Where Does Belief Come From?

Why do we believe the things we do?  A complex question, but one I enjoy thinking about.  There used to be a series on NPR called "This I Believe."  Random people would record a 2-minute statement of what they believed: love rules the world, nature heals, education is (or is not) all it's cracked up to be.  That sort of thing.  Not necessarily religious belief, but something you carry with you in your core.

I used to know someone who was accused of preferring things to people.  Knowing that person, I'd have to agree.  "These fragments I have shored against my ruin" seems to encapsulate his attitude toward his possessions.  Margaret Thatcher once said, there's no such thing as "society."  I've always thought of her as an Ayn Rand sort of person, who puts the individual above all else.  Sometimes it's an activity that shapes a life.  My brother is an artist and has been since he was two years old, perhaps earlier.  He's 75 now, and he is still and always has been a painter.  Making art is the way he sees the world.  And, of course, there are those for whom religion is central.  I have come to believe that religious feeling is simply another way of seeing the world.  Religion, art, music, politics, literature, public service, acquisitiveness, the need to control, the need to submit (not a complete list)--all provide angles of vision that shape whatever belief system we may have.  This kind of belief, like personality, is not something we choose.  It is who we are.  That is why logic is often insufficient, persuasion ineffective, and true conversion rare.

An Islamic fundamentalist intent on restoring the caliphate, had he been born in Alabama, would no doubt be a foot-washing Baptist.  It is our minds that matter, far more than the message.  Belief comes from within; then we find rationalizations to support it.  Everything we think is an attempt to wrench the world into the shape we already see.  So what do I believe?

When I was a young child, I overheard the adults talking about the Hungarian Revolution.  I had no idea where Hungary was or what the people were revolting against, but I picked up enough to know that innocent people were suffering.  I wanted to do something to help--collect clothes to send them, anything.  I didn't, of course, but I thought a lot about it.

My parents used to take us to Youngstown, Ohio, just over the border from Pennsylvania, where we lived, to go shopping in the big department stores there.  Getting downtown meant driving through a poor, African-American neighborhood.  The streets were so unlovely I could not understand how anyone could live there.  I remember once passing an old man who was waiting at a stoplight to cross the street.  He looked so sad.  The image of this poor old man, bowed with the weight of years and who knows what sorrows, pierced me like a shard of glass.  Our car moved on and left him behind, still standing in the same place.

When I was in the eighth grade, a poor family was burned out of their house just before Christmas.  I rounded up some friends, and we all bought gifts for the children.  My dad drove us to their rundown neighborhood, a place I never went otherwise, and we delivered the packages.  What I remember is an empty room with bare floors, a worried woman who stood in a doorway and spoke not at all, and a toddler, dressed only in a diaper, running about barefoot.  The emptiness was like the inside of a bell. 

The sadness in other people's lives is something I have always been aware of.  I don't remember a time when I didn't know that I was lucky and many others were not.  How could I be happy, knowing that so many were broken and alone?  I still ask myself the same question.  This all sounds rather depressing, and it is.  So how do I manage not to drown in the pity I constantly feel?

There are two things I base my life on: love and beauty.  To me, love means giving comfort, nurturing, supporting, and encouraging another person(s).  Lacking a human being, I would need a pet to care for.  I'm sure most people would feel the same way, or say they do, but I can never know if others feel what I feel.  I believe in MY feelings.  I don't have to do anything to feel these emotions any more than a believer has to do anything to believe in a religion.  My core--and I say this not to boast but simply to describe--is empathy.  It is natural for me to put myself in another's shoes and feel what I would feel in their situation.  When my teenage children went through break-ups, my heart was broken as well.  When my grandson wants his "lamby," I want him to have it.  If I cherished something, wouldn't I want to hold onto it too?  I don't always act in accordance with my own deepest values, but when I don't I feel tremendously guilty.  Shame is what you feel when you are caught by others doing something amiss.  It is related to embarrassment.  Guilt is your judgment of yourself, and for me that is far more unforgiving.  I am not religious, but when the Bible says that of faith, hope, and love the greatest of these is love, I have no trouble agreeing at all.

