Psychologists have worked hard to prove sadness is pathological. They have redefined the black mood and demonized melancholy. They have packaged pessimism as depression and intensity as disorder.

The attempt to rid the world of sadness is totalitarian in nature. There is no happiness, no humanity even, without sorrow and despair.

Every human being finds a satisfactory answer to the riddle of life, or withers inside. In a world that has turned its back on truth and meaning, this answer is missing. For many, sadness is health. Sadness is resistance. Sadness is the subconscious refusal to surrender.

To take this sadness away by classifying it as disease is to remove the last traces of humanity. A machine never aches. A stone never weeps. The war against sadness calls for its counterpart: the war for sadness, the war for pain, the war for ten million tears, felt one by one.

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In an interview in the New York Times today, the photographer Lillian Bassman makes an interesting, politically-incorrect admission. When Bassman was young and newly married, she did not want children. Her husband did. So Bassman went to a psychotherapist. Within six weeks, her desire for children was awakened. She had a son and daughter.

An unmarried woman who chooses another life is not necessarily unhealthy if she does not want children. But, a married woman who lacks all interest in reproducing is psychologically abnormal. Unfortunately, in our world, this lack of interest is considered perfectly healthy, an assumption that keeps women from seeking help. Maternal desire is not always innate – and there is nothing shameful about it not being innate. But, it can be acquired.

Bassman became famous for her artsy erotic images of women in lingerie ads. Gina Bellafonte, the reporter, says Bassman was “advantaged” in her work with women because they felt more comfortable with a female photographer.

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A Dessert, Raphaelle Peale, National Gallery of Art

If human beings had no need for variety – and for alternating stillness and activity –  there would be no need for domesticity. We could live like horses in penned pastures. Day after day, the same grass, the same sky. We could live like well-oiled furnaces, humming and churning without skipping notes. We could be as static as rocks, as un-various as concrete, as free from melancholy and joy as the sand on the beach.

As soon as he gets over the shock of his arrival, an infant looks about him. He looks about and wants more. More of something. He will never be satisfied with the same thing over and over. Even his moments of stillness contain the search for variety.

Our domestic lives would be formulaic and simple if we were formulaic and simple. The housewife would have nothing to do. She too could join the mechanical flow.

This drawing by the artist Kidist Paulos Asrat is a beautiful rendering of a bird who sings of love all summer long. He does not mourn. He hopes. He does not cry. He woos.

How did we reach the point where we both sanction suicide among the old and yet go to extraordinary lengths to extend their lives? We got here by losing sight of what life is.

Roughly 60,000 Americans in their eighties now have open-heart surgery every year, according to a recent study, as reported in yesterday’s Philadelphia Inquirer. And, more than a thousand in their nineties do. Those surgeries cost Medicare $40,000 to $60,000 each. Medicare will be bankrupt in seven years. And, the number of people in their eighties and nineties is rapidly increasing.

Americans appear to believe death is okay if you’re dying of hopelessness and despair. Death isn’t okay if you’re dying from ordinary physical decline.

No advanced civilization has been sustained without barbers. The more the better. There are few things more beautiful or emblematic of strength and order than a man’s neck, freshly-shaven. Some societies have found long hair in men attractive and masculine. These societies have disappeared, as well they should have.

The barber closest to where I live is a nice, but messy person. He sweeps all the day’s hair into a hole in his floor. The hair rains down into the basement, where he leaves it accumulating in a massive hill of human locks. I once took my son down to the basement so that he could use the restroom. We both almost fainted in disgust. The hill was illuminated with the ghostly light shining from the hole above.

For this reason, and out of thrift, I have long been my husband’s barber. I have cut his hair for about fifteen years. I have a few rules. One, I don’t talk sports. Most men enjoy mulling over the latest scores while getting their heads shorn. Tough luck.

I also reserve the right to break out in laughter. There’s a reason why there are barbers. It does take some skill and training. Worse comes to worse, my husband can wear a baseball cap for a few days. Don’t misunderstand me. I take the job seriously. What woman wants her husband to appear with unintentional corn rows?

“Thanks,” my husband said recently after a hair cut. “It needs to be done.” He was quoting Richard Nixon. In his famous conversaton with John Dean, Nixon spoke of the need to use the FBI and IRS against political enemies.

“Oh, what an exciting prospect,” said Dean.

