Psi – HBO presents a Brazilian Psychoanalyst

Psi is an HBO series about a Psychoanalyst in Sao Paolo, Brazil.  He is recently separated from his wife (an attorney) and two stepchildren, and he hangs out with a friend who watched his parents die and now works in a graveyard, and a former student, who was an anthropologist before she became a psychoanalyst.  A friend of mine, a film analyst and Spanish Literature faculty member at my University, joined me to present the fourth episode at our local psychoanalytic institute last night and to lead a discussion about it.  My friend is from Argentina, and knows quite a bit about South American culture – so she was quite helpful in understanding some of the context of the series.

My friend stated that Sao Paolo is a city of 20 million and that this series is less about Sao Paolo or Brazilian culture, and more about living in a megalopolis and the resulting alienation that can occur.  To underscore this, the version of the series that is available in the US on HBO has been dubbed from Portuguese to Spanish and has English subtitles.  My friend suggested that this could just as easily have been set in Mexico City, for instance, as Sao Paolo.  Further, it is about a relatively small slice of the socio economic pie in Sao Paolo.  All of the characters – to her eye – are white.  When I noted that the Analyst’s ex- wife is dark skinned, she responded that this is a decidedly American read, where our notion of one drop of blood in a hundred leads us to describe a person as of African descent – where in Brazil, where she has lived, the much higher ratio of people of African and Indigenous descent leads to a much different way of reading race and color.  The cultural slice is one that is of high socio economic standing and lives in a relatively homogenous euro-centric social sphere.

The fourth episode - the one we watched - presents three interlocking stories about death.  It starts with the death of Regina, Milton’s husband.  Regina was a patient of Carlo – the analyst – and she and Milton also came to Carlo for couple’s therapy.  Now Milton invites Carlo to the funeral, and then Milton consults with Carlo.  The second story is the story of a woman in Carlo’s practice who has been seeing Carlo for some time – and during that time she has complained about her brother who has recently died, along with his son, in a car accident, and she has not been able to bring herself to tell her children about that.  Finally, Carlo’s stepdaughter is in the process of losing the family dog, to whom she has become more attached as the dog is dying.

Carlo, around whom all of this revolves, observes the actions of his patients – he comments on them – and he seems, at least to me, to be somewhat removed from them.  Not quite clinically, but almost.  He is more human with his stepdaughter – when his ex tries to tell her daughter that things will be alright, he clarifies that the dog will die.  He is almost cruel in pretending to be the dog’s spirit and telling the stepdaughter that she has not cared for the dog – not played with him, fed him, or wanted to spend time with him, until now when he is on death’s bed – and then feels badly about having crossed a line.  He is clearly affected by these losses, however.  He reads a letter from his father about his father’s wishes not to have a priest comfort him as he is dying – fearing that his anti-God stance will soften when he is confronted directly by his mortality.  He also consults with a medium – through his friend the gravedigger.

The medium says two interesting things to him.  The first is that he is the medicine for his patients – and that being the medicine is much more difficult than prescribing medicine – but also that it is different from being a friend or relation.  This is actually a quite intriguing observation – one that I could write a post about – though in some ways the episode becomes a meditation on this observation.  The second thing that the medium does is to encourage him to connect with the spirits that are calling to him.  This, for a skeptical man – as his friend calls him – could be a problematic piece of advice, but he takes it more or less in stride, and remains as open to this as he is to his patients and their various beliefs.

Milton is, for me, the more poignant of the two patients.  He is convinced that Regina, who was highly religious and badgering him to become religious, is now a spirit – indeed he believes he saw her spirit leave her body – and he is looking to connect with her wherever he can – including in Carlo’s office – where he believes she may choose to come visit him.  Carlo clarifies that he does not expect this to happen, but notes that he becomes the lightning rod for people from his patient’s past, and that, since he knew Regina, he is more likely to serve that function for Milton.  He goes on to point out that Milton has an unrealistically rosy picture of his relationship with his wife, which was actually quite problematic.  This becomes, for Milton, an example of Carlo channeling his wife.  Carlo wonders why Milton wants so desperately to be in contact with his wife.  When Milton states that it is to ask forgiveness for killing her dogs, whom Milton hated, Carlo thinks that the amount of detail that Milton uses in telling the story indicates this is not the real reason, and Carlo confesses that he really hated his wife – she smelled bad, she was stupid, and he wants to confess that, because of this, he was not a good husband.