Love is my connection to other people; beauty is my connection to the world.  A melting Mozart aria, the clarity of a Bach fugue, the lushness of a Beethoven symphony are all enough to push me toward the sublime.  The paintings of Monet, the poems of W. H. Auden, a beautiful garden take me places I can't get to on my own.  I prefer a panorama to a pinpoint, an ennobling idea to an ideology, a wilderness to an urban grid.  I believe people are more important than ideas, philosophies, religions, ideologies, abstractions of any kind.  I believe justice is conditional and truth elusive.  If I had to choose one philosopher, it would be J.S. Mill.  If I had my life to live over, I'd do things differently, but I'm glad I don't, because I want to be right here, right now, right where I am.  If it's the past that got me here, then of course I wouldn't change it, pain and all.  I hope it doesn't sound cruel to say it, but I wouldn't be so happy if I weren't so aware of the unhappiness that lies just off-shore of every life.  Virgil wrote of "the tears in things."  I believe he would understand what I am talking about.

I Think I Just Figured it Out

How do some politicians get away with it and others not?  Gingrich is a skunk who cheated on two wives.  McCain's record is nearly as colorful.  Bill Clinton made a mess of things and is today one of the world's great humanitarians.  Texting, groping, lying, cheating--it seems as if it's almost inevitable these days for pols to self-destruct when their libido and sense of power get in bed together.  Now Anthony Weiner goes down (so to speak).  I felt sorry for him at first, because I figured he had been only a little bit bad.  I still feel sorry for him, but I think he's been very, very bad.  How excruciating to be humiliated in such a public way.  How devastating to carry the guilty knowledge that he himself caused all this.  And his poor wife.  What a terrible position he's put her in. 

Absolutely no one can or should try to tell her what to do or how to respond.  Donald Trump is an ass for going on TV and scolding her for sticking with her job in Europe while all this blew up.  It's none of his business, and it's none of mine either.  But I want to go on record as saying I see this debacle as both a disaster and an opportunity.  Something was clearly awry in Weiner's head; now he has a chance to face his demons and figure out how to live the rest of his life.  Is it possible that this is somehow what he wanted deep down all along? 

What disturbs me almost as much as Weiner's peccadillos is the obloquy heaped upon him by the public.  Is there anyone else besides me who feels sorry for the poor schmuck?  I don't defend or accuse him, but if I were in his shoes, my heart would be broken.  That seems pretty much punishment enough to me.

Am I being selective about whom I direct my sympathy toward?  Perhaps.  I admit that I get more upset with the politicians I don't like than with the politicians I do like or am indifferent to.  Weiner would fall in the latter category.  All I know is, morality is not one-size-fits-all.  Consenting adults should be free to do whatever they want; we are only obligated to those closest to us.  Private matters should be left alone by everyone not immediately involved.  And I have a question?  If all these women (Weiner's online pals, Clinton's dishy side-dishes, etc.) were so outraged, why did they write back, stay in the room, answer the phone?  Surely, they bear some responsibility as well.

What Was He Thinking?

I stand by my defense of poor Anthony Weiner (below), but I feel I must add a post script.  I don't know what possessed the Congressman to expose himself to the world in such a flagrant manner, but I'm told that when this sort of thing comes to light, it is because at some level the perpetrator (for lack of a better term) actually wants to be caught.  It's difficult to believe that such recklessness is mere accident.  One tweet, maybe.  But a pattern of contacting strange women and saying sexual things to them is neither healthy nor wise. 

I feel sorry for Mr. Weiner, more sorry for his wife.  I hope they can repair the damage and continue their lives together.  I hope the public can set the scandal aside and focus on the work the man has done and may yet do.  I hope Mr. Weiner has learned that risking marriage and family is not worth a few minutes titillation.  People stumble.  Sometimes they fall.  Let's not kick him while he's down.

What Is It With These Men?

And so another up-and-coming politician bites the dust of sexual misbehavior.  Poor Anthony Weiner.  Move over Clinton, Gingrich, Sanford, and don't forget all the ministers of the gospel who have taken the plunge into hypocrisy.  For what it's worth, here's my take on this latest Washington misfortune.

I have always believed that those who read great literature have the best education in human nature possible.  One of the truly great American novels, "The Scarlet Letter," is but one example of how society fails in its judgment of what most Americans would call a sinner, Hester Prynne.  Hawthorne presents the community of Salem, MA, as the arbiter of convention, religion, and decency, but he gives us a negative example.  The good citizens of Salem are vicious in their rectitude, unmerciful toward the human need for love, and cruel in their punishment of a young woman whose only "sin" is to be caught in a loveless marriage that traps her spirit and degrades her soul.  It is she, the wearer of the scarlet letter, who is the only virtuous character in the entire novel.  Her lover, a minister, who should stand by her, rejects her in favor of his God, a demanding, punitive force that works through Salem's townspeople, who enjoy the deliciousness of punishment as much as they detest mercy and tolerance.

