"Education—What For?" An Urgent Seminar for Teachers, November 6 in NYC

Teachers all over the US and Canada are rightly outraged at the state of education in our schools today. Reading about the increasingly organized teachers' coalitions now combating the corporate-imposed, legislatively-sanctioned culture of testing is inspiring, and I respect them very much!

Still, the central question about teaching and learning must be asked—and answered—in order for education to succeed in the fullest sense: in order for students to love learning.

This will take place at an urgently needed seminar at the Aesthetic Realism Foundation in New York City on November 6: "The Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method Succeeds, & Answers the Question "Education—What For?" I'm proud to have used this exciting, practical method in my English classes for nearly 30 years, and I can say with confidence that it can change what goes on in every classroom for the good of students and teachers alike.

The announcement for the seminar begins:

AMERICA’S SCHOOLS are in tremendous turmoil, and in this desperately needed public seminar you will hear the solution. You’ll hear the convincing answers to questions which plague students and which teachers dread: “Why should I learn long division? What do I need history for?”—or earth science—or Shakespeare? Amidst new “standards” and relentless testing, a boy repeating 4th grade in the Bronx asks himself, “What’s the matter with me? Am I dumb? Will I ever be able to learn?” A frustrated 3rd grader asks her mother, “Am I learning math just to pass an exam?”

New York school teachers, using examples of actual classroom lessons, will show how the Aesthetic Realism Method enables young people to succeed—to learn with true pleasure, and also meet the feared “rigorous” academic standards with greater ease.

That is because Aesthetic Realism explains definitively the what for? of education, its purpose. "The purpose of education," Eli Siegel, the founder of Aesthetic Realism, explained, "is to like the world through knowing it." And he identified the greatest impediment to learning: contempt, "the addition to self through the lessening of something else."

This is the groundbreaking principle on which the Aesthetic Realism method is based: "The world, art, and self explain each other: each is the aesthetic oneness of opposites." At this event, NYC teachers will give examples from their classes of how lessons based on this principle make learning come alive!

 To read the entire announcement, click here. 

How a Woman Hopes to See & Be Seen

I'm very glad to point readers to a recent issue of the periodical The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known, which publishes one of the kindest instances of writing about what women hope for as to the way we see ourselves as both body and mind: the essay by Eli Siegel "The Everlasting Dilemma of a Girl." The way he describes a young woman—with thoughts about herself, her mind, her attractiveness, her effect on men—is beautiful, and as I read it, I felt understood.

In her commentary introducing and placing the cultural value of this important essay, Aesthetic Realism Chairman of Education Ellen Reiss writes:

...The essay was written half a century ago. In these decades there have been big improvements as to how women have been encouraged to use our minds. Women today are certainly more able than once to be expressed in every field, from law to medicine to policing to government to space travel. Yet the dilemma Mr. Siegel writes of is with us still, as tormentingly as ever. A woman today may want to look as attractive as she can and also be as educated as she can—yet she does not see these two possibilities of herself as deeply coherent, of a piece, of the same unified self. She does not see them as having the same purpose.

Here I quote, with enormous gratitude, something Mr. Siegel said in an Aesthetic Realism lesson many years ago. It is about a matter connected with the “everlasting dilemma of a girl”: it is about the opposites of body and intellect. He was speaking to a man I had to do with then, who was confused by both me and himself, as I was. Mr. Siegel said:

In the field of corporeal expression or enjoyment, or sex, we hope to be proud and pleased at once. Ellen Reiss hopes to be proud about her manner of taking earth—in the same way as she would take the page of a book. The difference between the two things is felt by man and woman: I’m a different person making love from him or her who goes after knowledge. Do you think if Ms. Reiss could solve this problem of somatic expression and cerebral expression, you could? Do you think, then, that the fate of man depends on the fate of woman?

Aesthetic Realism makes possible, for both man and woman, what has eluded people for centuries. It makes possible at last the proud feeling that what we’re after as body and how we use our intellect go together, are an integrity....

