May 9, 2025

What is private, inescapably solitary and incommunicable, and what can be shared? We have electronic mass communications, the ability to communicate instantly no matter where in the world. We have a network of interconnectedness beyond anything that was remotely imagined in science fiction when I was growing up, and people—especially young people—spend hours linked to it. And yet there is talk of a loneliness epidemic. And yet we are divided, factionalized, balkanized, polarized in every way. Politically of course—but also alienated from one another according to gender and sexual identity, race, ethnicity, and religion. Alienated is the right word—people are aliens to one another, strange, incomprehensible, and threatening.

Worse, attempts to reach across the barriers are frequently rebuffed. “Don’t think you can be my friend—don’t think you can even understand. It is arrogance on your part to think you can understand me. You haven’t had my experiences, and I don’t want to hear that you can sympathize with my pain. You don’t have a clue because you didn’t suffer what I did, what my kind did.” The walls are everywhere.

You might think that people could be united through what used to be so quaintly called the universal language of art, but these days enthusiasm divides as much as it unites. I was reading a review in Living Blues magazine of a new book: Before Elvis: The African American Musicians Who Made the King, by Preston Lauterbach. The songs that made Elvis a star were written and first performed by African American artists. “Appropriation” is one of the most painful issues in modern popular art, and especially about the blues. White people of my Baby Boomer generation loved the blues and helped keep it alive in the United States at a time when African Americans themselves had turned away from it. One of the ways they expressed their enthusiasm was by performing the blues themselves. Yet the reviewer speaks of Lauterbach’s “scathing takedown of the ‘white-led blues revival’ and its blindness/deafness to the realities of the Black culture it claimed to revere.” White people cannot perform the blues because they do not share the particular history of African American suffering. Being a human being suffering the pains of the human condition is not enough to qualify you, and neither is participating in another people’s experience vicariously through empathetic imagination—the blues can only be truly understood by African Americans. I may have to buy the book to find out how that takedown is to be reconciled to what the reviewer speaks of as Lauterbach’s “final verdict”: that “Elvis, in a moment of armored racial segregation, stood up for the best of American possibilities.” The reviewer concedes that this verdict “probably won’t please hardcore haters.”

A comparable reflex of closure, of sealing off, has been true in “high” culture. Anthropologists have become much more skeptical about the possibility of knowing any culture from the inside. Even if an anthropologist lives in another culture for many years, they remain an outsider and their understanding is tentative and questionable at best. As for comparison, there is no comparison. Cultures are unique. No such discipline as comparative mythology exists. It is not just that Western countries cannot meddle with other cultures—they cannot even speak of them. This is a pushback against the abuses of a previous era, in which Western scholars blithely categorized cultures according to certain “universal principles,” which turned out to be Western prejudice and racism given fancy names. Civilized people, which meant white people, are like this; natives, meaning “savages,” are like this. So nowadays any attempt at universalism is greeted with skepticism: it is all too likely to be a form of cultural imperialism in disguise. But what this does is dim the hope that burned brightly after the Second World War, the hope that mutual cultural understanding and respect were possible when scholarship replaced ideology and ignorance with genuine insight. Such universal understanding could become the foundation for a society that moved beyond warring nation-states, a truly civilized society like that of the Federation in Star Trek. It is hard for those of us old enough to go back that far to remember what that hope felt like in this era of virulent populist nationalism on the right and angry identity politics on the left.

What is true in space is also true in time. We are now used to historical theory that denies the possibility of history. One age cannot really understand another age. Each age is isolated within certain cultural assumptions, experiences, and values that are unique to it. We cannot understand the Elizabethan age as the Elizabethans understood it. When historians attempt to do so, they are beginning to write historical fiction. In The Order of Things (1966,1970), the philosopher Michel Foucault said that every cultural period has an episteme, a way of experiencing and understanding the world that is based on a set of unconscious assumptions about what counts as truth. This is not completely novel. Historians have always divided history into periods based on certain cultural assumptions and styles: Classical, medieval, Enlightenment, Romantic, modern. What is different is a kind of cultural solipsism, a sense that epistemes are hermetically sealed, in a sense unknowable. They are like the “windowless monads” postulated by Leibniz. Our sense of the Classical episteme is in fact not Classical at all: it is a modern construct based on modern assumptions about the truth. We cannot transcend our modern episteme to participate, even partially, in how another culture knew itself.