In the recent NYRB Stephen Greenblatt compares Milton's "Paradise Lost" to Wagner's "Die Walkure."  Without going into his whole, very cogent argument, let me draw out what I believe is one of his most important points.  Both artists create a world wherein humans choose human love over transcendence into the sublime.  Both Milton and Wagner emphasize the loneliness of God/Wotan, whose power and unmatched status isolate them utterly.  Their isolation is their agony, and it lasts forever.  Humans who choose earthly love escape their loneliness, if only for a time.  It is clear in both works that, while being thrown out of heaven or denied Valhalla is tragic, living without connection to other human beings is worse.  (Who is more lonely than a tyrant?)

Both Milton and Wagner consider self-love the origin of mature love.  Most psychologists would agree.  Ourselves reflected back to us is what we most want to see.  Isn't this what loneliness is?  The desire to be known by another as well as you know yourself?  This impossible need drives man like the furies.  Laws and customs prevail not because they reflect what people do, but what they so often don't do.  Otherwise, we would need no laws.  When a couple promise to be faithful to one another, the promise is serious precisely because it is difficult to keep, so difficult that we need to stand up before the community and commit ourselves to a choice, not an inevitability.

I believe that Anthony Weiner does love his wife and is a good man.  I don't know him, but he's a friend of Jon Stewart, and for me that's a good recommendation.  So far as I know, he did not sleep with any of his online contacts, which makes him, I suppose, technically innocent.  But the question is not one of innocence or guilt; it is a matter of private thought.  Thank god we are not mind-readers.  Our thoughts are our own, and we are accountable to no one for them.  The most terrifying thing to me about totalitarian systems is their invasion of the mind.  Mr. Weiner, I believe, was indulging in a bit of make-believe and obviously never intended it to see the light of day.  I had a professor in graduate school who once said you know you haven't really lived if, when you find a note on your desk that says "all is discovered", the only thing you do is chuck  it in the wastebasket.

American society in the 21st century is as blinkered and puritanical as 17th c. Salem.  We recoil--with delight--when the mighty are brought low.  If we can stand in judgment, perhaps we won't be judged ourselves.  If we proclaim the supremacy of virtue, maybe our own peccadillos will never be brought to light.  (Newt, are you listening?)  It feels so good to see another righteously punished, and I suspect this feeling is a mixture of envy and revenge, neither of which is laudable.  Why should an intelligent, compassionate, loving young woman be humiliated and shunned simply because she brought life into the world through a loving act?  Why should a congressman be vilified because in the middle of the night he felt a universal, existential loneliness and reached out to another mind for a moment's tenuous connection?  Oscar Wilde said that hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue.  Another fine aphorism is, never presume to understand a man until you have walked a mile in his shoes.

What Mr. Weiner did is embarrassing.  No, he shouldn't have done it.  But he was flirting with danger, no more.  A man who deceives his wife and children over a long period of time, who condemns others for doing the same, who believes that apologizing for an act is as good as never having done it, is a whole different kettle of fish.  The French have their mores.  When the prime minister's illegitimate children appear at his gravesite and no one blinks, it is clear that French society has found an accommodation to the frailty of man.  This sort of thing goes against the American grain, perhaps for good reason.  If we go back to what I said earlier about the highest form of love being mature, mutual connection with another soul, not because nature dropped an anvil on our head and rendered us helpless, but because such a relation requires a choice forged in our deepest selves, then love is more sacred than prayer.  It is also nobody else's business.  We should feel sorry for the hapless Mr. Weiner and remember that we all have our secrets.  He deserves our commiseration, not our condemnation.  He owes his wife an explanation and undoubtedly a lengthy apology; he does not owe the rest of us the destruction of his career.

So what is the difference between Newt Gingrich, who cheated on two wives, one of whom had cancer, and Anthony Weiner who took some embarrassing photographs of himself--not anyone else, mind you, himself?  Mr. Weiner has that deer in the headlights look of stunned amazement.  His apparent lack of affect is presumably an effort not to break down in sobs before the cameras as he sees his life and career slipping inexorably away.  Newt, on the other hand, puffs himself up like a bantam, tosses off a cursory apology, and blames "the pressures of work," thus trying to blame his own conscientiousness for his own tawdry behavior.  One is a poor slob; the other is a pompous ass.  One has critics baying for his resignation; the other throws his hat in the Presidential ring, and no one chokes on it.  Who is really to blame here?  I suggest that, as with the good men and women of Hawthorne's Salem, the real evil is in our own hearts.