This matter, I know from my own life, doesn't stop affecting a woman after she's no longer in her glorious and often confused youth. I'm a happily married woman, interested in love and all that goes with it, as well as intellectual pursuits. Studying Aesthetic Realism has had me feel more integrated than I ever could have been, and feel I'm the same person thinking about literature and being with my husband Alan. I know I can feel this more and more.

I want every woman, and every man hoping to understand women, to read this great issue of The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known!

What Good Will REALLY Is! A Holiday Event in NYC on Sunday, December 22

Tomorrow's Thanksgiving celebrations kick off the holiday season. It can be a joyous time, a chance to spend time with people who mean a lot to us.

What is it people are really hoping for at this time of year? When someone speaks about this as a time for good will, what do they mean by that? Aesthetic Realism explains that good will is not the mushy thing people take it to be. It is, Eli Siegel showed, "the desire to have something else stronger and more beautiful, for this desire makes us stronger and more beautiful."

If you're planning to be in the NYC area on December 22, you can learn more about the meaning of good will at a special dramatic and musical event, including holiday songs, arias and choruses that have been loved by millions, a lecture on Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol," and more. Find out more here.

The Aesthetics of Mobile Devices

In her commentary in a recent issue of the periodical The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known, the editor, Ellen Reiss, writes "on a big aspect of current life: the use of mobile devices." As a person who's come to depend on mine, I love what she explains here. She shows that, at their best, these devices have an aesthetic purpose: they put opposites together. Ms. Reiss writes of them: 

They’re wonderful, of course. And their goodness has to do with the fact that through them, we can be better related to the outside world, less separate from it. To be able, at any moment, to text a person a thousand miles away makes a one of what’s close to us and what’s distant. That is related to romanticism, because one of the large, new things the romantic writers did was present what seemed strange and distant as also close to oneself, of oneself. Byron, for example, swept English readers by writing about his intimate personal turmoil and at the same time far-off places he was visiting: like Lake Geneva or the Roman Colosseum.

Those opposites, the close and distant, personal and vast, familiar and wondrous, are one in all art. They were joined in a bigger, fuller, more elemental, also wider way in romanticism. But it happens that they are in Twitter too. Through tweets we feel that words which have come close to us—we may see them on a device held in our intimate hand—are being seen by perhaps scores, hundreds, thousands of people we don’t know. And to be, along with many other people, the swift recipient of a tweet, and then retweet it, is to feel the world coming close to us and our going out to it.

We can use the smartphone or tablet we carry close to us to find out (for instance) the holdings of a library in Ankara, Turkey. As we do so, the intimate and distant, familiar and strange, are together...."

And Ms. Reiss also explains that, in addition to people's using handheld devices to know the world better,

"they can also be a means of that entirely anti-art purpose: to grab the world through aspects of it; have people and things quickly, on one’s own terms. It’s good to get information speedily, and mobile devices can assist that. However, there is a huge tendency to think that what one can find out quickly is all one needs to know."

Read the entire issue, which includes a portion of Eli Siegel's lecture Romanticism and Guilt.

What the fast food workers' strikes mean

In a recent issue of the periodical The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known, the editor, Ellen Reiss writes: "America’s fast-food workers, who have shown they can shut down, at least for a time, some mighty operations, are illustrating this statement by Eli Siegel: 'The whole purpose of history is to show that the greatest kindness is the greatest power.'"

And she shows that even though they are not yet unionized, these workers are acting like a union—they show that many people work together to have each individual person get what he or she deserves. I love the commentary by Ms. Reiss. I'll write soon about the lecture by Eli Siegel that is being serialized in this journal, on a subject dear to my (English teacher's) heart: romanticism.

Read more here

The Aesthetics of Sleep

In a recent issue of the journal The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known there is a description of something that concerns many people. The issue is titled "Why People Can't Sleep," and it contains notes of a 1946 lecture Eli Siegel gave on the subject. At this time, as more and more people are having trouble sleeping, what is said in this lecture, and in the commentary by Ellen Reiss, can make for deeper thought and understanding of this important and confusing subject. Here are the introductory paragraphs of this issue, and a link to the rest of it.

