent nonsense about symbolic patterns in Dickens or figurative language in George Eliot. “Great,” I would say caustically. “That was worth asking about.”

Granted, this was not a useful attitude to take at three o’clock in the morning. But it truly bothered me that she was wasting her considerable intelligence and effort — not to mention my lost sleeping time — on work of so little consequence. “In case you didn’t realize it,” I would tell her, “the stuff in these books isn’t real. Somebody made it all up.”

Marcia had the last laugh, of course. The papers that seemed so clearly pointless to me were regarded as gold by her professors. She eventually graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa. And as much as I wanted to be happy for her, what I really felt was envy.

(To be continued in part 2)

[1] This is a good time to note that Marcia has taken issue with what I said in my post “Paper Delivery.” As she remembers it, she typed my thesis. I think we’ll need to leave it to future biographers to sort this one out.

Posted February 15, 2021 by Mark S
Category: Education
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Antibody

“Why does Uncle Neil act so weird?” I asked my mother.

Neil was her brother, twelve years her junior. That big gap between their birth years meant that he was actually closer to my age than to hers. I was probably about eight when I asked the question, which would have made Neil eighteen. And like may eighteen-year-olds, he was moody and self-involved. His latest annoying behavior was to come over to where I was sitting and demand, “Scratch my back.” Which I did, but didn’t especially like it.

“It’s hormones,” she said. “When you get to be a teenager, your body starts producing these chemicals called hormones. They help your body develop into an adult, but they can also make you act a little crazy.”

That was alarming. “When do the hormones go away?!” I asked.

“They don’t,” she said. “You just get used to them.”

The reason I remember this brief conversation so vividly is that I suddenly felt that I was doomed, and that sense of impending doom lasted for years. I didn’t want those hormones. Other people might get used to them, but I was sure I wouldn’t. Once they arrived, I feared that I would have to battle them for the rest of my life.

I learned early on that my body was not my friend. When I was a year old, I was sent to a hospital for a hernia operation — an experience so terrifying that I still have a memory fragment from that night in the hospital, alone in a crib in a vast room, crying with all of my strength as I watched the fluorescent lights overhead turn off, one by one. When I was seven, I had a bout of asthma that was so serious that the family doctor came to the house at night and considered sending me to the emergency room. (He eventually determined that it was triggered by an allergy to aspirin, which I haven’t taken since.)

I had other reasons to resent my body. In addition to my allergy to aspirin, I developed allergies to dust, molds, and grass, for which I had to get injections — one in each arm — every weekend. I also was allergic to mosquito bites, which caused them to grow into huge welts on my arms and legs. I had flat feet, thick ankles, and puffy breasts, which made embarrassed to be seen without many layers of clothing. When I reached adolescence and the dreaded hormones arrived, the main result was not weird behavior but painful acne cysts on my face, chest, and back, from which I still have scars.

My mother wasn’t much help with all this, because she’d always had her own body issues. She had been a chubby girl with very heavy thighs and unruly curly hair. As a teenager, she spent nights crying in her room, wishing that her body would turn into an onion so she could peel away the layers. She spent much of her life dieting, including taking prescription amphetamines for a time. In preparation for my Bar Mitzvah reception, she spent months losing weight and then hours having her hair and makeup done. I remember her gazing into the mirror and saying wistfully, “I’m never going to look this good again.” (She eventually fulfilled a lifetime dream by having liposuction in the 1980s, followed by a face lift, and she proudly sent out before-and-after photos.)

My sister and I both tended toward chubbiness, so we were put on Weight Watchers from the time we were young. My sister’s response was to severely limit her calorie intake for the rest of her life, while mine was to binge-eat out of a constant sense of food deprivation.

There are many more examples I could offer (and in fact did offer, before I realized that this post was turning into a catalog of complaints and then edited most of them out). But the main point is that I never developed any sense of comfort, much less identification, with my body. There was me, and there was my body, and we only reluctantly shared the same space. Occasionally we could make a deal — my body learned the physical techniques that allowed me to perform as a mime, and I would reward it by giving it the exercise that those performances demanded — but most of the time we merely coexisted.

