Hasten Slowly

That life is fleeting is hardly an original thought.  I attended a repast for a departed friend earlier this week, so the thought was more on the surface than usual, but mortality is always something at the back of our minds. It is why people have bucket lists. It is why we feel guilty about wasting time. Just last week a somewhat younger fellow in my circle of friends was expressing his funk over where he is “at this stage” in life: alone and essentially property-less. One could rephrase that (and I did) as free without burdensome responsibilities though I understand why he didn’t find that reassuring. This is a sentiment we hear expressed by people at all levels of financial and professional success. One woman (whose property I showed back in my broker days) with a seemingly healthy family in an $800,000 house once said to me with a head shake while leaning on her Mercedes, “I can’t believe this is my life.” She meant that in a bad way, not in an “I’ve hit the jackpot” way. Despite material superficialities, she may well have had solid reasons.
 
In a world where there is always someone who outshines us in ability and achievement, most of us feel like underachievers and laggards much of the time. We can feel this way at any stage of life, but the “middle-age crisis” is the classic event and for good reason. Time really is slipping away from us at that point: our range of possible futures constricts. This often leads to rash decisions from the thought “If I don’t do this now [get married, get divorced, quit my job, become an artist, study philosophy, have an affair, start a business, backpack through India, or whatever], I never will.” Sometimes the decision works out through luck or good planning, but more likely it’s a mistake, and a major life mistake made at 45 or 50 is less recoverable than one made at 25. (This is why such blunders are less of a “crisis” at 25 even though the feelings may be just as intense.) I speak from personal experience: time by itself is the wrong reason to do anything. First think twice to determine if it is something you would still want to do if not rushed for time. Then think it over once more. If the answer is still yes it might be the right move. A second, third, or even a fourth thought would have benefited me in my 40s.
 
It took me far too long to stop worrying about life benchmarks. There is something to be said for making peace with underachievement. Don’t get me wrong: if winning those trophies (real or metaphorical) makes you happy then by all means go for them. But if they don’t, don’t. In the end, the needlessly unhappy life is the wasted one. An entertaining little book that makes just this point is The Underachiever’s Manifesto: The Guide to Accomplishing Little and Feeling Great by Dr. Ray Bennett. In it he expresses a fundamentally Epicurean (in the classical sense) world view and advocates a leisurely approach to life: “By now you should be completely confident that underachievement is the key to happiness in your life and for everyone else around you, so stop worrying about not being perfect.” Accomplishment, he tells us, is in the eye of the beholder. He quotes Pablo Picasso of all people: “You must always work not just within, but below your means. If you can handle three elements, handle only two. If you can handle ten, then handle only five. In that way, the ones you do handle, you handle with more ease, more mastery, and you create a feeling of strength in reserve.”

None of this means we shouldn’t write that novel or record that song or whatever it is we always meant to do but didn’t. Bennett simply reminds us that the point of doing those things is to have fun: something we tend to forget when we drive ourselves to meet some external standard. Unless we really enjoy our work, perhaps being a workaholic is the wasted life… and life is fleeting.

 

Bessie Smith – Wasted Life Blues (1929)

Winter’s Bones

Betting on weather in NJ, whether days ahead or months, is a fool’s game. Nonetheless we all try regardless of our expertise or its lack. The smartest of the foolish money is on a coming winter season of heavy snow, much like last winter, in consequence of the recurrence of La Niña, a weather pattern caused by cool water temperatures in the Pacific. Whether those bets pay off or not, it won’t hurt to prepare. Having been snowbound more than once last winter with two 2WD vehicles unable to navigate my driveway much less the roads, I replaced my sedan a couple months ago with an All Wheel Drive Trailblazer. I’ve stored 20 gallons of fuel in case the heating oil delivery truck can’t make it up my driveway as happened a few times last year. I’ve tied tarps on equipment and machinery (e.g. AC and pool filter) that fare better if not infiltrated by snow. Yesterday I was up on the roof of the barn cutting back overhanging branches. Besides the risk of them doing damage by breaking, snow causes the branches to bend down onto the roof, which is not good for the shingles. I used a Sawzall and manual branch cutters for this job because I didn’t feel comfortable waving a chainsaw over my head while balancing on a roof peak.
 