The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known--July 22, 2009
Issue #1749

Why People Can't Sleep
Here, based on notes taken by Martha Baird, is The Philosophy of Insomnia, the lecture Eli Siegel gave at Steinway Hall on December 19, 1946. Its subject, the inability to sleep, torments people today as it has for centuries. Around 1370, Geoffrey Chaucer wrote of himself:

I have gret wonder, be this lyghte,
How that I lyve, for day ne nyghte
I may nat slepe wel nygh noght.

That means: “I have great wonder, by this light, / How I live, for day or night / I cannot sleep nearly at all.” He says that, for lack of sleep, he is “a mased thing, / Alway in poynt to falle adoun” (“a dazed thing, / Always at the point of falling down”). *Chaucer made poetry of his trouble about sleep; he told of it musically; but he didn't understand it.

Today, the psychologists don't understand the cause of sleeplessness any better than Chaucer did—and their expression on the matter is certainly much less beautiful. The website of the Mayo Clinic tells us that “stressful life events...may lead to insomnia”; also, “anxieties...may disrupt your sleep.” Well, such relations were noted long before Chaucer's time even—but why may they occur? And why may someone whose life is no more “stressful” than another's find herself agonizingly awake at 4 AM again and again?

The answer is in the lecture published here. It's also in the discussion of the subject in Eli Siegel's Self and World. As a prelude, I'll quote a passage from Self and World....

click to continue reading

Rock 'n Roll, the Opposites, & Our Greatest Hopes!--A Celebration, on Sunday, Aug. 24

I'm so glad that this exciting presentation will be taking place! It's an event not to be missed!

Aesthetic Realism Foundation
141 Greene Street, Manhattan

SUNDAY • AUGUST 24 • 2:30 PM

The Aesthetic Realism Theatre Company presents:Rock ‘n’ Roll, The Opposites, & Our Greatest Hopes—A Celebration! Why has rock 'n roll affected people so much? Singing & commenting on songs from the '50s and '60s to the present, the performers illustrate these sentences from an Aesthetic Realism lesson Eli Siegel gave to a rock musician: “Rock ‘n’ roll has the answer to people’s problem of, on the one hand, wanting to be very private and sad, and on the other, wanting to have something like sunlight and public force. Every person has to make a one of the most secret thing in him and the most public thing. Rock ‘n’ roll shows it can be done.”

The Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method Shows Art and Science Are Related

As we approach the end of another school year, with many teachers and students less hopeful than ever about their purpose in the classroom, I want to tell educators about an important presentation on the success of the Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method. In it, my colleagues Rosemary Plumstead and Donita Elllison, teachers of science and art respectively, show how these two subjects, often seen as very separate, are deeply friendly to each other. Their talk is based on the central principle of Aesthetic Realism: "The world, art, and self explain each other: each is the aesthetic oneness of opposites." You can read an account of this powerful presentation by clicking on the following link:
http://plum-education.blogspot.com/2007/11/art-science-and-aesthetic-realism.html

A kind and ethical approach to health care: it exists!

These days, Americans are increasingly worried about health care. Many people have no insurance, while others have coverage that is inadequate at best. While there's growing anger at this problem, it can seem as if no one in the position to do anything about it is ready to be brave and take a stand. The article "Imagine health care that is compassionate and real," by Christopher Balchin describes what is really possible--and not only possible, for it exists in the UK. Mr. Balchin describes the ethics behind our health care crisis, as explained by Aesthetic Realism. Forward this article to everyone you know!

The Aesthetic Realism Method in the Teaching of Art

The Aesthetic Realism Teaching Method, which has been used with enormous success by teachers for over 3 decades, has students learn the subjects in the curriculum with excitement and pleasure. This includes not only academic subjects, but also the arts. My colleague Donita Ellison teaches art at NYC's LaGuardia High School. Some of what she has seen about art, teaching, and the Aesthetic Realism Method is described in her blog, Aesthetic Realism; or, Why I Love Teaching Art. It is so clear from what she describes that art can be a means of young people's learning to have proud perception of the world, and knowing humanity better--including themselves.