Foucault comes close to saying that different epitemes are different realities. When a culture passes from one episteme to another, reality actually changes. One of the great works in the history of fantasy, John Crowley’s Aegypt tetralogy, is based on a very similar premise. Its hero, or antihero, Pierce Moffatt, is a historian baffled by the question of how such a profound culture as the Elizabethan age could actually have believed in such things as magic and alchemy. The answer is that within that cultural period, or episteme, magic actually worked. When that period ended, magic ceased to work, and scientific materialism “worked.” Mistaken assumptions did not give way to truth. Rather, truth itself changed. Science tries to break through to universal laws not subject to cultural assumptions through scientific method and empirical testing—but Foucault’s theory has been compared to Thomas Kuhn’s theory of “paradigms” in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). Even in science, certain assumptions hold sway, not despite the facts, but because the governing paradigm has the power to judge what counts as a fact, has the power to judge when certain results “prove” a theory to be correct. Paradigms are interpretations, not truth. When there is a “paradigm shift,” a term that has become famous, there is more than the disproving of this or that theory: the entire framework of understanding changes.

But surely it goes too far to say that we can never understand any culture other than our own, whether that culture is different from ours geographically or historically. Surely there must be a possibility of surmounting, however imperfectly, our own cultural assumptions, of genuinely coming to understand a perspective different from our own. The hermeneutic philosopher Hans-George Gadamer’s term “horizons” bears comparison with Foucault’s “epistemes.” In a landmark book, Truth and Method (1960), Gadamer held out the hope of a “fusion of horizons” based on dialogue He was attacked, however, by the deconstructionist philosopher Jacques Derrida, who, following Nietzsche, said that the desire to understand is really a desire to dominate and eliminate difference. A mutual understanding through dialogue sounds idealistic, but it is really an attempt to deny and repress conflicts born of irreducible differences. The will to knowledge is a mask for the will to power. Derrida does not seem to accept the possibility of genuine dialogue, one of equals involving a back-and-forth equal exchange in which both sides learn from the other and possibly modify their views. Dialogue to him only means that the stronger speaker imposes their view on the weaker and calls it an amicable compromise. So much for mutual understanding. Derrida was an Algerian Jew who suffered when young from anti-Semitism in a country that had to fight to free itself from French colonialism. He is understandably skeptical of noble claims about a new world order born of “dialogue.”

Our ideas about a world-wide order of peace through democracy, including rational compromises producing equality through true dialogue and universal rights based on universal human needs, comes from the Enlightenment of the 18^th century. The Enlightenment was a reaction against the what came before it. The entire 17^th century was torn up by wars that were at once religious, political, and economic: Catholics against Protestants, Protestants against Protestants, and everybody against the Jews and atheists. The endless, pointless strife, so evocative of our own, made authoritarian rule seem attractive, or at least inevitable, as it does again to millions. Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan said that absolute monarchy was a necessity to prevent “the war of all against all,” which was a good description of what the 17^th century had just experienced. However, Enlightenment thinkers, including the Founding Fathers in the United States, argued that authoritarianism is a cure worse than the disease. It produces order and stability, but at the price of a life of constant fear, hate, and oppression, even for the elite. The Enlightenment’s counterproposal was liberal democracy, which means a lot more than an electoral system of one-person-one-vote. The voting system is only part of a much larger vision of a community, not of universal utopian harmony (a common misconception), but of a pluralistic society in which both individual and communal differences and conflicts could be resolved by something like Gadamer’s “fusion of horizons” through dialogue. Real dialogue, not a sham, not a façade hiding a done deal brokered by power players.

What we have not yet come to terms with is the fact that such democratic pluralism has to be based on a mutual openness of one individual to another, one group to another, one culture to another. This does not imply the old solution of the “melting pot.” Democracy and equality cannot in the long run depend on everyone’s differences being melted down like cheese in a crock pot to form one big featureless mass called “Americanism.” On the other hand, it cannot mean the opposite extreme of isolationism and tribalism or complete relativism. Isolationism sometimes has to be a short-run pragmatic solution, because there are too many people saying, “You’ve persecuted me and mine for too long—just let us alone. I don’t want to be part of anything larger with you, which only means being co-opted.” But in terms of the long-term survival of the democratic ideal, there has to be a reversal of the present self-protective impulse to withdraw into opacity. There is no community in a den of hedgehogs.