With or without whirring blades, I’m cautious these days on roofs – even a one-story roof. There is a family history. My dad had a nasty encounter with a Skil saw as long ago as the 1950s when he fell through rafters. He was young and he recovered. I’m not young but I’d be averse to repeating the event even if I were. Besides, my bones probably would object to the impact from the fall alone, and not just because I’m (let’s not mince adjectives) old.

We of the 21^st century are more fragile than our ancestors, who bounced better. The further back in time one goes the greater the fragility gap. Skeletal evidence from archeological sites reveals just how much bone density has dropped. A 2017 study of remains from 5300 BCE to 100CE showed the ancient bones to be 30% stronger than those of average 21^st century people. They are stronger even than those in most modern athletes: “humeral rigidity exceeded that of living athletes for the first ~5500 years of farming.”

An interesting book on biological changes in humans over the past few tens of thousands of years is Primate Change: How the World We Made is Remaking Us by Professor Vybarr Cregan-Reid. The changes include higher rates of cardiovascular disease, smaller and more cavity-prone teeth, smaller brains, allergies, back pain, higher rates of myopia, etc. A few of the changes are genetic: brain size, for example, which is down about 10% from the peak some 30,000 years ago; this is a global phenomenon that is apparently an effect of self-domestication as human populations rose and forced more social interaction. (Domesticated animals almost universally are smaller brained than their wild counterparts.) Most of the changes are either purely environmental or epigenetic. Epigenetic influences change the way genes are expressed even though the genes themselves are unchanged. These include such things as childhood diet and exercise. Unlike purely environmental effects (e.g. adult exercise) these changes (e.g. height and foot structure) are irreversible in adulthood. They also are partly heritable, which came as a surprise to researchers a few decades ago. In general, residents of advanced countries today are weaker than our ancestors (and modern day hunter-gatherers for that matter) in almost every imaginable way. We somehow live longer anyway, but that is a testament to how safe we have made our world rather than to our innate fitness to live in it. Our sedentary lifestyle is mostly to blame. A desk job (including school) is as deleterious to health as smoking. An indication of how inactive contemporary humans are is that on average each burns fewer than 300 calories per day over the basic metabolic minimum; Paleolithic hunters (as do their remaining modern-day counterparts) burned more than 1000.
 
Based on long-term trends (especially of the last few centuries) the future of human biology is not rosy. We are not realistically about to give up the creature comforts that make us weak. However, other interventions are possible. There exist today drugs that mimic the effects on the body of rigorous daily exercise with all its benefits; they are not approved for use (the side effects are undetermined) but they might one day be on drug store shelves. Then there is the prospect of bioengineering (long promised but little delivered) that might put us into shape without medication and despite our laziness. If we do tinker with the genome, I suggest aiming (among other things) for a greater capacity to self-regulate body temperature so we can stay warm in the cold. We then could face the winter with less trepidation and lower heating bills – though higher food bills. I don’t mind eating an extra meal. Oh, yes: we should re-toughen those bones, too, to improve our bounce.
 

Guttermouth – Primate Camp

Paper Friends

Not all the friends of our youth are people we have ever met. Some of them are artists, musicians, and authors with whom we have one-sided friendships. Some of them died before we were born: long before. One-sided relationships are called parasocial, but there is nothing para- about their influence. Hearing an old song or revisiting a favorite book evokes every bit as much nostalgia as the last high school reunion. Maybe more. It’s a feeling I get whenever reopening a novel by Wells, Asimov, Heinlein, or any of several other authors whose works already had claimed space on my shelves in my second decade.
 