“Thanks,” said Nixon.  “It needs to be done.”

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Artists give up everything – money, security, normalcy – for their art. Why do they do it? Lech is an Abstract Expressionist painter and a friend of mine. He once explained to me the reason why he has devoted his entire life to art.

“I love the smell of paint,”  he said. “I can never get enough of it.”

Bessie Huey was a fixture of the working-class Pennsylvania neighborhood where my husband spent his childhood. Bessie used to show up now and then at my husband’s house, which was filled with children, boarders, relatives, cats, and dogs. Boo, hoo. Boo, hoo, Bessie would cry. I saw you all sitting around the table last night and it was so beautiful. It was so beautiful it made me cry.

Bessie once called the police to her home with a report of domestic violence. She claimed her husband, who weighed 90 pounds and was incapacitated by illness, was beating her. Bessie was a large woman, about 200 pounds, and strong. No report was ever filed. Bessie, who favored tent-like dresses on her ample frame, appeared to idolize both domestic health and domestic un-health.

Bessie was an eccentric. Healthy neighborhoods include eccentrics. It’s the sterile, unbalanced place that does not. My husband grew up in a normal place, with children playing in the streets, mothers at home, couples yelling at each other instead of divorcing, and taverns filled with men at night. It was a normal place, not a perfect one. A big reason why it was normal was that it had a healthy economy. There were plenty of factories and plenty of jobs.

That town is gone. Much of America is gone. It’s disappeared because Americans have decided they don’t need an industrial economy. America has given away its factories to the world. The whole stunning transformation of the American economy has been treated as if it was inevitable and not the product of choice.

Does a child need both a mother and father in his life? Many people today say, ‘Not quite.’ I was trying yesterday to explain to a friend who is a passionate supporter of same-sex marriage why the answer is yes, but the reasons are so abstract as to be almost unreachable. Many common sense truths, what C.S. Lewis called the Tao of living, are like that. They lie partly beyond our ken. Then I came across this excellent quote by Felix Adler, author of an early 20th century book, Marriage and Divorce. He said:

“The child needs father and mother; but it does not need them only as some think, alternately, now the father’s influence and then the mother’s or in some things the father’s influence and in other things the mother’s. The child needs the father’s masculine influence and the mother’s feminine influence always together, the two streams uniting to pour their fructifying influence through the child’s life into the life of humanity.”

 

In this entry, Rose, a “conservative lesbian,” responds to the charge in the previous post that she is self-glorifying and guilty of idealizing woman love. Among her most interesting comments is this: “Eccentrics need a stable society in which to be eccentrics.”

Rose writes, initially quoting the female commenter Kidist Asrat Paulos:

“In a way, she is saying that there is no non-romantic, Platonic (or otherwise) relationship possible between women. She doesn’t say this explicitly, but I have a feeling she believes this.”

I, in fact, do not believe this, and rather agree with what Heather Elizabeth Peterson writes in “Romantic Friendship: Not Just a Code Word for Gay” and “The Misguided Search for ‘Homoeroticism’ A Plea for Research on Friendship.” As you’ve stated, the sexualization of our culture has helped destroy the possibility of nonsexual closeness. A modern Wordsworth would hide the extent of his love for his sister for fear of accusations (as I have read about William and Dorothy) that his regard was incestuous.

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The following is a critique of the widely prevalent notion that the ideal life for a woman is one of “balance,” the judicious mixing of career and home. I call this the “Balance Myth,” one of the central ideas of mainstream feminism.
 
On the face of it, “third-wave feminism,” as it is known, seems reasonable,  an appealing counterpart to middle class virtue. In fact, it normalizes the radical tenets of feminism. Thanks to the Balance Myth, the casual neglect of children, marriage and home are now mainstream phenomena. This seemingly harmless idea wears a soft and pleasing exterior. But, it offends exactly what it purports to uphold: the intelligence of women and their innate desire for meaningful work.

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Where is Shakespeare on this pie chart?

This article in today’s New York Times states an amazing fact. Apparently, female artistic directors and literary agents have a tendency to discriminate against female playwrights. Are women naturally more competitive with other women? If so, the more women in positions of influence the harder time women trying to break in will have. In other words, the idea that women will be kinder to women is false. Or do women agents, sick and tired of the feminist claptrap that lands on their desks, secretly wish to purge the field of all women? Whatever the answer, the solution is this: Feel sorry for women.

