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Tag Archives: Ego

Ambition

17 Tuesday Feb 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Philosophy

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Ambition, Christian Wiman, Ego, My Bright Abyss: Mediation of a Modern Believer, Poet, poetry

CT ct-prj-christian-wiman06.jpg

“I once believed in some notion of a pure ambition, which I defined as an ambition for the work rather than oneself. But now…

No, all ambition has the reek of disease about it, the relentless smell of the self — except for that terrible, blissful feeling at the heart of creation of itself, when all thought of your name is obliterated and all you want is the poem, to be the means wherein something of reality, perhaps even something of eternity, realizes itself. That is noble ambition. But all that comes after — the need for approval, publication, self-promotion — isn’t this what usually goes under the name ‘ambition’? The effort is to make ourselves more real to ourselves, to feel that we have selves, though the deepest moments of creation tell us that, in some fundamental way, we don’t. (Souls are what those moments reveal, which are both inside and outside, both us and other.) So long as your ambition is to stamp your existence upon existence, your nature on nature, then your ambition is corrupt and you are pursuing a ghost.”

__________

From Christian Wiman’s collection My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer

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The Intoxicating Power of a Teacher Who Believes in You

18 Wednesday Jun 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Literature

≈ Comments Off on The Intoxicating Power of a Teacher Who Believes in You

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Art, beauty, C.S. Lewis, Character, Description, Donna Tartt, Ego, literature, Martin Amis, Mentors, novel, people, reading, Students, Superiority, Teachers, The Four Loves, The Secret History, Vladimir Nabokov, Writing

Donna Tartt

“It has always been hard for me to talk about Julian without romanticizing him. In many ways, I loved him the most of all; and it is with him that I am most tempted to embroider, to flatter, to basically reinvent. I think that is because Julian himself was constantly in the process of reinventing the people and events around him, conferring kindness, or wisdom, or bravery, or charm, on actions which contained nothing of the sort. It was one of the reasons I loved him: for that flattering light in which he saw me, for the person I was when I was with him, for what it was he allowed me to be.

Now, of course, it would be easy for me to veer to the opposite extreme. I could say that the secret of Julian’s charm was that he latched on to young people who wanted to feel better than everybody else; that he had a strange gift for twisting feelings of inferiority into superiority and arrogance. I could also say that he did this not through altruistic motives but selfish ones, in order to fulfill some egotistic impulse of his own. And I could elaborate on this at some length and with, I believe, a fair degree of accuracy. But still that would not explain the fundamental magic of his personality…

It is similar to another remark made to me once by Georges Laforgue, on an occasion when I had been extolling Julian to the skies. ‘Julian,’ he said curtly, ‘will never be a scholar of the very first rate, and that is because he is only capable of seeing things on a selective basis.’

When I disagreed — strenuously — and asked what was wrong with focusing one’s entire attention on only two things, if those two things were Art and Beauty, Laforgue replied: ‘There is nothing wrong with the love of Beauty. But Beauty — unless she is wed to something more meaningful — is always superficial. It is not that your Julian chooses solely to concentrate on certain, exalted things; it is that he chooses to ignore others equally as important.’

It’s funny. In retelling these events, I have fought against a tendency to sentimentalize Julian, to make him seem very saintly — basically to falsify him — in order to make our veneration of him seem more explicable; to make it seem something more, in short, than my own fatal tendency to try to make interesting people good.”

Donna Tartt

__________

From Donna Tartt’s brilliant novel The Secret History.

For context: this reflection sets off History’s wistful denouement, as protagonist Richard Papen surveys the fragmentation of his college friends, all of whom had once coagulated around Julian, their charismatic classics professor at a New England liberal arts college.

In The Four Loves, C.S. Lewis describes friendship as originating in that instant when one person says to another, “What! You too? I thought that no one but myself…” So it has something to do with not being alone in the world, or not being so alone in the world, and the awareness that affinity is what ultimately spurs, in some sense, intimacy. This relational question applies to fiction as well, particularly in terms of whom within a story should be the ideal target of such a you too? epiphany. Nabokov’s advice for reading literature can be summarized in a single breath: In your progression through a novel, don’t try to identify with the story’s protagonist — try to identify with its author. Such challenging but sound counsel squares with the view — annexed from Martin Amis — that literature must be understood, not as communication, but as a means of communion. In other words, when you’re reading a book, you’re not just tracing a story arc or absorbing discreet facts about the world — you are communing in an immediate way with another person’s — the author’s — psyche.

