HENRY DAVID THOREAU

by William H. Benson

July 12, 2012

     William Falk, the editor at The Week, described his busy life one day last week. “I am in the 15^th hour of a day that began at 6 a.m. with some work at home, a 9 a.m. trip to the doctor, more work on my laptop in the waiting room, some text updates to my wife Karla, a work-filled commute, a full day of pedal-to-the metal cranking on deadline, a commute back home, a rushed dinner with my daughter, and a few more hours on the laptop, pecking out this editor’s letter.”

     Such a schedule sounds relentless, and it is, but it is not a-typical, not uncommon. Many American people push themselves to work that number of hours daily for five, six, or even seven days a week.

     Tim Kreider, a writer for The New York Times, wrote a column last week that he entitled “The ‘Busy’ Trap.” In it he argued that people’s “busyness is purely self-imposed. They’re busy because of their own ambition or drive or anxiety, because they’re addicted to busyness and dread what they might have to face in its absence.” He may be right.

     Kreider works only four or five hours most mornings, rides his bike in the afternoons, and reads books or watches movies evenings. He says, “I am not busy. I am the laziest ambitious person I know.”

     Henry David Thoreau, that eccentric resident of Concord, Massachusetts in the middle of the eighteenth century, argued that even four or five hours of work every day is too much. He turned the whole scheme of work and living upside down, arguing that a person should only work one day a week and live the other six, or work two weeks a year and vacation the other fifty. Few people in today’s modern society would dare follow his prescription for living, and yet he did.

     On July 4, 1845, his Independence Day, he moved into a rustic cabin that he had built near Walden Pond, and eight days later, on July 12, he marked his birthday, turning twenty-eight. Near his cabin he planted a garden, and so he fed himself. For the next two years, until September 6, 1847, he lived at Walden Pond, proving two propositions: first, that a person can live with a minimum of things, and second that a person can live with a minimum of labor. There, he wrote his book, Walden.

     In it, he asked pertinent questions, “Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life.” “Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed and in such desperate enterprises?” He challenged and rejected society’s basic premises. He would not hurry; he would slow down and savor life’s pleasures.

     He belonged to no church, having rejected most theology. He detested government’s intrusion into his life, saying that “the best government is that government which governs least.” He had no use for family, marriage, or friends. He had no ambition to acquire personal comforts, and he looked askance upon technology. For example, Henry derided the post office, saying, “I never received more than one or two letters in my life that were worth the postage.” One wonders what he would say about e-mail.

     What does a person have left if he or she has challenged and rejected religion, government, family, career, a home, and society? Two things remain, and the first is nature: trees, air, sunrises, muskrats, squirrels, birds. So he wrote, “I am monarch of all I survey.” He kept appointments with a birch tree. The second is paper and pencil, and so in his cabin he pushed words around on paper, making known his counter-arguments about life and writing what literary scholars today consider great literature.

     It is quite true that our lives today are hectic, packed with the pursuit of things we may or may not need, things we have already bought on the installment plan and now need to pay for. Our jobs require exceptional effort in the name of productivity, and Henry David Thoreau laughs at us. His words still     haunt us, and they puncture many of our cherished dreams, especially our love affair with busyness.

     Thoreau wrote, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep.”

     Yes, Henry, you were right, and you are still right. You saw a lot more sunrises and sunsets than I will, and the squirrels and birds ate out of your hands. But if given a choice between my comfortable home and your rustic cabin near Walden Pond, on these suffocating hot July days, I will choose my home every time. I like air conditioning, and I think you would too.

MASSACHUSETTS VS. MISSISSIPPI

by William H. Benson

June 28, 2012

     Bob Kerrey wants to return to the Senate. He left in 2001 after completing two terms there, and now after ten years of living in Greenwich Village near Washington Square Park, he wants to return to Nebraska and run for the Senate. Democratic leaders, such as Harry Reid, the majority leader, have  pleaeded with him to come back, but, Kerry said, “just about everybody else who lives in Washington told me not to do it. They just said the place has become too toxic and you can’t get things done.”