However, the ideal of dialogue and mutual understanding does not often work as planned. Self open to self is a beautiful idea, but in fact it rarely happens. Something intervenes between us and the other person. If you try to talk to a MAGA true believer or to the convert to some conspiracy theory, you may quickly realize you are not talking to the real person but to some kind of automaton that is mouthing words that do not originate in some thought process but have been generated by something else. Another critic of Habermas, Jurgen Habermas, contended that Habermas had not taken into account the role of ideology, which prevents the dialogue between two selves by kidnapping one or both of the selves. (I am oversimplifying the enormously complex and demanding work of several contemporary thinkers here, hoping to find something we can use to think with while avoiding the reduction of the theories to simplistic parody. I am aware that not everyone would approve of such a procedure).

Habermas comes out of the Marxist tradition, and is using “ideology,” not just in the general sense of a value and belief system but in the specific sense of a belief system that functions as a kind of false consciousness or bad faith. It is, bluntly, a set of convenient lies that the bourgeois tell themselves and others to avoid admitting the truth about class exploitation and its consequences. When people hide behind their ideologies, there can be no true dialogue. “Ideology,” however, is a conceptualized term. Contemporary versions of Marxism are aware that an ideology is not just a set of ideas—most people don’t have ideas, but they do have a deeper social conditioning. They are usually unaware of that too, but the majority of people are ruled by their conditioning. Ideologies are collective, so they imprison individuals in a collective state, always in danger of collapsing into a mob. The ideological or socially conditioned self is, or is closely related to, what Jung calls the “persona,” the word for the mask worn by an actor in the Greek theatre. The first step in the Jungian process of “individuation” is to become aware of one’s persona, not necessarily to reject it, because we all need to wear a social mask for many purposes, but to become detached from it enough to recognize that it is not one’s true self.

In the absence of a social environment that accepts and encourages true selves, however, people are thrown back on their personas. This is what destroyed the hopeful promise of social media. You have to be of a certain age to remember how, when the Internet first became a feature of everyone’s lives, somewhere beginning in the 1990’s or so, there were actually people writing books full of euphoric prophecies of a “cybertopia.” The Internet would solve the alienated loneliness of modern life because all we would have to do is “reach out and touch someone,” in the words of a famous AT&T advertising slogan. Marshall McLuhan had already said that the electronic mass media were making the world into a “global village,” and the Internet was foreseen as the full realization of that prediction. The Internet came of age during the same period of time that “globalization” did, and there were people who saw that as leading to peace and prosperity as well. The Internet and globalized capitalism were synergetic, each reinforcing the other, but what they led to was the violence of the present hour.

What you so often see on Facebook are not people’s true selves but their personas, which they are busy polishing and doctoring, sometimes to the point of presenting a completely false identity and false lifestyle. Why are they doing this? Because Facebook, Instagram, and X are what we could call high school as a way of life. In high school, students proclaim a rebellious individualism while actually seeking desperately to be a member of some conformist clique, mimicking its dress, slang, opinions, and satiric view of the members of other cliques. The real self in such a situation is what the historian Christopher Lasch called The Minimal Self (1984) in the title of a brilliant book that was years ahead of its time. The minimal self hides fearfully. It is rightly afraid of showing itself, of sharing itself, lest it be turned upon by some clique or ideological group looking to bind its members together by finding some scapegoat to target with its hate, a trolling hate born of the same kind of fear. The minimal self is afflicted by a sense of unreality, of barely existing. It seems to itself a kind of tenuous ghost, one that needs to borrow a more substantial identity from outside. It seizes upon fads and trends, eagerly consults Internet influencers, trying to drape itself in whatever fashions of dress, speech, and lifestyle that seem to be approved of. The well-known FOMA, fear of missing out, really means fear of not belonging to the in-group. Or it becomes addicted to a radical belief system or conspiracy theory, or surrenders its identity to merge into the group-identity of some cult, so that the charismatic cult leader becomes the powerful self of which the individual is incapable.