Ellen Reiss, on the Aesthetic Realism Explanation of Poetry

Why have people loved poetry, written it, read it--even memorized it--for centuries? As an English teacher, I love studying poetry with my classes, and I am moved by how my students respond to it. I want people to know of the writing of Ellen Reiss, the Class Chairman of Aesthetic Realism, whose study of and explanation of poetry, through the principles about beauty stated by Eli Siegel, has been an invaluable source of education for me. "Poetry," stated Mr. Siegel, "is the oneness of the permanent opposites in reality as seen by an individual." This is what Ellen Reiss describes richly in the writing here. She explains the relation of poetry--and also prose works--to the hopes, confusions, desires of people.

Eli Siegel's Poetry -- and, What is poetry?

As a person who loves poetry, and teaches it in my high school classes, I think the following page is tremendously valuable: Eli Siegel's Poetry -- and, What is poetry? It contains many poems and translations by the founder of Aesthetic Realism, American poet and critic Eli Siegel (1902-1978) , works of literary criticism by him and others, lectures he gave relating poetry to other subjects, and more. It is a resource I value, and I think other people will agree.

Ellen Reiss, on Robert Burns and justice to working people

How should working people, and the work they do, be seen? Aesthetic Realism explains that work is an aesthetic situation--a putting together of an individual person with the outside world--and it should be respected. Yet so many people throughout history, and many, many today, have been and felt disrespected when it comes to work, and have been rightly discontent because of this. In her commentary to the issue of the journal The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known titled "Jobs, Discontent, and Beauty," Ellen Reiss, the Class Chairman of Aesthetic Realism and literary critic, discusses some poems by Robert Burns to show how he objected poetically to the unaesthetic, unjust way working people were seen. She has also written about the work of many other poets, and the aesthetic way they saw the world in their writing. So, there's more to come!

Aesthetic Realism Online Library!

I'm so glad to say that there is now an exciting new online resource for anyone who wants to learn more about Aesthetic Realism, the philsophy founded by Eli Siegel. It is the Aesthetic Realism Online Library. By clicking on www.AestheticRealism.net, you can read poems and lectures by Eli Siegel, chapters from various books about Aesthetic Realism, Mr. Siegel's reviews of many books, originally published in Scribner's Magazine, his poetry and criticism, many issues of the journal The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known, including commentary by Ellen Reiss, the Class Chairman of Aesthetic Realism, and much more! This is an amazing compilation of work that shows what Aesthetic Realism truly is--and I encourage anyone who wants to learn about this beautiful and intellectually exact philosophy to read what is on the Aesthetic Realism Online Library!

A Photographer Tells What He Learned about Art and Life from Aesthetic Realism

Here is a website that I recommend to anyone interested in the art of photography--and also to anyone interested in learning more about his or her own life:
Len Bernstein--Photographic Education: An Approach to Art and Life Based on the Aesthetic Realism of Eli Siegel.

Final post: Aesthetic Realism Taught Me about What Interferes with Happiness

This is the conclusion of the paper I've been posting here, which discusses "The Necklace," by Guy de Maupassant, with its famous ironic ending, and what Aesthetic Realism taught me about the interference in oneself to real happiness

Maupassant describes in vivid prose the change that takes place in Mme. Loisel as she now, because of her own conceit, must live “the horrible existence of the needy.”

"She took her part...with heroism. That dreadful debt must be paid. She would pay it....She came to know what heavy housework meant and the odious cares of the kitchen. She washed the dishes, using her rosy nails on the greasy pots and pans. She washed the dirty linen...; she carried the slops down to the street every morning, and carried up the water, stopping for breath at every landing. And, dressed like a woman of the people, she went to the fruiterer, the grocer, the butcher, her basket on her arm, bargaining, insulted, defending her miserable money sou by sou.