Here’s another question: Is it possible for artistic endeavour to survive in a world where people are charting its progress?

James M. writes:

Your piece on clouds reminded me of a passage from one of my favorite obscure books: V. M. Yeates’ Winged Victory, a semi-autobiographical novel about RAF pilots during the Great War.

    It climbed well, and in a minute reached the cloud layer, which was at fifteen-hundred feet.  After a few preliminary obscurings he was involved in the grey deleting mist. The world had gone; dissolved into intangible chaos. Nothing had form except the aeroplane and himself and perhaps that queer circular ghost of a rainbow that sat in the blankness in front. Every motion had ceased, for all the roaring of the engine. Nevertheless, he knew by experience that in this no-world it was necessary to keep the pitot at eighty or more, and the joystick and rudder central, or bad sensations as of dizzying flopping would follow. The mist grew darker. He put his head in the office and flew by his instruments. He kept the speed right but he could feel that all was not well, without being able to tell what might be wrong. The mist brightened. He came suddenly into sunshine. A cloudless blue sky arched over a gleaming floor of ivory rocks. It was all around him in the twinkling of an eye, and the grey chaos away in another universe, a million years or a few feet distant. The two sphere were as close together and as far apart as life and death. He saw that he was flying with unintentional bank.
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Kristor writes in response to my comment about the need for praise:

I wouldn’t worry too much about getting attached to compliments. Let them register. After all, their ultimate effect in a basically duteous person will be to raise the bar you set yourself to hurdle every day. Am I right? Plus you’ll never give yourself credit for them anyway, never leave them on the plus side of your personal balance sheet. Right? You’ll say, “Oh, it wasn’t me; all I did was interfere with the Lord less than usual.”
 
What counts, what makes the difference, indeed all the difference in the world, is the direction of one’s ultimate orientation. For those who are oriented horizontally, along the plane of the mundane, the world’s effects will affect them by pushing them about therein, to no ultimate relief. For those whose orientation is even a little bit angled up toward Christ’s pure orthogonal to the mundane, the world’s effects will affect them by pushing them about in the world and pushing them up a bit on their diagonal. The closer we approximate to Christ’s orthogony to the world, the more profound this effect, and the more delightful it will be. At the apotheosis, we will see that every worldly experience is radiant with uncreate light; we will enjoy creation as God does. 
 
A purely worldly person, if such there be, refers everything to the world, and is entirely entrapped. Such perhaps is the fate of say Richard Dawkins; it is the Hell C.S. Lewis describes in The Great Divorce, a shadow world of deficient actuality. But almost no one I think is purely worldly; almost all of us want to get out of this shadow world, and into the high bright solid light at the top of the mountain, where our world is no longer obscured, but able at last to be fully itself.
 
I can’t figure out whether Numenius thinks we should be on the peak looking at the boat, or vice versa. Either way, one would be far from the hurry, noise and commerce of the shore. Having spent a lot of time in both situations – wave-tossed and perched on high scarps – I can say with confidence that both are fit places to open and cleanse the doors of perception.

Laura writes:

Yes, Numenius was unclear. I think whatever he meant it involved extreme isolation.

On the subject of compliments, I come from a long Irish tradition of treating them with embarrassment or sarcasm. According to this worldview, which is genetically transmitted, it is presumptuous to see any truth in them. They must be doled out and received sparingly for fear of creating an even minimally self-supporting ego. For instance, if someone tells you have made a great meal or they like what you are wearing, you just sort of shrug your shoulders and grimace. That means, “Gee, thanks!”

I think there are some who are purely worldy in their waking hours. Only at night, in their sleep, do they escape what you call “the shadow world of deficient actuality.”

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Clouds are cheap. Wherever you are, they entertain and enshadow, magnifying to immense proportions the proposition that life is ever-varying shades of grey. Boredom is just a state of mind when there are clouds in the sky.

The plumes, puffs, phantasms and pillows parade across the local heavens. Few days are completely bereft of clouds in May and June, at least where I live. Brides keep planning their weddings as if thousands of June weddings hadn’t been obscured and dampened by banks of Cumulonimbus. This is cloud-denial, a common psychological disease. Cloud deniers always act surprised when spring is cloudy. They have a fixed, illusory image of a cloud-free spring that only the right psychotropic medication could cure.