Self-dramatizing is a pragmatic necessity in a culture such as ours, not just on social media. In their careers, people are supposed to project a persona of limitless energy, competence, and confidence. It is an obnoxious image, satirized through centuries of dramatic comedy as the figure of the alazon, the boaster who pretends to be more than he is. The entire Trump administration is staffed with alazon types, and they are all frauds. But you have to play the game in job interviews or risk not getting hired. If you do not blow your own horn, you will not get promoted, or so you are told, even in academia. A generation ago, the scholar Judith Butler caused a sensation by saying that “woman” is not a biological essence but a performance. A lot of women, including those who might not want anything to do with radical feminism, knew the truth of what she said. The only thing to add is the obvious: if this is true for women, it is also true for men, who cannot escape the demand for “performance” even in bed. Especially in bed. And behind all the masks, behind all the performances, is a forlorn self. Even Shakespeare’s Prospero in The Tempest takes off his mighty magician’s garb in the epilogue and speaks face to face with the audience, melancholy and begging to connect with them.

The democratic ideal of the Enlightenment was one of free individuals, strong and confident enough in their sense of self to risk opening themselves to an encounter with difference, an encounter with others who are different from themselves. Out of such an encounter may emerge a bond, a union of those who acknowledge the other’s difference at the same time that they perceive what is held in common, so that the other becomes a kindred spirit. This union, in its full intensity, may become an experience of identity-in-difference, a paradoxical condition which rationalist types distrust because it is beyond logic. The free union of individuals may expand into communities, into a nation, whose wholes are more than the sum of their parts.

Perhaps the weakness of Enlightenment universalism, however, is its grand, sweeping gestures. It has a tendency to rest upon a high level of grandiloquent abstraction. “We, the people,” and so on. On that high level, it is all too easy to speak of a common human nature, holding certain truths about all people to be self-evident. Because of that, the hopeful idealism of the Enlightenment seems not just obsolete but discredited to a lot of people, many of whom are reverting to the other possible solution of authoritarianism. In a famous line from the poem “The Circus Animal’s Desertion,” Yeats in his old age says that, “Maybe at last being but a broken man / I must be satisfied with my heart.” At the end of the poem, he concludes, “I must lie down where all the ladders start, / In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.” Assuming that we survive the present reign of terror, people are asking, how will it be possible to rebuild. I think we must begin on the level where we are, not up in the high altitudes of lofty principles and plans, but on the level of the heart, risking a possible sentimentality. Many ideologues will conclude that, in that case, no hope is possible. Only some great collective action guided by some higher idea of order can produce real change. After all, on the grass roots level, it depends on a face-to-face encounter with one person at a time, so that change becomes like trying to number the grains of sand on a beach. But I am a teacher, and am not fazed by this. All my life it has been one other human being at a time, one personal encounter at a time. “Mass education” is at best a pragmatic fiction. Same with this newsletter. I have 72 subscribers, not thousands. But to have a potential genuine connection with 72 people seems to me amazing, more than enough for a lifetime.

It is no accident that the period succeeding the Enlightenment, the Romantic era, saw a spontaneous effort across society to begin where we are, with an explosion of subjective writing, both literary and non-literary. This is a well-known phenomenon: in fact, the Romantics themselves were aware of their own subjectivity, and were at times uneasy about it. The famous essay contrasting former objective ages of art with the present subjective age was Schiller’s Naive and Sentimental Poetry, in which objective art is “naive” and subjective art “sentimental” in the sense that the former is unself-conscious and the latter self-conscious. At times, the Romantics regarded the sea-change from objective to subjective, impersonal to personal, as a “fall,” because they identified the personal with narcissism. This anxiety haunts post-Romantic writing, especially poetry, up to the present. The personal is not at all the same as the self-centered, yet it is true that writing personally leaves us open to the temptation of falling into narcissistic self-preoccupation, especially when we are young. Looking back on our youthful writing and feeling that it is full of adolescent self-pity is a kind of humiliation unique to those who write. It can even affect geniuses. Goethe repudiated the “Romanticism” of his early novel The Sorrows of Young Werther because it was full of Sturm und Drang and angst and other German words for adolescent over-emotionalizing. Browning repudiated his early poem Pauline, modeled on the hyperventilating effusions of Shelley (as Browning thought of the matter), and turned to the objective form of the dramatic monologue. But, whether anyone approved of it or not, the old objective forms of poetry, the epic and verse drama, were becoming simply impossible to write.