"After 10 years, they paid off everything. And though Mme. Loisel now looked old, “with frowsy hair, skirts askew, and red hands,” we can see that her idea of what would make her important and happy has not essentially changed.
Sometimes,...she sat down near the window, and she thought of that gay evening of long ago, of that ball where she had been so beautiful and so feted.

"One day while taking a walk, she sees Mme. Forestier and decides to tell her the truth about the necklace. She greets her old friend, who doesn’t recognize her and is shocked to see how she’s changed.

'Yes, I have had days hard enough, since I have seen you, days wretched enough—and that because of you!'
'Of me! How so?'
'Do you remember that diamond necklace which you lent me to wear at the ministerial ball?'
'Yes. Well?'
'Well, I lost it.'
'What do you mean? You brought it back.'
'I brought you back another just like it. And for this we have been ten years paying. You can understand that it was not easy for us, us who had nothing. At last it is ended, and I am very glad.'"


Mme. Loisel’s pride here is of two kinds, representing two ideas of what will make her happy: one, the justice of being able to meet an obligation justly; and two, being able to be superior—here, by feeling she’d successfully fooled Mme. Forestier. But had she?

"Mme. Forestier had stopped.
'You say that you bought a necklace of diamonds to replace mine?'
'Yes. You never noticed it, then! They were very like.'
And she smiled with a joy which was proud and naive at once.
Mme. Forestier, strongly moved, took her two hands.
'Oh, my poor Mathilde! Why, my necklace was paste. It was worth at most five hundred francs!'"

The deep theme of this story, said Ms. Reiss, is: “If we go after substitutes for liking the world through being fair to it as we see it, are we asking for disaster for ourselves?”

The great news is: People can learn to have the happiness that comes from seeing the world truly and liking it. “In happiness,” said Mr. Siegel,
there is the wonderful and the ordinary. Every person has to feel that his feet are on the ground if he is to be happy; every person has to feel there is something wonderful about the ground and it isn’t just ground....Aesthetic Realism does think that happiness is the most wonderful thing in the world, and yet it is a study.

That study can enable women and men everywhere to have real, lasting happiness!

What Happiness Is and Isn't--Explained by Aesthetic Realism (4th installment)

And here's the next section of this paper.

“The idea that one’s ability to like the world depends on being made supreme in it is here,” said Ellen Reiss, and she asked, “What is it a child coming into this world is born for? Is it to see meaning in the world, or to dazzle the world?” Mme. Loisel thinks it’s the second, and so she agrees when her husband says she might ask to borrow some jewels from her rich friend, Mme. Forestier, whom she rarely visited “because she suffered so much” by the contrast between their situations. Generously, her friend shows her a box full of gold, pearls and precious stones, saying, “Choose, my dear.” Yet, despite their beauty, she still asked, “Haven't you any more?”

All of a sudden she discovered, in a black satin box, a superb necklace of diamonds, and her heart began to beat with an immoderate desire. Her hands trembled as she took it. She fastened it around her throat, outside her high-necked dress, and remained lost in ecstasy at the sight of herself.
Then she asked, hesitating, filled with anguish:
“Can you lend me that, only that?”

And she does. Mme. Loisel has now within her grasp what she thinks will make her happy. At the ball, she dazzles many men.

She danced with intoxication, with passion, made drunk by pleasure, forgetting all, in the triumph of her beauty, in the glory of her success, in a sort of cloud of happiness composed of all this homage, of all this admiration, of all these awakened desires, and of that sense of complete victory which is so sweet to woman's heart.

This is a description of a certain notion of happiness. Mr. Siegel writes:
The feeling of being agog in an honest fashion belongs to happiness. There is a desire to be gloriously dizzy and exaltingly abandoned. But that...is not going to be got by shortcuts....There is no porch climbing to happiness.” [TRO 1011]

And so, as they leave the ball at 4 a.m. and return home, she feels “All was ended for her. And as to him, he reflected that he must be at the Ministry at ten o'clock.” Inside their apartment,

She removed the wraps, which covered her shoulders, before the glass, so as once more to see herself in all her glory. But suddenly she uttered a cry. She had no longer the necklace around her neck!
Her husband, already half undressed, demanded:
“What is the matter with you?”
She turned madly toward him:
“I have—I have—I've lost Mme. Forestier's necklace.”