     “Too toxic,” they told him. The Republicans paint the Democrats as free-spending and irresponsible liberals, and the Democrats accuse the reactionary Tea Partiers of daring to close down the federal government. The bitter partisanship is like a whirling cyclone pulling some in and ejecting others out. No one governs. “You can’t get things done,” he was told.

     As bad as it is, it could be worse. This time the political polarization is not necessarily as sectional as it was over 150 years ago, and we have not witnessed a breakdown in the rule of law on Congress’ floors. That happened once. On May 22, 1856, a South Carolina Representative named Preston Brooks walked into the Senate chamber, stepped towards the Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner who was writing at his desk, read a statement, lifted a cane, and then beat Sumner about the head a dozen times.

     Sumner lived through the bloody ordeal but was absent from the Senate for the next two years, suffering from headaches and memory loss, but his Senate chair was kept vacant until his return.

     What had provoked the assault was Sumner’s two-day speech on May 19-20, in which the Massachusetts Senator had denounced in the most vile language the advancement of slavery into Kansas and also ridiculed the South Carolina Senator Andrew P. Butler, who happened to be Preston Brooks’ uncle. People in the Southern states lived by an honor code, and to resolve issues people resorted to dueling or assaults. Not extracting revenge for a slight was considered cowardly.

     Most Congressmen suspected that if compromise failed between the slave South and the free North, then the Union would be lost, divided, and that a bloody Civil War would follow. Sadly, tragically, unfortunately, it all happened, and no one stopped it. No one person could stop it.

     The American people are proud of their country, but so too are they proud of their state, that state  where they live now or where they were born and grew up in. There is an unwritten rule in every one of the fifty states. “Do not belittle another person’s state.” A person cheers for his or her college football or basketball team, and so cheers for his or her state. U. S. citizens defend the honor of their own state.

     The news magazine, The Week, published two short articles next to each other on May 25. On top was an article on Massachusetts, saying that it was “The healthiest state in the nation,” and immediately below it was another article on Mississippi, claiming that it was “Where race remains relevant.”

     The first article proclaimed how rosy and wonderful things were in Massachusetts, Mitt Romney’s state. “Its schools have produced the best scores on fourth- and eighth-grade reading and math tests, with the lowest gap between poor and wealthier kids; on average, our students even outperform those from Singapore and Japan. Our per capita income is the second highest in the nation.”

     Eli Hager, an eighth-grade teacher in the rural Mississippi Delta, wrote the second article, detailing how awful things are there. “The schools here are as ‘fundamentally separate and unequal’ as they were in the 1950s. White students are sent to prestigious private academies and have every opportunity to succeed, while the state’s failing public schools are 95 percent black, churning out students who are ‘functionally illiterate’ and destined for poverty or jail.” His words are harsh, even biting.

     Hager states that “folk music historians note that the word ‘Kumbaya’ mispronounces a blues lyric that urged listeners unaware of injustice to ‘come by here’ and see it.” It is there, if you look for it.

     How can it be that a New England state has so much, and yet a Southern state has so little? Again, it is the age-old discrepancy between rich and poor, between haves and have-nots, between urban and rural, between advantaged and disadvantaged. Sadly, tragically, and unfortunately, it is so, and one person can do so little to improve the differences.

     Bob Kerrey wants to leave New York, live in Nebraska but work in Washington, in the Senate, and make a difference. A reporter asked him what the Democratic leaders will think of him “slashing trillions of dollars from entitlement programs” or of banning party caucuses. “My guess is,” answered Kerry, “is that they’ll think my proposals are wrong. So we have an argument, that’s all. Nobody’s going to die. Nobody’s going to haul me across the river and shoot me, like Burr did Hamilton.”

     Hopefully, no one will step up to him in the Senate chamber and break a cane over his head, either. That is, if he wins the election. I wish him well.

Sunday in the Park with George

by William H. Benson

June 14, 2012

     Georges Seurat, the French artist, worked for two years, from 1884 until 1886, on his masterpiece, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. It is a large painting, almost seven feet wide and over ten feet long, and today it hangs in the Art Institute in Chicago. Instead of painting with the usual brush strokes, Seurat pointed his brush’s tip at the canvas and dotted it with thousands of dots until the picture emerged, an art style now called pointillism.