"The London Train" by Tessa Hadley

"Writing makes me happy....All those years I couldn't do it...writing was a painful, awful absence in my life....I love paintings, but it's never hurt me that I can't paint for toffee.  Which bit of myself, and when, elected to need to write, in order to be me...?  I used to feel...that life itself wasn't quite real, unless I could write about it in fiction.  Now that I am writing..., that mild insanity has dropped out of sight.  I have a fear, of course, of its returning, if writing ever failed." -- Tessa Hadley

Tessa Hadley joins Alice Munro, William Trevor, and John McGahern in my pantheon of writers who write the way I wish I could.  When I was younger and had more ambition than talent, I was so jealous of successful women writers that I declined to go hear Margaret Atwood read from her work.  Of course, I regret that now.  I admire Atwood, though I wouldn't call her a favorite, and I subsequently fell in love with her critical study of Canadian literature, "Survival."  Thankfully, I have outgrown my youthful sensitivity and can now rejoice when reading a short story by Lorrie Moore or a novel by Kate Atkinson.  At least I have the satisfaction of believing I'm a good audience for these more accomplished writers.  I do, however, resonate with the Hadley quote above.  It follows in an epilogue to her latest novel "The London Train." 

Once upon a time I wrote fiction and was quite serious about it.  I even had a short story published in a Canadian ladies' magazine and was paid $400 for it.  That was the peak of my writing career, though I did follow it up with an MFA in creative writing and a PhD in English literature.  I'm no academic; in my bones I still feel like a writer, but writing about literature seems to come easier to me than creating fiction.  I wish it were otherwise, but there it is.  One thing I do know, I need to write, as well as read, to keep a grip on life.  Somehow, putting words on the page anchors me.  The shape of the English language contains the best of whatever thought I have and keeps it from leaking away.  I have loved to read my entire life.  As soon as I could read by myself, I climbed down off my mother's lap and lost myself in the mysteries of the written word.  I can remember the passion I felt for particular books when I was four or five years old.  I have it still. 

As a PhD student, I, of course, read a lot of literary criticism.  Some of it was very, very good.  There is a chapter by M.H. Abrams on "Moby Dick" that was life-changing for me, and Jonathan Bate's "The Song of the Earth" is a book I would hate to have missed.  But the pursuit of criticism, the effort to find something new to say that both provokes and rings true, the unending need to be somewhere near the cutting edge, the knowledge that few people will ever read you or care what you think are all too disheartening for me.  I'm glad to have climbed those mountains, but I cannot live in those climes.

In my twenties I struggled to find something to say.  Perhaps I had not yet lived enough or lacked the distance from experience that is necessary to see all its contours.  I was an empty vessel.  Now I contain a river of words and can release them almost at will.  Whether I actually have anything worth saying is another matter, but I'm beginning to think that really doesn't signify.  In the end, I am writing to get inside my own head, to hold a conversation with myself.  Solipsistic, I admit, but true.  I would love to be able to express in words the ways I feel about the people I love.  I believe nothing could mean more to me.  Of all the things I need to say, that is the most important--and the most daunting.  Much as I love language, I know I could never make it dance to the music in my heart.  Words are all-important, but at the end of the day the things that most need utterance are locked in fearful silence.

When I read a novel like "The Train to London," I fall in with the rhythm of the writer's mind and for a while can make it my own.  This illusion of release and connection paradoxically makes lived experience richer, just as Monet's waterlily paintings encourage the viewer to see nature more vividly, or the way a painting by Braque casts a landscape seen from an airplane in an entirely new light.  E.M. Forster said, "Only connect."  These words have been my mantra every since I first read "Howard's End."  Imagine two planets colliding or two amoeba dissolving into each other.  Watch an iron filing crawl toward a magnet or a mother cat surround her kitten, and you begin to realize that in everything, living or inert, connection is the constant.  The only way I've found to truly get inside another mind, or at least to feel that I have, is to read something--prose, poetry, fiction--that draws me into connection with it.  This is a need that goes beyond entertainment; it is not a desire for escape.  In fact, it is just the opposite.  For me, literature is the road to life itself.