It is just as well that, more often than not, we don’t ever meet the actual artists – except perhaps in some cases for a minute at a book signing or some similar event. Art says little about the character of the artist. They might be very much what they seem in their work or they might be radically different. They might be pleasant or they might be jerks. It makes little difference to the value of their books, but sometimes we can’t help but wonder.
 
For this reason the title When Nietzsche Wept by Irvin D. Yalom (Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry at Stanford) caught my eye. Period novels with intriguing subject matter still can manage to disappoint, but this one did not. This is a well-written and extremely well researched historical novel set in the 1880s and featuring Friedrich Nietzsche, Lou Salome, Josef Breuer, Sigmund Freud, and other key thinkers of the day. Yalom conveys a real sense of the personalities and he has a firm grip on their ideas, which were sometimes stuck in the 19^th century and at other times transcendent.

Friedrich Nietzsche is one of my old parasocial friends. He shook up a lot of my preconceptions in my late teens and early 20s. I first read him while taking a college class of classical Greek tragedy – not as an assignment but just because I had seen him referenced and wanted to see what he had to say. Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy (through the Spirit of Music) was a revelation not only for its deep insight into Greek drama but into human nature. The book also has a lot to say in a comparative way about Wagner. Truth be told, at the time I knew Wagner best from Bugs Bunny but I soon remedied that, though without becoming a Wagner fan. (Nietzsche himself later broke with Wagner over the latter’s anti-Semitism.) I soon followed The Birth of Tragedy with Thus Spoke Zarathustra [Also Sprach Zarathustra] and then with several of Nietzsche’s other books. The Walter Kaufmann translations were and are still the best. When called for jury duty for the first time, I spent the hours in the courthouse jury pool waiting to be chosen or not for a case by reading Beyond Good and Evil. I didn’t think about it at the time, but that title might have raised a few eyebrows in that venue.
 
Nietzsche’s writing career lasted only a decade, but he was prolific in that decade. His ill health and thoughts of mortality intensified his drive to produce. I understand the feeling: most of my short stories and my only novel were written in the space of a few years when my life circumstances caused me to be feeling my mortality. None of my writings is as deep as anything published by Fred, but we can’t all be mad geniuses. Nietzsche suffered a mental collapse in 1889 (tertiary syphilis is the usual diagnosis) and eventually ceased speaking. He was tended by his sister until his death. He remained obscure throughout his productive period but his fame rose as soon as he was no longer capable of being aware of it. His influence extended beyond philosophers to artists such as Strauss, who wrote the heavy-handed but impressive tribute Also sprach Zarathustra in 1896.
 
As noted, Nietzsche often failed to rise above his time, and on those occasions he induces most readers (including me) to shake their heads and sigh. But he more than made up for it the rest of the time. He and the existentialists who followed him caused me to engage in introspection of a kind that I had neglected until then. It was less a matter of showing the way than showing we all choose our own ways – even if most of us opt for well-trodden crowded paths. I owe him a lot.
 
The closer one looks at the life he actually lived, however, the more he looks like a taxing friend to have had. I’m happy to keep him at arm’s length via Yalom’s pages.
 

Strauss – Also sprach Zarathustra [initial fanfare]

Stockholm High

While shopping at the local supermarket last week, a few teen boys in line in back of me at the checkout counter were dissing other teens not present – an activity that was not entirely alien to my own long-ago teen years. I wasn’t intentionally eavesdropping: adults other than those in authority were simply invisible to them, as they were to me at that age, so they weren’t being remotely quiet. The crime of the not-present was conformism at school. “Stockholm Syndrome,” one of the boys ventured. This was actually funny. Outside of teen oriented TV series with adult professional screenwriters writing the lines, one doesn’t commonly expect cleverness from teen boys. I think the remark was lost on the other two, but by then I was headed to the door with my groceries so I can’t say for sure.
 