     The scene that Seurat painted is that of a park on the shore of an island in the middle of the Seine River near Paris. The park is a grassy area that slopes downward to the left to the river, and one can see in the painting’s upper left corner a sail boat and a canoe on the water. In the scene’s upper right corner stand the trees. In the foreground on the green grass, are the people, both adults and children, who are either standing or sitting, and most are peering to the left, towards the water. Some hold umbrellas. Most wear hats. The women wear bustles. There are two dogs.

     The only person missing in the painting is the artist himself, Georges Seurat.

     Thirty years ago a writer named James Lapine wrote a fictional account of the artist Georges Seurat when he was painting that scene. Lapine and a dramatist named Stephen Sondheim then joined forces, and together they wrote the Broadway musical, Sunday in the Park with George.

     The story centers around George, a self-absorbed, inattentive, and consumed artist, who simply cannot ever stop painting long enough to connect with the people he meets in the park. He will not let down his guard for one moment. Dot, his mistress and model, is with him in the park and begs him to speak and listen to her, but he will not. The writer Roger Rosenblatt says, “He ignores her, leaves her high and dry. He’s an artiste, after all.” She finds him attractive but not great company.

     An old woman and her nurse join them in the park. They leave. Others walk in and try to visit with George. He will not. They leave. Finally, Dot leaves him for another man, and the two sail to America.

     “But then, in the very last scene [of Act 1],” Roger Rosenblatt writes, “the separate parts of Seurat’s painting coalesce before our eyes. Everything magically comes together. And the audience gasps, weeps in wonder.” Those people whom George dismissed throughout Act 1 take their respective place on stage as they appear in his painting.

     Rosenblatt then asks a curious question: “So who is the superior character—the man who attends to the feelings of his loved ones, or the artist who affects eternity?” That question I think is unfair in that it creates a false dilemma, insisting that a person must choose one or the other: be a family man or be a professional. Yet, a man or a woman can actually choose both. Also, I insist that the family man can affect eternity, and that not everyone would agree that a distinguished work of art does affect eternity.

     For nearly fifty years now, my mother’s side of the family has gathered for a picnic at the park each year on Father’s Day, a Sunday afternoon. At that picnic in the park, there is no river, no sailing boats, nobody brings an umbrella, the women do not wear bustles, no one brings his mistress, and no artist brings out canvas and easel and paints a picture. But there are trees, green grass, at least two dogs, and plenty of people—men, women, boys, and girls—and they talk to each other. They are not all looking in the same direction, to the left.

     A sad personal note: my dad passed away on Monday morning, June 4, in the emergency room at Sterling Regional MedCenter. He suffered a ruptured aorta. He was eighty-four. The well-attended funeral service was held on Friday, June 8. My dad loved that Father’s Day picnic every year, just as he  loved all the times when his family gathered: at Easter, Thanksgiving, Christmas, birthdays, or any other occasion. I miss my dad even now, and I will miss him at the annual Father’s Day picnic.

     My dad was the opposite of the fictional George Seurat. My dad was a great talker who connected extremely well with people. He loved my mother. There was no mistress in his life. He had no use for creating art, mainly because he worked hard to provide for his family. He was an active participant in life, not just its observer.

     Who is the superior character in this existence called human life? That is a crucial question, one worth thinking through until we each arrive at our answer. Is it the celebrity, the abundantly talented, and the over-achiever? Perhaps yes. Perhaps no. Or is it the dad, mother, grandparent, brother, sister, aunt, or uncle who is ultra-sensitive to the feelings of others? Again, perhaps yes. Perhaps no. 

     This Sunday afternoon I will be in the park on Father’s Day, not to paint a picture, but to visit and connect with friends and family. My best wishes to all.

THE PRISONER vs. NORMAN VINCENT PEALE

by William H. Benson

May 31, 2012

     The Prisoner first premiered on American television on June 1, 1968. It was a British spy mystery and said to be “one of the most imaginative shows ever on television.” It featured the actor Patrick McGoohan, who played the role of a top-secret English spy agent, who in a huff abruptly resigned his position, was immediately knocked out, abducted, and taken to “the Village,” a quiet and prosperous town on the coast of Wales where he was called Number 6.