"We Think the World of You" by J. R. Ackerley

Now here is a curious little novel.  It is brief, and my remarks shall be brief.  Frank is a middle-aged, gay man who his besotted with a working-class amateur thief with a jealous wife and three, then four, children.  Johnny, Frank's beloved, also owns a German Shepherd named Evie.  It is sometimes difficult to tell whom Frank loves most, his unreliable boyfriend or this wild and undoubtedly dangerous dog.  Johnny goes to prison for a few months; the dog goes to stay with Johnny's mother and step-dad Tom.  Frank wants to rescue the dog from Tom's cruelty and neglect.  No one wants Frank to have the dog, out of spite.  Frank's money is the nexus connecting this disparate crew, and Frank wields it like a weapon, giving and withholding as circumstances dictate.

It's a sad little story really.  Frank's loneliness is a bottomless pit, and it is painful to see his slavish attachment to Johnny  received with such indifference.  The dog becomes the "child" they share, and it is a Solomon-like task to figure out who really owns her--or should.  In the end, Frank gets the dog but loses the boy.  At last Frank has an attachment that will not desert or disappoint him.  So what if he has to relinquish everyone else in his life because Evie won't tolerate anyone coming near?  So what if she devours his mail and will barely tolerate a leash?  She loves Frank, as Frank loves Johnny.  In one creepy scene, Frank describes Johnny's sexual arousal of the dog in the most positive terms.  There is obviously something sick going on, and one recoils from it.  It's not a bad novel though.  It does depict, very touchingly actually, the obsessions of a lonely man, whose dark mind is a place where he admits he doesn't want to go. 

"A Favorite of the Gods" by Sybille Bedford

Anna, Constanza, Flavia--Three generations of women whose lives weave in and out of Italy, England, and other parts of Europe, taking us from the late nineteenth century into the 1940s.  Money, marriage, and misunderstanding weave in and out of their lives like a tangled rope, sometimes tripping, sometimes choking.  Anna, a conventional, stiff-necked American marries an insouciant Italian prince and finds herself supporting his household with her considerable wealth, while he carries on a decades-long affair with a family friend in the European way.  Anna's reaction to her husband's infidelity (not the only one, incidentally) when she finally discovers it reflects her Protestant principles and her bruised rectitude.  She flees with their only daughter, Constanza, and takes all her money with her, leaving behind a small son, whose birth cost her much and who grows up to be a disappointment and a thief.

"They fell back, as people--and nations--in a crisis do, upon ready-made standards and emotions....she dealt with it [the "prince's conduct"] as once it might have been judged and felt about by her New England family."  For his part, he does the same, clinging to the sacrosanct idea of the family, puzzled by his wife's extravagant reaction.  Indeed, their entire Italian community is more than a little amazed that Anna didn't know what was going on and simply ignore it, as so many wives have done.  Or she might have taken a lover herself.  That would have balanced things out.  Discretion was much to be preferred to righteous indignation.  Anna is technically innocent, yet it is she who sets in train the events that shape and sometimes blight the lives of her daughter and granddaughter.  Constanza is led to believe her father didn't want her, which was not true, and Flavia trails around Europe after a mother whose metier is men.  She receives a strangely unsentimental education and has no settled home.

World events simmer in the background, erupting occasionally into these peripatetic lives to inconvenience or impede, but, as in a Henry James novel, the overriding theme is the collision of new- and old-world manners and mores.  Women live through their relations with men, while the men, though not peripheral to the action, are not the focus of Bedford's moral scrutiny.  The only note of hope is at the end when Constanza and Flavia take a villa in St. Jean, a small French village often visited by tourists.  Their neighbor is a Parisian, "un homme politique," who lives in a tower with a library of books.  Constanza and Flavia refer to him as "the man of principles."  After Anna dies, after the many men, Constanza moves yet again, this time with Michel, "the man of principles" who offers to drive her to Paris.  He gives Flavia the key to his tower, and Constanza assures her that she will find plenty of books there to read.  And so life goes on, not without hope.

What I love most about this novel has to be the way it is written.  I have come to believe that just about any plot can be made interesting if the style it is written in is compelling.  Bedford is highly intelligent, literate, and worldly, and it is a joy to be carried along by her well-crafted sentences.  There is something about being in the hands of a skilled writer that settles a restless place in me, that invites trust.  I can give myself over to the reading experience whole-heartedly and be rewarded with astute insights into the way things--and people--are.  If the author's judgment is discriminating and articulate, the novel resonates with life.  Without that magic (talent, deftness, call it what you will) the story lies flat upon the page.  I am so happy to have discovered Sybille Bedford and will certainly read more of her.