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.

LITERATURE VS. RELIGION

by William H. Benson

May 3, 2012

     In January of 1604 the English King, James I, instructed a committee of 54 men, “That a translation be made of the whole Bible, as consonant as can be to the original Hebrew and Greek.” Seven years later, on May 2, 1611, 401 years ago yesterday, that committee published the authorized English version, the King James Bible, and it remained preeminent until the latter half of the twentieth century.

     Most religions, such as Christianity, are based upon texts or Scriptures, usually writings that originated in the distant past, much like the King James Bible. People then will extract from those texts certain principles, doctrines, creeds, covenants, interpretations, and supplemental works, which they then expect other people to believe. This is the case for literate people of all ages.

     For example, in ancient Greece, people read, studied, and believed Homer’s Iliad with as much intensity and devotion as Christians read and study the Old and New Testaments today.

     The subject of literature is equally textual-based. People of the past wrote down words, and their words have been read and studied by generations of people who wish to understand that writer’s mind. There were the Greeks—Plato and Aristotle; the Christian writer—St. Augustine; the English writers—Chaucer and Shakespeare; the French writers—Montaigne and Balzac; the Russians—Pushkin, Tolstoy, and Dostoyevsky; and the Americans—Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Whitman, Melville, and Twain.

     So we have religion with its Scriptures, and we have literature with a secular scripture, the Western Canon. The first is reserved for the church, synagogue, meeting-house, and temple, and the latter is restricted to the library, college, and the university. The two rarely meet or communicate.

     The literary critic seeks to find, according to the Yale scholar Harold Bloom, that “irreducibly aesthetic dimension in plays, poems, and narratives,” or in other words that which is beautiful, close to the ideal. The religious critic “must seek for the irreducibly spiritual dimension in religious matters.”

     Another difference is that literature does not ask anyone to believe in a life after death with punishments or rewards to follow, or in the existence of divine beings. Literary critics can only go so far. They can point out the flaws in a writer’s work, can identify the plot’s winding intricacies and the skillfully-drawn characters, and they can either approve or disapprove of a writer’s attempts to tell a story or write a poem or present a history, but those are the limits of their authority.

     In the horse race between literature and religion, religion wins every time. People are far more attracted to religion than to literature, mainly, I think, because religion offers hope, a life beyond the grave, a point that the great works of eminent writers lay no claim to. It is with that conclusion that we can then say that “literature . . . can seem oddly irrelevant. It is religion that matters.”

     Thomas Carlyle said, “A man lives by believing something, not by debating and arguing about many things.” Seneca said, “Every man prefers belief to the exercise of judgment.” And George Bernard Shaw said, “Reading made Don Quixote a gentlemen, but believing what he read made him mad.”

     Literature is meant to be read, not believed. A man, woman, boy, or girl, seated in a library’s corner alone with the text, reads in order to know that author’s mind. Sometimes literature, such as a play or a poem, is performed on stage, and those in the audience may experience that which the ancient Greeks called a catharsis, a release of that tension which the characters by their voices produce.

     Americans watch a dozen or more movies and programs every week for what? To see a mystery solved, a killer identified, a guy and a girl driven apart by circumstances but then magically reunited, and other dire human problems all sorted out in the show’s final three minutes.

     But that form of quasi-catharsis is a far cry from that which worshipers experience at a church service, when, according to William James, “they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine.”

     Some things are better off left unwritten. So said Plato. “He who has knowledge of the just and the good and beautiful . . . will not write them in ink, sowing them through a pen with words, which cannot defend themselves by argument and cannot teach the truth effectually.” Now that is profound.

     Overshadowing both literature and religion though is politics, because it is now, immediate, right in your face. The politicians can transform our lives, take away our jobs and security, upset our comfort levels, and sequester our bodies into a place we would rather not go, simply by imposing higher taxes, dragging us into a war, or carting us off to prison. Politics trumps all texts.

     Albert Einstein said, “One must divide one’s time between politics and equations. But our equations are much more important to me, because politics is for the present, while our equations are for eternity.” Literature and religion, like Einstein’s mathematical equations, are also for eternity, or at least for as long as the human species survives.