Interestingly, the thing that allowed me to reconcile with my body was a practice called Breema, which is a philosophical path toward self-understanding embedded in a practical form of therapeutic bodywork. One of the foundations of Breema is that our sense of separation — the idea that there’s me, and then there’s everything else — is all an illusion, that calling myself “me” is no different from a drop of water in the ocean claiming that it has an independent existence. Breema reminds me that I am not my body, but that my body is a tool that, through attention to breathing, weight, and posture, can help me learn to be present and experience the unity of all that exists. Nevertheless, I’m always amazed by people who seem to be naturally embodied, who appear so at ease in their skin. The place where I encounter this the most is Las Vegas, where young people (mostly women) dress in as little clothing as possible and pose on the street for tourists to take pictures with. I always wonder, how did that happen? Somehow, when they hit adolescence, they didn’t just “get used to” the hormones; they embraced them and made them their own. I’d love to know their secret.

Posted February 9, 2021 by Mark S
Category: Body
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Yay Team

When I was seven years old, my father took me to my first baseball game. He had no particular interest in baseball, and neither did I, but he’d been led to believe that fathers ought to take their sons to baseball games. So we took the train and the subway into Queens, to the recently erected Shea Stadium, to watch the Mets play the Phillies.

At that time, the Mets were a fairly new team and the laughingstock of the National League. I watched batter after batter strike out; I watched outfielders repeatedly fumble the ball and infielders miss it entirely. The Phillies, by contrast, were the picture of competence: They tended to hit fairly regularly, make it to base now and then, and field the ball as if they had at least played the game before.

My father seemed not to notice the difference. Whenever a Met was at bat, he would applaud encouragingly; whenever a Met managed to hit the ball or catch it, he cheered along with the crowd. Whenever a Phillie did anything similar, he sat in silence. This irritated me no end.

“Why are you cheering for the Mets,” I asked him, “when the Phillies are obviously the better team?”

“The Mets are from New York,” he explained. “They represent us — they’re our home team. So we root for them.”

My seven-year-old brain found this concept difficult to grasp. Just because the Mets were from New York, how exactly did they represent us? I couldn’t imagine why anyone would think New York was a better place if the Mets won a game, or a worse place if the Mets lost a game. Either way, New York and its residents would remain exactly the same.

Even if the Mets did somehow represent us, they were clearly a terrible team. So why did my father want this terrible team to win the game? It seemed to me that anyone who cared about baseball would want the better team to win. Otherwise, the game would have no meaning. If winning were purely a matter of dumb luck, such that even the Mets could do it, there would be no reason to feel proud of winning. You might just as well feel proud of winning a coin toss.

I’m many years older now, and I’m happy to say that I’ve figured out many of life’s puzzles, but this is one I still don’t get. I live in Oakland, and so I’m supposed to be happy when the Oakland A’s  win — in fact, I’m supposed to actively want them to win — and yet I still don’t see how my identity, or my city’s worth, is at all tied to the performance of a baseball team.

I’m not saying this to be dismissive. Good friends, for whom I have great respect, have emotional investments in the outcomes of baseball, football, and basketball games, and so I certainly can’t claim that there’s anything superior about my not having such an investment. I’m just trying to understand it.

I can imagine that many years ago, in the days of wooden bleachers and hand-operated scoreboards, your home team really was your home team. You might have known some of the players, or their families; you might feel a kinship with them because they came from your neighborhood. The part of you that wanted to be an athlete might be living vicariously through their wins and losses. I could see how under those circumstances, a victory by your team might make you feel better about yourself.

But these days, professional sports is a multi-billion-dollar enterprise that draws on a worldwide pool of talent. In most cases, there is no underlying relationship between the players, the management, and your home town. The city where they play is, in every practical way, arbitrary. So how is it that people feel an emotional tie to their city’s team? When I ask friends why, they can’t offer any logical explanation; like my father, they just do.

It strikes me that this is similar to the idea of loving one’s country. As an American, I’m supposed to love America. I long wondered why this was so. I can be grateful that I had the luck to be born in this country; I can be proud of anything I’ve done to make this country a better place. But “love” seems like an odd thing to demand, considering that if I’d been born in France, I’d be expected to love France, and if I’d been born in Papua New Guinea, I’d be expected to love Papua New Guinea.

What I realized is that loving one’s country isn’t something one chooses to do; for most people it’s inborn, like loving one’s family. If I love my mother, it’s not because I think she’s better than other people’s mothers, or because she’s done something particular to make her worthy of love; it’s just because she’s my mother. There’s no actual requirement to love one’s mother, but if I met someone who claimed not to, I’d probably be wary of that person. (I’m not including here people who, as a result of childhood neglect or abuse, have a compelling reason to renounce that emotional tie.) Under normal circumstances, loving your mother is something you just do.