     Now, a person is not normally kidnapped and incarcerated for quitting his or her job, and yet Number 6 was. There, in “the Village,” he discovered that each time he tried to escape a six-foot bouncing ball, called the Rover, would roll over and detain him.

      The show’s seventeen episodes featured a supervisor, a Number 2, who would play mind games with Number 6. “We want information,” the supervisor would say. “Why did you resign your position?” Number 6 was forced to think through complicated situations, second and third guessing the supervisor’s words, for things said and done were never as they appeared. “We want information.”

     Graduation season just ended, and college will roll around in August. The university classroom is where information is dispensed in large doses. Some people do want information. They want knowledge. They crave to know how and why things work as they do. They will do whatever they can to go to school and learn. Then, there are others who do not want knowledge. They display very little desire to acquire skills, to know much of anything.

     There are a thousand hindrances that will prevent the mind’s free use, to stop it from soaring, and people who fail to walk the path that leads around those hindrances will invariably feel as imprisoned as did Number 6. Because some people are lazy, their minds remain untrained, misused, unexercised, and clogged by television, songs, movies, gossip, trivialities, and stories of romance. They are stuck.

     Poverty is another major hindrance. When a person lives constantly near the point of desperation and starvation, there is no extra money to buy books and supplies, or pay tuition. A young person born into such poor circumstances must be powerfully determined to escape his or her pitiful condition. He or she must make sacrifices, deferring until much later the acquisition of job, family, house, and toys. Instead, for years, all he or she does is geared towards learning and gathering information.

     Also, there are all kinds of errors that people can fall into when they set out to acquire information. They can get derailed into accumulating a blinding series of football, basketball, or baseball statistics. They will memorize mountains of meaningless data, or they will adjust and match their lives to outrageous religious or legal codes that sets their minds into a locked position. Nothing new enters.

     Then, many people deliberately seek out and explore society’s restricted areas of knowledge—into alcohol, drugs, cruel and violent deeds, or sexual abnormalities—and are shortly thrown into jail, prisoners of their own appetites. Training the mind begins with self-discipline.

     Born on this day, May 31, in the year 1898 was Norman Vincent Peale, the author of a quite profound book, The Power of Positive Thinking. He called positive thinking a great law. “If you think in negative terms, you will get negative results, but if you think in positive terms, you will achieve positive results.” “You can think your way to failure and unhappiness, but you can also think your way to success and happiness.” “To change your circumstances, start thinking differently.”

     Peale’s idea is simple, and yet we see it played out repeatedly. Everybody gets what they want; more specifically, they get that which they do and say. The cynic, the griper, the complainer, and the resentful one gets exactly those kind of things, but the positive, optimistic, and progressive thinker—the one who makes everyone they meet feel great—gets those same things in return. People reap what they sow.

     Peale’s ideas may sound simplistic, even childish, and they are. I would argue that falsely accused prisoners, soldiers swept up into a horrific war, and victims of violent crimes are people thrust into positions where they would find it challenging to change their thinking. To that Peale and his disciples would shout back, “Transform your thinking wherever you are!” I say, “Easier said than done.”   

     Number 6 was very intent on escaping the Village. He would not submit. He would not give them information. But then, if he had relaxed and adjusted his thinking towards the positive, the television network would have canceled the show because it then lacked the necessary drama.

     On Monday, we celebrated Memorial Day. Because much of our inner personal thoughts revolve around reminiscing and reflecting upon pleasant memories, we should do what we can to acquire and file away the more satisfying memories, at the same time that we are warehousing knowledge.

     “We want information.”

ROBERT CARO VS. EDWARD CONARD

by William H. Benson

May 17, 2012

     Two new books are being published this season.