Perhaps there is no more profound point in the course of reading a good book than when you snap out of full concentration on the text, fork the pages between your fingers, and look to the floor, thinking, “How’d [the author] know that about my life?” Sometimes this realization can alight on the ego, as you are reintroduced to a positive personal trait or pleasant memory that perhaps you’d forgotten. Though for me it more often comes in the form of an amused sense of incrimination, as I smirk and feel compelled to sigh something like, “I’ve been sized up. I’m busted.”

In the course of the two concluding pages from which the above excerpt is pulled, Donna Tartt coaxed this reaction from me a handful of times, most clearly in the initial evocation of teacher-spurred feelings of superiority (which brings a particular professor and mentor to mind) as well as the final thought in the final sentence, which I have learned can lead to very grave misjudgments about people you let into your life.

Read on:

  • I reviewed in one sentence every book I read last year
  • A short essay on why the novel is imperishable
  • Also from The Secret History, on the memory of adolescent friends

Donna Tartt

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Why Lying Is a Waste of Energy

09 Monday Jun 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Philosophy

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dishonesty, Ego, Energy, friendship, honesty, integrity, Lying, Sam Harris, Trust, truth

Sam Harris

“Lies beget other lies. Unlike statements of fact, which require no further work on our part, lies must be continually protected from collisions with reality. When you tell the truth, you have nothing to keep track of. The world itself becomes your memory, and if questions arise, you can always point others back to it… In this way, a commitment to the truth is naturally purifying of error.

But the liar must remember what he said, and to whom, and must take care to maintain his falsehoods in the future. This can require an extraordinary amount of work—all of which comes at the expense of authentic communication and free attention. The liar must weigh each new disclosure, whatever the source, to see whether it might damage the facade that he has built. And all these stresses accrue, whether or not anyone discovers that he has been lying.

Tell enough lies, however, and the effort required to keep your audience in the dark quickly becomes unsustainable. While you might be spared a direct accusation of dishonesty, many people will conclude, for reasons that they might be unable to pinpoint, that they cannot trust you. You will begin to seem like someone who is always dancing around the facts—because you most certainly are. Many of us have known people like this. No one ever quite confronts them, but everyone begins to treat them like creatures of fiction. Such people are often quietly shunned, for reasons they probably never understand.

In fact, suspicion often grows on both sides of a lie: Research indicates that liars trust those they deceive less than they otherwise might—and the more damaging their lies, the less they trust, or even like, their victims. It seems that in protecting their egos, and interpreting their own behavior as justified, liars tend to deprecate the people they lie to.”

__________

From Sam Harris’s short e-book Lying.

At a mere 26 pages, this essay is an extremely rewarding and challenging read — one that will recalibrate how you process truth-telling and even the minor dishonesties we all encounter in the course of daily life. Harris’s essential thesis is as daunting as it is simple: we should prefer to be awkward or even impolite rather than dishonest.

Read on:

  • Also from Lying, Harris levels on why personal integrity matters
  • Confucius, asked what to look for in our leaders, stresses honesty first…
  • Barnes offers a devastating paragraph on a friend whose dishonesty eroded her identity

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John Updike on Making Peace with Our Past Selves

21 Wednesday May 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Biography

≈ Comments Off on John Updike on Making Peace with Our Past Selves

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Aging, Biography, consciousness, Ego, F. Scott Fitzgerald, fatherhood, Growth, Haven Hill, High School, identity, Ipswich, John Irving, John Updike, marriage, Maturation, memoir, Mortality, Parenting, Philosophy, Self-Consciousness, Self-Consciousness: Memoirs, Selves, Shillington, Writing

John Updike

“Not only are selves conditional but they die. Each day, we wake slightly altered, and the person we were yesterday is dead. So why, one could say, be afraid of death, when death comes all the time?

It is even possible to dislike our old selves, these disposable ancestors of ours. For instance, my high-school self — skinny, scabby, giggly, gabby, frantic to be noticed, tormented enough to be a tormentor, relentlessly pushing his cartoons and posters and noisy jokes and pseudo-sophisticated poems upon the helpless high school — strikes me now as considerably obnoxious, though I owe him a lot: without his frantic ambition and insecurity I would not now be sitting on (as my present home was named by others) Haven Hill. And my Ipswich self, a delayed second edition of that high-school self, in a town much like Shillington in its blend of sweet and tough, only more spacious and historic and blessedly free of family ghosts, and my own relative position in the ‘gang’ improved, enhanced by a touch of wealth, a mini-Mailer in our small salt-water pond, a stag of sorts in our herd of housewife — flirtatious, malicious, greedy for my quota of life’s pleasures, a distracted, mediocre father and worse husband — he seems another obnoxious show-off, rapacious and sneaky and, in the service of his own ego, remorseless. But, then, am I his superior in anything but caution and years, and how can I disown him without disowning also his useful works, on which I still receive royalties? And when I entertain in my mind these shaggy, red-faced, overexcited, abrasive fellows, I find myself tenderly taken with their diligence, their hopefulness, their ability in spite of all to map a broad strategy and stick with it. So perhaps one cannot, after all, not love them…

Writing… is an addiction, an illusory release, a presumptuous taming of reality, a way of expressing lightly the unbearable. That we age and leave behind this litter of dead, unrecoverable selves is both unbearable and the commonest thing in the world — it happens to everybody.”