The woman who lost her brother, then, also did not appreciate her brother when he was alive – and finds herself feeling somewhat hypocritical about her feelings of loss at his death.  She is also inhibited about telling her children who, when Carlo talks to them, take the news quite matter of factly and don’t seem to wonder what the big deal these adults have about death.

Carlo’s stepdaughter’s dog dies, and she constructs a sign to put on his grave that states that just as he barked in life to scare off robbers, he will bark in death to scare off bad spirits.  The family funeral seems to provide a nice sanctuary and support as she grieves the animal – perhaps in some sense doing that for the family as a whole.

I organized my remarks about the episode around Freud’s paper, Mourning and Melancholia.  This dense and difficult paper is easier to understand when there is an interpretation – and I think Thomas Ogden, in his book Creative Readings, does a very nice job, both in the introduction and in the first chapter describing what is so ground breaking about this paper.  At the heart of it, at least in the context of this episode, is Freud’s observation that acknowledging our ambivalence about relationships is really tough to do – much tougher than Carlo’s soft croonings about them to his patients would indicate.  In fact, Freud maintains, we would rather stay connected with those we have lost – even when that loss has been of someone about whom we are ambivalent – than to move forward with our lives.

Milton – for all his complaining about Regina and how she held him back and stuck his nose in smelly stuff when she was alive – deeply feels her loss.  I imagine that she also supported him – and called him to be his better self – and did all those things that can become invisible in a marriage – especially when we begin to focus on the negative qualities of our spouse.  Only when our spouse is gone do we want them – in a way that we may not have been able to acknowledge when they were available.  Divorcing couples frequently reunite many times in the process of becoming divorced as they act out this dance of ambivalence.  The final scene of Milton has him walking down the stairs leaving Carlo’s office, touching the banister as he goes.  We puzzled over this in the discussion – wondering if he was touching the banister that Regina had touched – and being in contact with her – continuing to look for her, or perhaps he was letting go of her, realizing that she was no longer there, and he would have to move on without her, the outcome that Freud saw as the healthy one - the one that prevents melancholia (depression).

The kids were much less ambivalent.  They did not particularly like or feel connected to their uncle, and even less so to their cousin, who had bullied them.   When Carlo suggested that the cousin might now be in heaven, the daughter corrected him, stating he would simply become a skeleton.  This was the joke that ended the episode - the sensitive analyst - trying to be sugar coated medicine - was served by the kid who was not at all concerned by the death of her cousin.

The children's mourning process - letting go – something they seem to be able to do more easily, may be a result of the ways that they were less alienated from those around them, we came to think in the discussion.  They could more clearly hate and love those they were in contact with – whether a dog or a human – without as much apparent conflict between those two states.  As we age, our relationships become more complicated, and we are also closer to death, and thus more anxious, perhaps, about moving forward in our lives.  We no longer have the illusion of immortality, so we don’t let go of those we have lost as a means of hanging onto things as they have been.

My co presenter – who has seen more of the series – noted that Carlo is much less removed from children than from adults across the episodes.  He seems to be able to connect with them easily, while adults find him to be somewhat distant – perhaps aloof.  We, as viewers, observe him in various moments in his life – public and private – becoming voyeuristic – somewhat in the way that analysts view their patient’s lives.  We – or at least I – want to connect with him – and more than that  - help him connect with those around him.  I am relieved to hear that he connects with kids in other episodes.  Being the medicine for his patients seems to weary him, and he does not get much relief from his extra therapeutic contact with other adults.

In a post discussion conversation with one of the participants, we noted how alienated we are all becoming – through the use of our various devices that give us more and more surface connections with the world.  Analysis is, especially for those of us who gather to talk about it, a hoped for means of connecting with others.  Even that, this series would suggest, is laborious – for patients and analysts alike (unless we are young…).  And, while analysis may help us confront the obstacles to connecting with those around us, and this may feel like being in contact, there is a weird paradox that the analyst, who is consistently immersed in the stuff of life - relating all the time to his patients -  can become the most alienated of all - observing but not deeply connecting with those around him (or her).