Stockholm Syndrome is the tendency of hostages in certain situations to identify and sympathize with their abductors. Though Patty Hearst soon became the poster child for the syndrome, the term comes from a high profile 1973 robbery of Kreditbanken in the Norrmalmstorg area of Stockholm; hostages were taken and held for six days while police surrounded the bank. (The original term was Norrmalmstorg Syndrome, but that proved too much of a mouthful for non-Swedes.) I remember hearing about the robbery on newscasts (yeah, I’m that old), but don’t remember many details from them, which is just as well since reports when the event was ongoing were largely wrong. By coincidence (unrelated to the supermarket overhear) however, I recently read Six Days in August, a very well-researched book about the event by David King. King revisited original sources and interviewed participants. There is also an upcoming Netflix series called Clark that is based on the Norrmalmstorg robbery.
 

The affair was far more bizarre than I had gathered in 1973. It was not a simple robbery gone wrong. Jan-Erik Olsson had far more grandiose plans when, disguised in wig and makeup, he walked into the bank on August 23 armed with a submachine gun, ample ammo, and explosives. He wounded a policeman in the first exchange of fire, took four hostages (three women and a man), and retreated with them into the vault. He demanded 3 million kronas as well as the release from prison and delivery to the bank of Clark Olofsson, a flamboyant criminal of national notoriety. This latter demand caused police to misidentify the robber as a friend of Olofsson: a misunderstanding that persisted until that friend called in. Police in fact delivered Olofsson to the bank based on this error and on Olofsson’s assurances he would help mediate a nonlethal resolution. Instead, he appeared to join Olsson, assisting him in his armed resistance to the police and the holding of hostages. (A court later accepted Olofsson’s claim that he was just going along with things to prevent bloodshed.) Olsson and Olofsson demanded, in addition to the 3 million, a car and a clear path to safety; they said they would bring along two hostages with them for insurance but would release them when they were clear. Police refused. The prime minister Olof Palme agreed to a demand for direct negotiations (it was an election year and it would have looked bad if hostages were killed because he refused to get on the phone) but was surprised when one of the women hostages chided him on the phone for being unhelpful. After six long days, police teargassed the vault through a hole they drilled in the ceiling despite threats from Olsson to shoot or blow up the hostages. Olsson and Olofsson surrendered without following through on the threat.
 
During the ordeal the hostages became friendly and chatty with the robbers. They grew to feel that the greatest threat to their safety was an obstinate and aggressive police force. Identifying and sympathizing with abductors/abusers is a common survival mechanism on two levels: it relieves psychological stress by reducing the sense of victimhood, and it really does reduce the odds of being killed. It’s often said that hostages are in the greatest danger when they are dehumanized: seen as a member of some disliked group (even if it’s just “bank employee”) rather than as fully human. This is almost but not quite right, for some misanthropists hate humans in general too. The real risk is depersonalization: it is easier to harm some random human than Bob or Barbara with whom you have friendly chats. As for the hostages, they may start out by expressing faux sympathy and friendliness, but, as Kurt Vonnegut was fond of noting, if you pretend to be something long enough, you may discover that’s what you are. The feelings become real. After the crisis was over the released Kreditbanken hostages remained sympathetic to the robbers. One of the female hostages actually met Olofsson for a lunch and hotel romantic encounter while he was on a day pass from prison to see his lawyer.
 
Police psychologist Dr. Harvey Schlossberg, designer of the FBI curriculum on hostage negotiation, writes that such hostage attitudes are to be encouraged when possible as they improve the chances of nonlethal outcomes. He writes, “The Stockholm Syndrome is an automatic, often subconscious, emotional response to the trauma of becoming a victim.” Police shouldn’t be surprised or angered by curses and insults from hostages: “A hostile hostage is the price that law enforcement must pay for a living hostage.” Cults (religious or secular) when attempting brainwashing deliberately employ the techniques used in unplanned fashion by hostage takers (a mix of terror and small kindnesses) and frequently evoke the same response.
 
So, can the term Stockholm Syndrome fairly be applied to school? I suppose it depends on how much school resembles a hostage situation. Maybe the teen had a point, but that is a discussion for another day.
 
 

Donna Summer - The Hostage