Whereas lyric poetry, which for 2000 years had been a minor form, suddenly became the form of modern expression, precisely because expression had come to mean self-expression. Subjective does not always have to mean that the poem is directly about the author. Wordsworth showed in his Lyrical Ballads and other poems that it was still possible to write about others. But nonetheless it is not necessarily an accusation to say that the Lucy poems are really about the poet, about what Lucy meant to him. In fact, we know almost nothing about Lucy, really—that is very much the point, that such a “nothing” person could be so immensely, poignantly important. Likewise, “Resolution and Independence” is about a leech gatherer, and Wordsworth succeeds in making us admire his strength and endurance. But again, the point is the feelings that the leech gatherer evoked in the speaker. Keats accused Wordsworth of the “egotistical sublime,” but his statement is more about himself than about Wordsworth. Keats wanted to be Shakespeare, an objective artist who disappeared into his characters, but he had to settle for being Keats, the subjective genius.

Together Wordsworth and Coleridge invented the form of the “conversation poem,” a meditation on commonplace scenes and objects that turns into a meditation on time and memory. In the famous Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth says that poetry should employ the “language really used by men.” Coleridge himself objected to this, and tried to show that Wordsworth’s own poetic language was actually literary rather than realistic. But the demonstration is not entirely honest. True, at times of emotional intensity, Wordsworth rises to a high Miltonic-style rhetoric, but his verse eventually falls back into the truly conversational, as did Coleridge’s own conversation poems. In “Frost at Midnight,” we hear the voice of Samuel Taylor Coleridge musing at midnight, with his baby asleep nearby, noticing how the intense cold has built up the frost outside the window, a metaphor for the unobtrusive transformations of the imagination operating on the materials of common reality. This is the unguarded disclosure of an individual driven by loneliness to open out to another human being, Wordsworth himself, whom the poet addresses. We may take those patterns of frost on the window, which appear soundlessly, as if by magic, as a metaphor for the bonds created between self and self, working through the patterns of language as they come into being on the page in a process that will always be something of a mystery.

That leads to another conundrum—and, I’m afraid, to yet another hermeneutics philosopher, in this case Heidegger, who said that man does not use language, but rather language uses man. Nobody knows the truth of this more than a poet, particularly one kind of poet, to whom inspiration means to open the self not so much outwardly as inwardly. In another famous aphorism, Wordsworth defined the poet as “a man speaking to men,” but some lyric poetry turns away from an audience, becomes inward reverie. This can lead to a different kind poetic style, hermetic, oracular, solitary. Certain poets, such as Mallarmé and Rilke, achieve enormous reputations despite, or rather because, of the fact that their poetry is endlessly suggestive and yet elusive. It is difficult to pin down exactly what it means, and yet that is not a fault. Such poetry is hieratic: its poet is in the attitude of a priest in the old Catholic Mass, facing away from the congregation towards a transcendent mystery on the altar.

As the temptation of conversational poetry is narcissism, the temptations of hieratic poetry are laziness and pretentiousness. A certain amount of contemporary poetry is obscure as a freshman essay is obscure, because the writer is too lazy to go to the hard work of achieving clarity. Or, even more annoyingly, it is a con job: gibberish pretending to be speaking in tongues, Owen Glendower on a binge. Genuine hieratic poetry, however, is opening the ego self to deeper sources in the unconscious: it is not speaking to others but to an Other within. The Coleridge who wrote conversational poems also wrote Kubla Khan, which is about a poet who is not a man speaking to men but a visionary possessed by the Otherworld of Xanadu. These are the two types of modern poetry, centrifugal and centripetal. Their difference in orientation accounts for their contrast in language usage. The extraverted conversational poem naturally employs the ordinary speaking voice; the introverted visionary poem employs word magic, incantatory language of intricate verbal patterns both textural (alliteration, assonance, complex stanzas, and the like) and structural (myth and metaphor). But the point is this: to open either to others or the Other, there first of all has to be a self to open. That is where all the ladders start.