To access a narrative description of other posts on this site, link here.     For a subject based index, link here.

To subscribe to posts (which occur 2-3 times per month), if you are on a computer, hit the X button on the upper right of this screen and, on the subsequent screen, hover your cursor over the black line in the upper right area and choose the pop out box that says subscribe and then enter the information.  I'm sorry but I don't currently know how you can subscribe from a mobile device - hopefully you have a computer as well...

Hamilton! Lin-Manuel Miranda Does the Reluctant Psychoanalyst Proud (Weirdly)

Hamilton – Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Broadway hip hop musical interpretation of the life and times of one of our founding fathers most known for being shot by Aaron Burr and being on the ten dollar bill has been on the reluctant wife and my horizon for a while.  I read A War of Two (which I previously reported on here) in preparation for the musical in part because I was afraid that I would have trouble following the plot through the language – which I knew would come fast and furious.  I had much less trouble with that, but was unprepared for the emotional impact of the play.

Reading the playbill ahead of time, there was a brief article on the relationship between Lin-Manuel Miranda, who wrote the musical and stars as Hamilton, and his father, an immigrant from Puerto Rico.  After writing a Tony winning play, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s father wanted him to go into something safe, like law.  So when Lin-Manuel was torn between an offer for a full time teaching gig and finishing the score for Hamilton, he consulted with his father.  Despite his wish, his father said to him that he should follow his dream as he, the father, had done when he moved from Puerto Rico where he had a good job at Sears to New York where he didn’t know the language.  I found this deeply moving – perhaps because I have had the support to follow various crazy dreams that have worked for me – perhaps because I am being confronted by my child’s wishes to go to a college of his own choice.  The other thing that caught my eye was a notation that when Lin-Manuel went to Hunter College High School in New York (the very place he was offered a job), where there were lots of very bright students – he said that he knew he wasn’t the brightest kid, so he would have to work really hard to do well.

So, Hamilton, the musical, this kid’s product, is hot.  It is the toast of Broadway.  You can’t get a ticket until July, and the crowd we went in with was Rock Concert ready.  And so, when the play started, and this overachieving kid playing an overachieving orphan (son of a whore, the lyrics claim) who somehow managed to get a ticket to New York where he became Alexander Hamilton, when this kid – who was both the artist and the person he was portraying – in the weird kind of mashup that happens when – in a biopic – the actor does not try to imitate the person’s mannerisms, but instead inhabits the role, as Will Smith did in Ali – the two characters resonate and reverberate with and across each other until you are seeing both simultaneously – and they are each both themselves and each other – and this was accentuated because this kid who was jamming more words into a minute of music than was humanly possible was playing a man who couldn’t not write endlessly, eruditely, and with just too many words – ultimately tragically - on the subjects that would shape the nation – and when an anthem played – a song about how wonderful New York is (the kind of song that a New York audience just loves to hear) – and about how the uptown girls like to slum with kids like Hamilton and Hamilton is celebrating New York and the audience is celebrating Hamilton and therefore Lin-Manuel Miranda – I was moved by all of that, and by something more – something that it took me a couple of days to figure out – I was moved by a weird paternal pride in the accomplishments of Lin-Manuel Miranda, as if he were my son and I was enjoying his triumphant emergence on this particular stage.

As wonderful as this experience was, it made it a little hard to track what was going on in the play.  Or, more precisely – the thinking part of my mind was clicking along – but in a distant place – the center of my experience was a powerfully emotion filled one that didn’t leave room to know why I was so moved.  During and after the intermission, I recovered a bit and began to make more sense of the play from the vantage point of the story.  By the end, I pretty much had it, but the next day I could recall very little of what happened and really had to work to piece it together.  In addition to pride, I think I was also feeling envy – or perhaps the pride was driven by the underlying but less conscious envy.  Lin-Manuel Miranda, along with the actors playing the other characters, made those characters that I had read about real – they came to life.  Hamilton is the brash hero – one who is frustrated at many points, particularly in his interactions with George Washington.  He wants to become a war hero by commanding a regiment, but Washington needs the skills Hamilton learned on the islands where he managed the ships of the sugar trade, to fight with congress to get needed supplies.  I probably wrote a sentence like this in describing the book – the difference on stage was that little Hamilton was arguing, arguing, arguing with Big Geoge Washington, until Washington issued an order and Hamilton, still clearly intent on his goal, lowered his eyes – all but pouting – but dutifully responding that he would do as ordered.