     The first is Robert Caro’s fourth biography on Lyndon Baines Johnson, and is entitled The Passage of Power. In it Caro covers Johnson’s life between 1958 and 1964, primarily the years when LBJ was   Vice-President during John F. Kennedy’s presidency. For LBJ, those were his most difficult years, drifting along in the shadow of Jack and Bobby Kennedy, doing little and saying even less. Caro ends the book with Kennedy’s assassination and when Johnson is taking the oath of office.

     Former President Bill Clinton wrote the book’s review that appeared in the May 6^th issue of The New York Times Book Review. Clinton said, “Caro paints a vivid picture of LBJ’s misery. We can feel Johnson’s ambition ebb, and believe with him that his political life was over, as he was shut out of meetings, unwelcome on Air Force One, mistrusted and despised by Robert Kennedy.”

     Caro has devoted the past four decades to writing what will ultimately be five volumes in the series: The Years of Lyndon Johnson. The first installment came out in 1982, the second in 1990, the third in 2002, and now the fourth in 2012. Caro is 76 years old and running out of time. Hopefully, he can complete the series’ fifth and final volume, in which he will focus upon Johnson’s Presidency.

     Caro’s wife completes much of his research. With pen and white notepad, he writes the first draft, and the second draft he types on a Smith Corona Electra typewriter. He refuses to use a computer. He wears a suit and tie to his office on the 22^nd floor of an office building in New York City, near 58^th and Broadway, close to Central Park’s south and west corner. The New York Times says that “Robert Caro is a Dinosaur.” A reporter at the Times asked Caro’s publisher, “Are the books profitable?” He hesitated and then answered, “They will be, because there is nothing like them.”

     Edward Conard wrote the second book being published this season. He entitled it Unintended Consequences: Why Everything You’ve Been Told About the Economy is Wrong. Conard is a businessmen, a Harvard Business School graduate, one of the 1%, super rich, and in his book he makes a strong argument for a ferocious form of capitalism, for taking enormous risks, and for adequately rewarding those who do take those risks and succeed. He is brash, arrogant, and outspoken.

     Conard finds fault with the accountants and lawyers, those he says “who opt for stable professions that don’t maximize their wealth-creating potential.” But he especially disparages those whom he calls “the art-history majors.” At a diner close to his office in New York City, at 57^th and Madison Avenue, near Central Park’s south and east corner, Conard points out “three young people with plaid shirts and floppy hair” and asks a reporter, “What are they doing, sitting here, having a coffee at 2:30? I’m sure those guys are college-educated.”

     Conard says that “the only way to persuade these ‘art-history majors’ to join the fiercely competitive economic mechanism is to tempt them with extraordinary payoffs. When I look around, I see a world of unrealized opportunities for improvements, an abundance of talented people able to take the risks necessary to make improvements, but a shortage of people willing to take those risks.”

     Because Conard is all about calculating risk, the reporter states the obvious. “The world Conard describes too often feels grim and soulless, one in which art and romance and the nonrenumerative satisfactions of a simpler life are invisible.”

     Two books: the first is a biography written by a political historian, and the second is a book on economics. It would not take too long, no more than twenty minutes, to walk the distance from Robert Caro’s office to Edward Conard’s and yet they are as far apart intellectually as the North and South Poles. If they met, the two men would barely communicate, such disparate worlds do they inhabit.

     Graduation season is nearing. Some high school graduates will want to invest in themselves and go on to college. The university is a risk. It is competitive; grades count. It may involve assuming a load of debt. It is a struggle trying to balance housing, food, friends, classes, textbooks, and study time. One is expected to develop work habits like those of Robert Caro and yet survive in an environment in which no more than a handful in every class get the A’s, much like Edward Conard’s harsh world.

     Frank Bruni, a New York Times reporter, stated the situation. “Because of levitating costs, college these days is a luxury item, one with newly uncertain returns.” He cautions students to select those majors with job potential—computer science, business, nursing, and teaching—and steer wide of those without—philosophy, anthropology, zoology, art history, and the humanities. The world of jobs and employers can be very cruel to those who choose unwisely their major when first they enroll.

     Yet, I say take the risk. Go to college. Let no one stop you. There you will find your own way to survive and even thrive. The Passage of Power and Unintended Consequences. You will find both at the college you choose and the subject you study.