Her husband goes back over their route, trying to find it.
He went to Police Headquarters, to the newspaper offices, to offer a reward; he went to the cab companies—everywhere, in fact, whither he was urged by the least suspicion of hope.
She waited all day, in the same condition of mad fear before this terrible calamity.
Loisel returned at night with a hollow, pale face; he had discovered nothing.

Rather than admit they have lost the necklace, they decide they must replace it, no matter how much it costs—hoping Mme. Forestier won’t notice.
They went from jeweler to jeweler, searching for a necklace like the other,...sick both of them with chagrin and with anguish. [At last] they found...a string of diamonds which seemed to them exactly like the one they looked for. It was worth forty thousand francs. They could have it for thirty-six.

Spending all their savings, entering into “ruinous obliga¬tions,” borrowing from usurers. M. Loisel “compromised all the rest of his life” to pay for this diamond necklace. To their relief, Mme. Forestier doesn’t notice the substitution.

Aesthetic Realism and Why People Don't ONLY Want to Be Happy--3rd installment

What Aesthetic Realism can teach people about happiness is something I hope everyone can learn about. Who, after all, doesn't want to be happy? So--here's the next part of the paper that I began posting last week. In it, I discuss the protagonist of one of the best known short stories in world literature: Guy de Maupassant's "The Necklace," which I've studied with many of my high school classes. Through Aesthetic Realism, this lady, Mathilde Loisel, can teach us something important about ourselves.

What Did She Think Would Make Her Happy?

I’ll speak now about the main character in one of the most famous short stories ever written, read by millions of people—including high school students like those I teach: “The Necklace,” by Guy De Maupassant. As I do, I’ll be quoting from an Aesthetic Realism class in which Ellen Reiss discussed this story, showing it has centrally to do with the matter of what we think will make us happy—and how we also arrange not to be. The story begins:

She was one of those pretty and charming girls who are sometimes, as if by a mistake of destiny, born into a family of clerks. She had no dowry, no expectations, no means of being known, understood, loved, wedded by any rich and distinguished man; and she let herself be married to a little clerk at the Ministry of Public Instruction.

What this woman, Mathilde Loisel, feels is related to what I once felt: doomed to be unhappy because she was born, as she saw it, into the wrong family, and that “she had really fallen from her proper station.” Yet right away, we also have the thing that will make us happy: the aesthetic way of dealing with the world, which is in the style of Guy De Maupassant. There is in the sound of these opening sentences, Ms. Reiss explained, “a sweet ripplingness,” and then “a let-down.” His description of the ordinariness, even dullness, of French middle-class life has drama. For example:

She suffered ceaselessly, feeling herself born for all the delicacies and all the luxuries. She suffered from the poverty of her dwelling, from the wretched look of the walls, from the worn-out chairs, from the ugliness of the curtains. All those things, of which another woman of her rank would never even have been conscious, tortured her and made her angry....She thought of...silent antechambers hung with Oriental tapestry, lit by tall bronze candelabra,...of...delicate furniture carrying priceless curiosities....She had no dresses, no jewels, nothing. And she loved nothing but that; she felt made for that.

Said Ms. Reiss,”Everyone is something like this lady. We have a notion: If I had this [or that], I would be pleased....There’s a desire to be happy through owning the world.”