__________

From John Updike’s magisterial study of the internal life, Self-Consciousness: Memoirs.

Apart from his consistently masterful (and often playful) use of language, the real charm of Updike, at least in this reader’s view, can be boiled down to several factors that don’t exist in another American writer — or at least not in another one of Updike’s caliber. Like his style itself, which constantly bears the marks of a mind at serious play, these attributes exist in relationships that are, in some essential sense, oppositional. His intellect, weighted with a heavy dose of classical philosophy but buoyed by a boyish inquisitiveness; his well-bred WASPiness, clothed in the pastels of New England sans the starch you can smell on the pages of a Fitzgerald or John Irving; his fixation on women, tempered always by the guilt of consistently looking (and usually pursuing) the ones who are — in some sense, and for one reason or another — wrong. Tack all of this atop a Christianity which comprehended doubt, and a cheeriness that could face deep questions, and you have a mind that will always give you something worth seeing – if you can only keep up with such an agile pen.

Looking close at the above paragraph, you’ll recognize all of these attributes. If you do yourself the favor of exploring deeper into Self-Consciousness, you’ll get a better sense of each of them and how they shape the man and his understanding of the conscious and subconscious life.

Read on:

  • Paul Newman reflects: “Men experience many passions in a lifetime. One passion drives away the one before it.”
  • Updike explains why he was skeptical as a young man
  • Updike ruminates on how religious belief is ‘a part of being human’

John Updike

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Martin Luther King on Conquering Self-Centeredness

04 Friday Apr 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Philosophy, Religion, Speeches

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

American History, Christianity, Conquering Self-Centeredness, Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Ego, Jesus, Karl Barth, Love, Loyalty, Martin Luther King Jr., MLK Jr., Perspective, Philosophy, preaching, religion, Self-Centeredness, Selfishness, Sermon

MLK

“I look at my little daughter every day and she wants certain things — and when she wants them, she wants them. And she almost cries out, ‘I want what I want when I want it!’ She is not concerned about what I think about it or what Mrs. King thinks about it. She wants it. She’s a child, and that’s very natural and normal for a child. She is inevitably self-centered because she’s a child. But when one matures, when one rises above the early years of childhood, he begins to love people for their own sake. He turns himself to higher loyalties. He gives himself to something outside of himself. He gives himself to causes that he lives for and sometimes will even die for. He comes to the point that now he can rise above his individualistic concerns, and he understands then what Jesus meant when he says, ‘He who finds his life shall lose it; he who loses his life for my sake, shall find it.’ In other words, he who finds his ego shall lose his ego, but he who loseth his ego for my sake, shall find it. And so you see people who are apparently selfish; it isn’t merely an ethical issue but it is a psychological issue. They are the victims of arrested development, and they are still children. They haven’t grown up. And like a modern novelist says about one of his characters, ‘Edith is a little country, bounded on the east and the west, on the north and the south, by Edith.’ And so many people are little countries, bounded all around by themselves and they never quite get out of themselves…

And the way to solve this problem is not to drown out the ego but to find your sense of importance in something outside of the self… This is the way to go through life with a balance, with the proper perspective because you’ve given yourself to something greater than self. Sometimes it’s friends, sometimes it’s family, sometimes it’s a great cause, it’s a great loyalty, but give yourself to that something and life becomes meaningful.”

MLK and family

__________

From the sermon “Conquering Self-Centeredness”, delivered by Martin Luther King, Jr. at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama in 1957. Dr. King was assassinated on this day in 1968.

More MLK:

  • King’s beautiful and hauntingly prophetic final sermon, given the night before his death
  • King describes the moral imperative to oppose the Vietnam war
  • King tells us when and how we should break the law

(I couldn’t help posting my favorite King picture. Below: King and Karl Barth outside the Princeton University chapel. On a Sunday in April 1962, King preached the morning service and Barth taught the evening’s small group. Not a bad day’s line-up.)

Karl Barth and MLK

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