Those of us who teach on the university level are sometimes disheartened by the number of mental health issues our students suffer from. But students, like everyone else, are trapped in the solitary confinement of a social system that isolates them, with little chance to make genuinely personal connections. They are addicted to their phones because at least that is some link with other human beings, one that is safe because distanced, so much so that some students experience anxiety at any form of face-to-face interaction, and do not really know how to go about it. What happens in my freshman composition classes is that I allow students to write personally in their essays, to speak in their own voice about their own experiences and feelings, so long as they also analyze the source essays in the textbook, because I am paid to teach analytical reading and writing with use of sources. But I show them that they can use source analysis as a means to the end of saying something that means something to them personally. I stress to them that it is their essay, that they own it and are not just satisfying an assignment for someone else. Write something in your own voice that is yours, that is something you want to express, to an ideal reader who is another human being who might just care about what you are sharing.

This is liberating to many students who have been trained only to generate a formal style. Many of them have been subjected to the stupid non-rule of never even using the word “I.” It is the thing for which I get by far the most positive responses on student evaluations. They hunger for genuine communication. We all do, but they have been deprived of it more than most. They crowd into our creative writing program for the same reason. Whether it will get them a job or not seems to be less important than a chance to give something of themselves to the world. As for the level of the English major classes, I counsel people to save all their essays, even when, later on, you are embarrassed at how immature they are. I have saved at least some of mine, and once in a while I go back and listen to that young man in order to find out who I was back then, in a way that photographs and recordings can never tell me. I mostly listen to the voice. It is an uncanny thing to go back as in a time machine and meet yourself in the past, but also strangely valuable. We become other to ourselves over time, and a conversation with your alter ego may be instructive.

Most people are not creative writers, and writing essays is something one only does in school. But, since the Romantic era, other forms of personal writing have emerged, occasionally developed by literary writers into new genres, including diaries, memoirs, family histories, and letters. The forms are not entirely new. Few and fragmentary as they are, the poems of Sappho can still startle with the intensity of their open and vulnerable self-disclosure. Many of the poems of Horace and Catullus, among others in Roman literature, are personal, chatty, the equivalent of verse letters. Augustine’s Confessions documents the events of his life in order to show what led up to his conversion. In the Renaissance, the charming openness of Montaigne’s Essays made them a favorite of that exemplary objective writer, Shakespeare. Yet these were islands in the sea of an objective culture.

The modern forms of personal writing exist on an ambiguous borderland between the non-literary and the literary. The diary or journal form was raised to the level of art by Virginia Woolf and May Sarton, but the diary begins as purely personal and private. Its purpose is ostensibly archival: we want to keep a record of the present in order to remember it in the future. But when a diary starts becoming a journal, the shift in terms implies a shift from recording life to thinking about it. When we do that, we are holding a conversation with ourselves— with our selves. One self is in my head— the other in the language on the page. “Dear diary” is a cliché, but it implies something, a conversation between two identities. There is also the castaway’s message in a bottle. I used that as my metaphor for writing in a school assignment when I was 16 years old, my first piece of creative writing insofar as I can remember, though perhaps it was not entirely creative: I suspect the influence of a classic science fiction story, “A Saucer of Loneliness,” by Theodore Sturgeon, in which two lonely people bond by discovering a flying saucer that turns out to be, not the emissary of a super-scientific race but a cosmic message in a bottle by an alien being who is not really alien at all because he is capable of the quintessentially human emotion of loneliness.

What is the “use” of these personal forms of writing? There is a tendency, in our neurotically extraverted, other-directed culture, to view them as self-indulgent narcissism, navel-gazing, and of course they can become that. When the world is in the throes of a highly dangerous political crisis fraught with violence and the threat of violence, isn’t it irresponsible to sit around thinking about and writing about our selves? Would the Marxists not say this is the way the bourgeois evade the necessity of social engagement and activism, by sitting around and playing with their heads? A brief response would begin by asking: yes, but how did the United States get into this mess? What caused enough people to disconnect themselves from reality to vote for Donald Trump, knowing full well what he is and what he would do? Trump has power because too many people in this country are lost souls, lost selves. External social action is all very well, but if we do not address the root cause, social action is going to fail. The root cause is in people’s heads. I am hardly the first to suggest that personal writing is a form of meditation, one that can be suitable to people who are not intellectuals. The two forms of poetry actually have counterparts in the sprawling garden of personal writing. The inward-facing type corresponds to the form of meditation developed by Jung called “active imagination,” for which the model is Jung’s own Red Book, recording what he called his “encounter with the unconscious.” The Red Book contains dialogues, but with internal, archetypal figures, and also contains paintings by Jung as a way of getting beyond the limitations of words. Active imagination supplements therapy—and therapy itself is a form of meditation via conversation with an other. The graphic novels of Alison Bechdel, Fun Home and Are You My Mother?, interweave Bechdel’s therapy sessions with memories of her parents and her own early life along with showing the struggles of the creative process to create the work we are reading.