So I’m guessing that having an emotional attachment to a country or a team is something similarly inborn, something that grew out of loyalty to a clan or tribe. If I lack that sort of attachment, I can’t just choose to have it, but I’ll understand if that makes you trust me a little less.

Posted February 2, 2021 by Mark S
Category: Society
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Paper Delivery

I was always bewildered when teachers would explain the process for writing a paper. You were supposed to do research, take notes, make an outline based on the notes, write a first draft, review and edit the draft, and then write a second draft. To me, it seemed crazy to go through all those steps. Why not just write the paper?

From elementary school through high school, this is how I wrote a paper: I laid out all of the necessary books on my bed; started writing, referring to the books as needed; and stopped when I reached the required number of pages. Then I turned it in. I always got A-plusses on my papers.

A few things changed when I got into college. Because I was in an environment where “pulling an all-nighter” was a social norm, I was able to procrastinate longer than I could when I lived with my parents. That meant that at ten or eleven o’clock on the night before the paper was due, I’d roll the first sheet of paper into my typewriter. (College papers usually required making some sort of argument rather than doing straight research, so I could dispense with the laying out of books on my bed.) I’d start typing, and by morning, I had a finished paper.

In college, where standards were higher, I didn’t always get As on my papers, but the professors often commented on how well written they were. I only got a B-minus on my senior thesis, but I didn’t mind, because my thesis advisor said that it read like an essay in The New Yorker. I worshipped The New Yorker, so that was the highest compliment he could have paid.

I should note that unlike with most of my other college papers, I didn’t write my entire thesis the night before it was due, nor did I write it as I typed. I actually wrote it out in longhand first, in tiny printing on unlined paper, so I wouldn’t be distracted by guessing how many pages it was. I put a mark next to anything I’d said that needed to be supported by a source; then, after the draft was written, I went to the library to find sources that said what I needed them to say. (It was a huge library, so that was no problem.) Having thus taken care of the footnotes, I began typing.

Looking back on it, the fact that I was able to turn out papers this way seems unbelievable. As much as I prided myself on the fact that I was able to avoid making outlines and writing multiple drafts, the fact is that I did do those things — I just did them in my head. By the time I started the task of writing, the entire paper was already organized and reasoned out. All I had to do was come up with the words.

This was in the days before word processors. Once something was typed, there was no way to edit it, other than tearing up the sheet of paper and typing the whole page again. Obviously, that was something to be avoided, so I thought very carefully before committing any sentence to paper. Entire paragraphs were written and edited mentally before they appeared physically. The idea of doing that seems superhuman now.

When I got my first computer — an IBM PCjr, in 1984 — I was already making my living as a freelance writer. The way that computer changed my writing process was, almost literally, mind-blowing. All of that mental labor could now be outsourced to the screen. I could shape and reshape sentences, rearrange paragraphs, and change things I’d written earlier to better fit with what I wrote later, all without having to track and retain it in my mind. I don’t think I can say that my writing got better, but it sure got a hell of a lot easier.

I’ve been reading many articles about how online life is rewiring our brains — how we’re losing our ability to focus and concentrate for extended periods, and how we’re less likely to remember things, since our devices do most of the remembering for us. I’m not convinced that my use of Google and Facebook has changed me much, but I can definitely state that my brain is a very different animal now than it was prior to the 1980s. My post-computer brain can’t write without a word processor. On those rare occasions when I have to hand-write something — say, a message on a greeting card — I have to compose it first on a screen, and then copy down what I’ve written. (What an ironic reversal from the old days, when things were handwritten first, and then typed.) In practical terms, I can’t say that this is a problem. Word processors exist, and they’re not going away, so the fact that we (or at least I) depend on them doesn’t matter much. Still, the thought of having a superpower and then losing it feels kind of sad. I may have developed some other skill to compensate for it, but if so, I haven’t found it yet.

Posted January 26, 2021 by Mark S
Category: Writing
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Niceties

I have been known to have cause to say to my wife Debra, “The cat is not a toy.” And she has been known to respond, “Yes it is!” while continuing to swing the cat’s forelegs as if they were the arms of a dancing puppet.

The point is, Debra and I have different ways of relating to cats. For me, it’s all about respecting the cat’s innate dignity. When Mary Beth, a gray-brown tabby with a long and elegant tail, comes to me for affection, I’ll generally stroke her head and back, scratch under her chin, and rub her belly if she asks me to. When she’s in Debra’s hands, I’m as likely as not to see Mary Beth’s ears being held back to make her look like a rodent, as she protests (in Debra’s imitation cat voice), “Dat’s not diggified!”