TOM PAINE & THE TITANIC

by William H. Benson

April 12, 2012

     In the spring of 1774, Tom Paine’s life hit a low point. On April 8 his supervisor fired him from his job in Lewes, England as an excise-man, working for the British government collecting customs and excises on imports. When his creditors heard that Tom was suddenly unemployed, they demanded that he pay all that he owed them and do so now. With little choice he liquidated his personal belongings at an auction on April 14, a “public sign of bankruptcy.”

     Then, on June 4, he and his wife Elizabeth agreed to separate, and neither of them would ever explain what had gone awry in their marriage. Tom said, “It is nobody’s business but my own; I had cause for it, but I will name it to no one.” He was thirty-seven, but she was only in her twenties. Never again would they see or speak to each other.

     Divorce was out of the question. The English laws then did not permit speedy divorces, in that it required an Act of Parliament, a virtual impossibility. Without a divorce decree, neither could remarry.

     Historians agree that they were badly mismatched. After three years of marriage, their “mutual illusions were destroyed.” He was finally catching a vision of what he wanted to do with his life—write political pamphlets and social commentaries. Because politics so excited him and the greater world beyond the borders of Lewes beckoned him, “he had little time for domesticity.”   

     Tom and Elizabeth had quarreled for obvious reasons. He was gone to London for months at a time. When he was at home, he devoted his nights to arguing politics with his friends over drinks at the White Hart pub. He barely made enough money to feed and clothe himself with nothing left over for his wife. In marrying Tom, Elizabeth “had expected to gain his strength, status, affection, and earning power,” and he had failed her on all counts, leaving her utterly disappointed.

     A day or two after the separation, Tom fled Lewes, landed in London where he met Benjamin Franklin, who told him he must go to Philadelphia and find his opportunity there. On November 30, a ship sailed into Philadelphia’s port carrying Tom Paine, who arrived penniless, in poor health, without family, friends, or job. No one would expect much of Tom Paine, and in that they were wrong.

     Thirteen months later, on January 10, 1776, Tom published Common Sense, a runaway best-seller in the colonies, and suddenly people on both sides of the Atlantic were asking, “Who is Tom Paine?” In that book he insisted that the thirteen colonies should come together, declare their independence, and forge a new country and a new government, one absent a monarch. A year and a half later, the Continental Congress did exactly as Tom Paine suggested.

     Elizabeth also fled Lewes, mainly out of humiliation, and she found refuge in her brother’s house in a nearby town where she made dresses. Without husband, children, or economic status, she could not have experienced any sense of fulfillment. Life and social customs can be very cruel to those who fail early in life, both then and today, and in losing her husband, she felt society’s worst form of exclusion.

     Much has been written the past few weeks about the centennial anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic on the night of April 14-15, 1912, about how the ship could not turn itself quickly enough to avoid the ice hidden under the sea’s surface, about how the band members continued playing waltzes until they too went down with the ship, and about how men deferred seats on the lifeboats to the women and children. Passengers were either martyrs or survivors in all of two hours, forty minutes.

     Ships, marriages, businesses, careers—each face icebergs that appear suddenly and unexpectedly, ready to rip and tear holes in our foundations, sinking our best inventions. Whenever a disaster approaches, we have options: we can push others aside to secure a spot for ourselves on a lifeboat, or we can do a noble thing, defer our spot to others, and stay on board until the ship sinks.

     Some will say, “This boat is sinking, and I am out of here!” Other will stick with it. Some will swim to safety and survive such a catastrophe, but many will not. For them it means bankruptcy, foreclosure, a public auction, separation or divorce.

     Maritime custom dictates that on a sinking ship women and children are preserved first, but in a failed marriage, it is often the women and the children who feel most afflicted because their means for providing food and clothing and shelter, their breadwinner, has departed. Life can be hard for the countless Elizabeth Paine’s of the world, for to survive they must struggle alone. Elizabeth never remarried, and neither did Tom.