Family history can remain preoccupied with names, dates, and family trees, but it can also expand into a narrative attempt to imagine the lives of those people from whom we came. I have found that memoir and family history are potentially linked genres, maybe even two forms of one genre. Some years ago, I made the attempt at creating a family history that opened out on the one side into my birth and development, but also moved backward in time, so to speak, meditating on how the stories of my immigrant forebears were part of the history of this country. If you wanted, you could trace the story back further. I have a poster showing an artist’s conception of what this area was like in the Pleistocene, right after the glacier retreated. It matches the fossils collected from the front yard. I feel that that too is part of my story.

Imagining other people’s lives is what novelists do. Nowadays, people are increasingly mounting family trees, narratives, and photos on websites. These could potentially be linked with other peoples’ and families’ websites, whether of those related by marriage or just by friendship. The result would be a kind of hypertext parallel with panoramic novels like War and Peace or George Eliot’s Middlemarch, which showed the interconnections of a vast number of characters’ lives. Such a process might be a domestic equivalent to the technique that the anthropologist Clifford Geertz calls “thick description,” in which the study of another culture is grounded in a larger context including explanations by the very people being studied. What does this ramifying of the familial do? One thing at least: it pushes back against an opposite attitude, a “libertarian” one that denies connection. Elon Musk has produced 14 children—produced, not fathered, for he apparently has no real parental connection with them. He has merely spawned them as a part of a eugenics program. He might as well be breeding cattle.

People are filled with foreboding about a total breakdown of society, civil war, an apocalypse, who knows what. Instead of becoming survivalists, like the people of my childhood who built fallout shelters in their backyards, shelters never to be used, I think we will best survive whatever is to come by maintaining our interconnectedness, hanging together lest we all hang separately. Even without a breakdown, I think our society’s tendency to atomize and dehumanize might be counterbalanced with new forms of connection made possible with new technology and circumstances. I have a small example.

A few months ago, in my Substack mail appeared a letter from someone who had been absent from my life for 55 years, yet who at one time had been very important to me. Mary Lynn and I became friends when we were 16 years old. I know that because I went back and found that in my 1967 high school yearbook she had written, “To a really sweet and nice guy I’ve gotten to know pretty much this year.” From that point until somewhere in the early 1970’s when we lost touch, Mary Lynn and I had a connection for which there is no name. We were more than just friends, yet not a relationship. She had a boyfriend and I was at least in pursuit of someone else. Those two people did not dream that they would meet again in their 70’s, entirely by email, and re-establish a connection that again has no name, yet has become one of the sustaining elements of my life. We began by sharing memories of our high school and college days—we had the same favorite teacher in high school. We remember the night the car wash burned down, just a few blocks from our homes, an act of arson by two incompetent crooks who used too much of whatever it was that ignited the building. We share the memory of steel I-beams melting like butter in white heat. The perpetrators were burned in their own conflagration, and died on the lawns of people we knew. We remember the shootings of 4 students by the National Guard at Kent State on May 4, 1970, an event commemorated just two days ago. Mary Lynn was actually on site, though the shootings were mercifully hidden by an intervening building. I was hitchhiking back from Kent, and heard the news in a truck driver’s cabin.

But then our memories delved back in time, and we discovered that we shared vivid memories from a time before we knew each other—all the way back to birth, in a way. It turns out that we were born and lived the first 3 years of our lives about 4 blocks apart from each other. Later, both bookworms, we loved the old city library, a remarkable place whose floors were, believe it or not, made of glass, like something out of a fairy tale. Our fathers both worked at Timken Roller Bearing, both as machinists, and for all I know maybe even in the same department. They might even have known each other. Yes, these memories are trivial and mundane, as most memories are. But Mary Lynn and I have agreed to turn our correspondence into an ongoing process of discovery.