Cumulus clouds are to June what snow is to January. They form in the lower atmosphere and sometimes extend in massive vaporous monuments upward into the stratosphere. Cumulus mediocris look like shredded cotton balls. Cumulus humilis are more reminiscent of clotted cream. Cumulus congestus create muscular heros, suggestive of so many shapes it is not surprising Zeus was believed to create the image of his wife, Hera, out of a cloud. The cloud was violated and Centaurus thus conceived.

Each Cumulus cloud is “the visible summit of a towering transparent column of air – like a bright white toupee on a huge invisible man.” So says Gavin Pretor-Pinney in his wonderful book, The Cloudspotters Guide: The Sciene, History and Culture of Clouds. Clouds satisfy both the scientist and the artist. The scientist looks at the sky and has the urge to measure droplets. He is a cloud-demystifier. The artist sees castles and ascending saints.  Clouds make him more depressed when he is depressed and more jubilant when he is happy. They intensify the inner condition.

I once lived in a place that was not cloudy for a single day for two months. It was a living hell. Thank you, clouds. You are unappreciated and vilified. You are too lofty for us.

O, vegetative June,
Fragrant opiates,
Milky pharmaceuticals.
O, ruffled doctor,
Tend your emerald clinic,
Your lab coat askew,
Your hair disgraced with tendrils.
Dispense your prescriptions.
Drug and deceive.
Only lengthen this appointment.
I cannot hold you close enough.

Pore through history and you’ll find no record of it. Energy, initiative, will, ideas, conflict – these seem to be the decisive factors in human affairs.

Gentleness is an inconspicuous and private thing. It’s hard to describe exactly what you’ve received when you’ve been its beneficiary. One wouldn’t want to live in a world governed by gentleness, but to live in a world short of it would be like living in a city without trees.

Gentleness is especially feminine. A woman who has never expressed at least some of her powers of tenderness has not fully lived. It’s as if she had never walked. Gentleness, which I myself have by no means mastered, is both inborn and acquired. It can be unlearned and erased. If one lives in a culture that prizes only assertiveness and energy, one may lose the essential thing. Gentleness is low-wattage. With a surge of power, its filaments break.

Some people go to therapists in search of lost gentleness, either the ability to receive or to give it. Gentleness is not simply soothing. It’s mental thing as well, a form of understanding and higher awareness with its own golden mean. Properly attuned, its objective is the buried truth. Improperly attuned, it becomes bothersome, meddling, sentimental, and indulgent.

Behind the achievements of civilization – the masterpieces, the monuments, the battles, the great works of thought – the hidden influence of the right sort of gentleness lives. It’s unrecorded. It’s received public acclaim and never will.

Here is something that is perhaps most apparent when it’s gone.

Perhaps you live in a normal neighborhood. Maybe you reside in a peaceful corner of America where people still make eye contact, wave hello and share meals during a crisis. If you do, cherish what you have.

I was talking to an elderly woman in her mid-eighties not long ago, a person who has lived in the same house in a pleasant suburban neighborhood for more than 50 years. “You must know lots of people on your street,” I said.

She is a gracious and uncomplaining person. But, she looked at me and said, “I don’t know them at all. If I fell down in the driveway, they wouldn’t come and help me up.”

Life is not a bed of roses, it’s true, and people have important things to do. But, something inside me rebels at the thought of an old person ignored. I can’t adjust to the idea. I like to think that if there were a few women at home, this would not have been true for this widow.

Neighborhoods thrive on trust, common habits and time. A non-neighborhood is a place where people may still possess common habits and trust but lack the time to forge connections. The anti-neighborhood is different. There, people have lost the social instincts. Autism becomes collective.

When people receive a basic level of social stimulation from television, it cuts into the desire for simple interactions. But, after a while, it can rob them of all neighborly intuitions. I once invited a couple who were new to our street over for dessert. They were mystified and taken aback. They had no idea what they were supposed to say, as if they were taking part in a ritual in an alien country.

Children and the old always sense something is amiss. To a normal child, it is inconceivable not to express curiosity about the people nearby.  Where is that man from? Who is that woman in the green car? Are there any children in that house?  You could never convince him that it is natural for people to just ignore each other.

Transience has always been a big challenge for the American neighborhood, but what afflicts it now far exceeds this surmountable problem. After a while, the child catches on. He picks up the habits of living among strangers.