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with wanting a nice home, or wanting to improve one’s situation in life—yet we should ask: Why do we want these? Is it to feel we’re getting along well with things, with reality, or to feel we should be in a position to look down on the lesser, more common¬place beings of this world? Mme. Loisel feels the latter, and we see in this passage that she feels humiliated in not having what she thinks she needs to be happy:

When she sat down to dinner, before the round table covered with a tablecloth three days old, opposite her husband, who uncovered the soup tureen and declared with an enchanted air, “Ah, the good pot-au-feu! I don't know anything better than that,” she thought...of delicious dishes served on marvelous plates, and of the whispered gallantries which you listen to with a sphinx-like smile, while you are eating the pink flesh of a trout or the wings of a quail.

In her picture of what will make her happy, Mme. Loisel is arranging to be unhappy. Here, she’s like many people: she cannot take pleasure in ordinary things, like good home-cooked food, and sees her husband as a fool for doing so; she cannot see everyday reality as having wonder. Asked Ms. Reiss,

Are we interested in seeing what the world is? Is that going to make us happy? Or is having it present us with certain things, give us the goodies...going to make us happy? What is it that will hold up?

And she explained how the art of Maupassant is a criticism of how Mme. Loisel sees: “The style here is a relation of richness and a certain bluntness. There’s terrific economy.” Yet, she explained, in this rather short story, “you feel there’s abundance.”

One evening, Mme. Loisel’s husband comes home with something he thinks will make her happy: an invitation to a ball at the palace of the Ministry of Public Instruction. Yet,

Instead of being delighted,...she threw the invitation on the table with disdain, murmuring:
“What do you want me to do with that?”
“But, my dear, I thought you would be glad. You never go out, and this is such a fine opportunity. I had awful trouble to get it. Everyone wants to go; it is very select, and they are not giving many invitations to clerks. The whole official world will be there.”
She looked at him with an irritated eye, and she said, impatiently:
“And what do you want me to put on my back?”

Flustered at seeing her burst into tears, he asks: “What’s the matter?”

By a violent effort, she had conquered her grief, and she replied, with a calm voice, while she wiped her wet cheeks:
“Nothing. Only I have no dress, and therefore I can't go to this ball. Give your card to some colleague whose wife is better equipped than I.”

Mme. Loisel is quite mean as she makes the mistake of many wives—blaming a husband for her unhappiness and punishing him. Cowed by her, he agrees that she should have a new dress, though it will cost all that he has saved for another purpose. But she’s still miserable: she has no jewels. Her husband suggests she wear flowers: “It's very stylish at this time of the year. For ten francs you can get two or three magnificent roses.” “She was not convinced. ‘No; there's nothing more humiliating than to look poor among other women who are rich.’”

Happiness and Unhappiness--Part 2

Here is the second installment of the paper I mentioned in my last post:

My Education about Happiness and Unhappiness Continues

“Is our desire to be happy all that it should be?,” asked Mr. Siegel. “It isn’t; we can be pretty sure of that. Because to desire to be happy is an art, it’s a philosophy, it’s a big thing.”

I’m glad I can study how I’ve wanted to be happy and also not to be—and it’s a live subject. For instance, speaking with my husband, jazz pianist and music teacher Alan Shapiro, about the subject of this seminar, I saw how ready I’d been, just that day, to find reasons to be unhappy. First, when I woke up, I saw it was pouring outside, and driving to my class on Long Island would take longer; I just knew I’d be late, and I was! Not only that, but when I got there, the door was locked, and I couldn’t find my way when I went in another entrance. I was late, soaked, and lost!

How might a person use occurrences like these not to be unhappy? The answer, Aesthetic Realism teaches, is to be found in aesthetics—in how opposites are present; and the central opposites are always self and world. For example: rain, weather as such, and time are big aspects of the world we meet all the time. A person could have a good time thinking about what rain is, and how it affects other things, such as roads, cars, grass, the colors of things, one’s own feelings. And we could ask: “What is my attitude to time? How do other people see it?” Though one might still be late, the state of mind making for this kind of thought has much more respect in it, and it would make for greater ease and pleasure.

I’m so glad I can learn about the moment by moment fight between wanting to be happy through liking reality and wanting to have the pleasure of contempt by finding reasons to be displeased. That I have a marriage in which my husband and I can be friendly critics of each other as to this is cause for tremendous gratitude.