I must quickly say that none of this hurts Mary Beth, who is a very patient cat. Debra loves animals and would do nothing to cause them pain. She just feels that there’s no point in having cats in the house if you can’t have fun with them. I, on the other hand, am the sort of person who says “Excuse me” if I have to maneuver around a cat who’s in my way.

As you might expect, our contrasting ways of dealing with cats reflect our ways of interacting with the world. If a house is for sale in our neighborhood, Debra has no problem with touring the house even though she has no intention of buying it; I worry that I’d be wasting the real estate agent’s time under false pretenses. If we’re walking through a narrow residential alley in China, I’ll be careful to keep my eyes forward so as not to accidentally see into anyone’s window. Debra, while not actively peering through the glass, believes that whatever she happens to catch a glimpse of as we walk by is fair game.

For the most part, we’re tolerant of and accustomed to each other’s styles. I will cringe at some of Debra’s behavior, and she will roll her eyes at some of mine, but neither of us will start an argument about it. The only time I can remember Debra seriously objecting to my conduct was when we were racing through an airport to catch a soon-to-depart connecting flight, and I was repeatedly stopping to let people go by. Debra told me, in an unmistakable tone of anger and frustration, to stop doing that.

The surprising thing — and one of the reasons why our marriage has lasted as long as it has — is that our styles of behavior complement each other. Neither one is clearly superior; sometimes Debra’s way is effective, and sometimes mine is.

The first place we lived in together was the ground floor of a house whose upper story had been converted into an apartment. Our upstairs neighbors were a pair of young women whose favorite activity, at the end of a long work week, was to invite a pile of friends over, play loud music, and drink and dance. The thunder of footsteps above us was deafening, and I often found myself having to climb the stairs late at night to ask them to tone it down. As you might expect, that didn’t sit well with them, and our relationship deteriorated into simmering antagonism.

Finally, I had an inspiration. Debra and I had made plans to go away for a weekend, and so I told our neighbors, “We’re going out of town, so this would be a really great time to have a party.” They were pleasantly surprised to be told this, and sure enough, they had a no-holds-barred party while were away. This happened a few more times, and we were pleased to see that they gradually made more of an effort to be quieter on the nights when we were home.

One day, one of the women came to tell me that her roommate’s birthday was coming up, and that they really wanted to celebrate with a big blowout. Would we be willing to go away that weekend? That was a major thing to ask, and she knew it, but we so appreciated her sincerity that we said, “Yes, we’ll find someplace to go.” We went away, they had their party, and from that time on we became friends. This is my favorite example of how instead of meeting resistance with anger, it’s often more effective to meet resistance with niceness.

On the other hand, sometimes it isn’t. When I was having a wisdom tooth removed under sedation in an oral surgeon’s office, my blood pressure suddenly dropped to a life-threateningly low level. The surgeon had to abort the operation, and I was rushed by ambulance to the emergency room. Because it wasn’t clear why this had happened (and because having a wisdom tooth removed when you’re in your 60s is a much bigger deal than when you’re in your 20s), the surgeon was reluctant to attempt the procedure again. He suggested instead that I have it done under general anesthesia in a hospital setting, where they’d be prepared for anything that might go wrong.

We found an oral surgeon who had admitting privileges at a Kaiser hospital (Kaiser Permanente being our healthcare provider), and he tried to set a date for the operation. But to the surprise of all of us, Kaiser turned him down, saying that there was no medical reason to use an operating room for a wisdom tooth extraction. Debra (who, incidentally, was once a lawyer) appealed the decision, submitting affidavits from a variety of medical professionals saying that there was indeed a medical reason — namely, that I had almost died the first time. Still, Kaiser denied the appeal.

At this point, I was ready to back down. Maybe it really wasn’t medically necessary; maybe the blood-pressure drop was just a fluke and I should try again to have the procedure done in the oral surgeon’s office. Maybe I just shouldn’t have the wisdom tooth removed at all. But Debra would have none of it. She pursued this case with various Kaiser representatives, making herself into the world’s worst pain in the ass and refusing to leave them alone until they reversed their decision. They finally did, a full year later — and even then, they refused to concede that use of the operating room was medically necessary. They said that they were permitting it “as a courtesy,” meaning that they were doing it just so they no longer had to put up with Debra. So sometimes it doesn’t pay to be nice, and I’m happy to still be alive to admit it. After that, I can’t really complain when she does funny things to the cat.

Posted January 12, 2021 by Mark S
Category: Communication
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