In passing, I note that the one thing email lacks is the other person’s handwriting. Handwriting is a quietly uncanny proof of our individuality. We all learned to write in exactly the same way, according to standard models. Then why is every person’s writing different? Why is there such a thing as typically masculine and feminine penmanship? In certain hands, no pun intended, letter writing has become art. The letters of Keats are one of his major works. But in some quarters, the subjective types of writing are stigmatized as “feminine,” and it is true that women, largely shut out of more prestigious genres, found outlets in letters and journals, to which traditionalists refuse to grant literary importance. Some deny that what Hawthorne called those female scribblers are important because all they write about is that private and domestic stuff, an allegation applied to women’s fiction from Jane Austen to Alice Munro. Against this prejudice stands Samuel Richardson, who created the form of the epistolary novel, told entirely through letters—and the letter writers in both his major works, Pamela and Clarissa, are women.

Already I would say that Mary Lynn and I know each other more deeply than most friends, perhaps better than some marital partners, even though we live several states apart and may never meet. There is a type of openness that, paradoxically, is made possible by distance. If such connections could be multiplied, the world would be a less lonely place, in which perhaps we would have to worry less about some solipsistically disconnected loner killing dozens of people, precisely because he is so alone.

We are not the only people who have experienced this miracle of time. Shakespeare’s final 4 plays, the romances, each play out over an entire generation, so that he had to devise ways of dealing with the passing of time within a 3-hour drama. In The Winter’s Tale, 16 years pass between acts 2 and 3, and a girl who was a baby in Act 2 is in Act 3 a teenager. The adults are old and have suffered greatly. The plots of the romances deal with loss—the girl’s name is Perdita, which means “loss”—with making mistakes and having to work out the consequences over many years, instead of the quick-turn-around happy endings of the earlier comedies. The plays clearly have some autobiographical basis. Shakespeare was himself at the beginning of old age, due to retire, his daughters marrying and moving away. He would be dead within a few years after his retirement. Yet there are miracles that are not only possible in old age, but perhaps only possible in old age. The lost is found. Wrongs are expiated, and people change through what they have suffered, through what they are in fact guilty of. Two words are motifs in the text. One is “wonder.” The other is “strange.” Life is so very strange. The old know this better than anybody.

What do we want of other people? We want kindred spirits, people with whom we share something. We want to find the ways in which we are the same. But, for all our fear and paranoia, we also want the different. Beginning poets tend to write poems that are so general that it is hard to tell what produced the feelings involved. When, as a poetry teacher, I told them to put the details in, be specific, they worried that no one would relate to the poem since no one else had those experiences. But I asked them to trust me: that is exactly what they will be engaged by.

At the same time that we seek sameness, we are drawn to the differences of other people, to their mysterious otherness. It is why people travel to foreign countries. The same is true in love. Vive la différence. No matter how polymorphous our brave new world of gender and sexual orientation becomes, this will still be true. Love is drawn to otherness, yearns to find sameness within the lure of difference, at the same time that difference makes a familiar partner fascinating. If this is true after 55 years, then anything is possible, and anything is.

Knowing all this is the best possible preparation for life—and also for death. By synchronicity, the Selected Poems of a great writer, Jorge Luis Borges, arrived in the mail yesterday. The title of the very last poem in the volume is the theme of this discussion: “The Web.” It is a poem of Borges’ old age, which begins, “Which of my cities will I die in?” He goes on to ask, one by one, the questions you ask in old age, such as, “What time will it be?” The poem ends:

These questions are digressions, not from fear
but from impatient hope,
part of the fatal web of cause and effect
that no man can foresee, nor any god.

We ask these questions alone, because we die alone, no matter how many people are in the room. It is a fatal web, yet the final note of the final poem is not of fear but of impatient hope. What it is we hope for is the final question we cannot answer, yet it is no less hope for all that.

References

Whiteis, David. Review: “Before Elvis: The African American Musicians Who Made the King, by Preston Lauterbach.” Living Blues, Issue 295, Volume 56, #2, March 2025. 62-63.

Borges, Jorge Luis. “The Web.” In Selected Poems. Edited by Alexander Coleman. Penguin, 2000. 483.