Happiness and Unhappiness

I recently wrote on the subject "We Want to Be Happy, but Do We Also NOT Want to Be?" This paper, which I presented with my colleagues Michael Palmer and Dale Laurin in a recent seminar at the Aesthetic Realism Seminar, will be posted here in several installments. Here's the first.

WE WANT TO BE HAPPY—BUT DO WE ALSO WANT NOT TO BE?
by Leila Rosen

I once thought real happiness was just not in the cards for me. How could it be when everyone around me was a fake, my family was annoying and ordinary, no one treated me with the honor and deference I felt were my due—and anyway, I reasoned at the advanced age of 19, the chances of anyone feeling happy in this world for more than brief moment were a zillion to one.

How I saw happiness changed when I began to study Aesthetic Realism. First, I learned that whether or not I was happy didn’t depend on circumstances—on what I had or didn’t have, or on how other people treated me—but rather on how I saw the world. Happiness, explained Eli Siegel, is “going to come by a person’s being able to say: ‘I’ve honestly looked at the world in relation to myself, and I like the relation.’”

And I was amazed to read this, in Mr. Siegel’s “Questions for Everyone”: “Does something in me want to be unhappy?” Why would anyone want to feel unhappy?—but somehow, I felt this described me. With the next question, I began to learn why: “Do I feel more important when I’m unhappy?” The answer was “YES!”

With this began the most important, liberating, joy-giving education of my life! “Happiness,” said Mr. Siegel, “can be defined as the state of being able to say truly you like the world.” We like the world, I learned, when we feel reality’s opposites are together well. I felt this, for instance, as I stood on the shore at Coney Island—looking out at the vast expanse of ocean, as the waves rose and fell, were powerful and yet sent forth a delicate spray. In high school, I was excited to see, through the lens of a microscope, tiny beings in a drop of ordinary pond water, and to learn how the soprano part I sang blended and contrasted with the lower parts, making for the rich, haunting harmony in a 16th century madrigal. In these instances, I experi¬enced the central thing in happiness, because I felt—though I couldn’t put it clearly—at one with the world outside of me.

Meanwhile, the other feeling I described, that I’d never be happy, was with me a lot of the time, and I had no idea why. Mr. Siegel explained:

"While the self wants to be happy—that is, be at one with the world—it also has a certain satisfaction in not being at one with the world, because [that might mean] you give up some of yourself for the world to take. Since we often are in a mood to have all of ourselves to ourselves, and we don’t want to give up any of it and so lose our ‘independence,’ this also means we don’t want to be happy."

This explains why, as I said in my first Aesthetic Realism consulta¬tion, I had trouble giving sustained attention to things: my studies, other people, books, even a sweater I was knitting. I learned that being able to say about one thing after another “It’s not that important”—had with it the triumph of feeling I was superior to the mundane world, and I had myself, undiluted.

One form this superiority took was feeling I should be treated with kid gloves, because I was more sensitive than other people, more easily hurt. I often felt left out. When I overheard members of my girl scout troop talking about a rehearsal for our show, I grew suspicious: Why wasn’t I invited? I sulked, finally forcing my mother to take me. As it turned out, only a few people were needed for the rehearsal. I was mortified; then I milked even this for another reason to be unhappy.

Seeing this tendency in me, my consultants once asked, “What is the great insult to you that you get from everyone?” I said, “I think it's that they see me as a little kid.” They disagreed, saying “It’s that they're not you. That's the way we're insulted by every other human being. They're not us, and they seem to think they're important anyway.” This was true! I took it as an affront that I wasn’t the first thing on other people’s minds. Yet when people did show interest in or concern about me, I felt they were butting in and wouldn’t leave me alone. No matter how you sliced it, I was going to be unhappy. Class Chairman Ellen Reiss once asked me if I’d felt I was “Picked-out-for-disaster Rosen.” Yes—and that I’m no longer driven by this feeling is a cause of tremendous gratitude for what I’ve learned!