My screedy thing involving The Communist Manifesto and how it influenced me deeply, for a couple of days, reminded me of two other books which affected me longer, but not forever.
In my early 20’s I was drawn to the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. It became for me a sort of tranquilizer; it seemed to level out my cyclothymic personality problems into a elevated, stoic calm. While I was reading it.
But. Whenever I put the Meditations down (which I had to do occasionally; I had a job, a life), my inner workings returned to the same old impenetrable mess. (You may not want to hear this but what got me out of cyclothymia was, first, real meds and later…simply growing out of it: just before I turned forty, my bouncy bio-chemistry got tuckered out and leveled off. I am deeply grateful.)
I came to understand that stoicism, the philosophy that dominated my father’s Odesan side of my family, is unnatural. It seeks to suppress or deny unpleasant but normal human emotions like anger, grief, despair, fear. Suppression leads to depression, among other miseries. Rather than locking oneself into the false simplicity of stoicism, it’s necessary to face the complexity of being human, and learning how to handle it successfully — preferably without killing anyone, especially oneself.
Ξ
Was The Manifesto the first book to kick start my life-long question when presented with some glorious idea for healing the world? “That’s great. How are you going to make it happen?”
I never mean that cynically, either. I may eagerly share the ideal you proclaim, but can you then tell me how you intend to effectuate that ideal? Because protests aren’t offering me a plan.
As I grew up, that question involving realistic pragmatism became more prominent in my character. And I became more patient about future possibilities and current realities.
Calmer, too, but it wasn’t Marcus Aurelius who got me there.
Nor was it Erich Fromm’s The Art of Loving.
Ah, The Art of Loving. I picked it up during an early romantic experience with a not-loving sort of guy. In retrospect, our fairly brief but unforgettable involvement had elements of cool cruelty (him) and muddled masochism (me), though emotional, not physical.
But that damn book! It taught me, or at least I believed it did, how I should love but not how I should not. So its influence on me was similar to Marcus Aurelius’s: suppression of normal feelings, like anger, and suppression of appropriate expressions of normal feelings, like, “Fuck you.”
I hope I remember correctly that the year after our college involvement, the guy called me out of the blue to re-connect, on New Year’s Eve. He took me to Times Square. I do thank him for that claustrophobic experience which I’ve eschewed ever since.
Somewhere during that “date,” I believe I told him what I thought of him. I recall feeling quite satisfied.
A few days ago, I tried re-reading both the Meditations and The Art of Loving but have been unable to get into them. Their old appeal was conjoint with the lesson stoic families taught us, particularly us girls: anger is bad and your anger makes you unloveable.
So I’ve rejected communism, relinquished stoicism, and recognized anger as a healthy expression. Maybe I should write a how-to book.
Or maybe I just did.