Did the interaction – one that took place between two men speaking in iambic pentameter (or some other carefully planned rhythm scheme) and in verse – one of them half Latino, the other African American – actually occur in this way?  Of course it didn’t.  But the essence of what took place – the human interaction – was much more clearly articulated here than in the play that I produced and watched in my head as I read the words on the page of the historical novel about the very same interaction.  I, who take pride in the vividness of my imagination, was trumped by this gang of kids strutting around on a bare stage with explosive rhythms and lighting that supported it.  The interactions in my head had been, by contrast, as dry as toast.

Similarly, Lafayette came to life as a preening, self-confident and slightly oily character, and the actor playing him went on to play a preening, self-confident and slightly oily Thomas Jefferson, who returned from France after the war, when Lafayette had been on stage, to ask what had happened while he had been away – as if something important might inexplicably have happened (like a revolutionary war) when he was not there.  Burr was both Hamilton’s foil but also the emcee – a sort of presence who knew what was going on – except at certain critical junctures where he cried, like a baby, that he wasn’t “In the room,”  one of many interactions that highlighted Burr’s envy of Hamilton, including also Hamilton’s admonishing Burr to stand for something, which seemed largely imaginary based on the biography, underscoring the increasingly tight circles these two men were winding around each other, circles that would trap them together as almost a single entity in our minds as a result of their duel.

The play, then, left history behind, only to find it – or a more authentic version of it – in the banter, in the singing, and in the unreserved dancing of a troupe playing at portraying history – but not tied to it.  Washington, dull as dishwater, wanted nothing more than to get one first down at a time.  Those that weren’t in power were eager to throw the long ball.  And into this mess waltzed King George – Lilly white and speaking (of course) the King’s English, his fey and clueless performance providing high comedy.  How could anyone be so completely unaware of what was boiling beneath and around him?  And, in the second act, when he was exposed as being the least mature of all the players, it was hilarious and somehow deeply true.

But this play turned on a much more classically tragic axis – Hamilton’s fatal flaw that was also his heroic strength – his ability to make an argument.  This was demonstrated in a series of rap battles where, for instance, Secretary of the Treasury Hamilton soundly defeated Secretary of State Jefferson on a matter of state – whether to back the Brits, the French or to remain neutral in the war between our new ally France and our old enemy but progenitor England.  Hamilton’s second flaw was his womanizing – a flaw that he shared with Burr.  At a time when serving one’s country meant being away from one’s wife (and one’s wife’s sister, whom Hamilton had a pretty serious crush on), one might love the one whom one found oneself to be with – especially if that someone was a woman whose husband was mistreating her.  Ever the gentleman, Hamilton took up her plight, and took her into his bedroom.  The husband, however, turned out to be using his wife, and blackmailed Hamilton to prevent Hamilton being sued for “alienation of affection.”  When Jefferson and Burr catch wind of this they now know that they are in the catbird’s seat.  They can tell of the scandal whenever they want.

Hamilton reverts to type and tries to write his way out of trouble.  He clarifies to the world that he is the wronged one in this instance.  Well, yes, he was duped – but he was duped by the husband of a woman who was sleeping in his bed – and acknowledging his part in it put a damper on his relationship with his wife.  More importantly, his son is called to defend his Dad’s honor – and loses his life doing this.  Again, I am reverting to the facts, but what we see on stage is Hamilton functioning as the caring and compassionate father – the one who tries to prevent the son from taking the bait – and then the caring father who instructs the son in how to honorably engage in a duel – to fire in the air.  We get the father’s attachment to the son – and can now imagine that the estranged mother and father can come together in their shared grief for the son.  What we are shown is the father’s grief – perhaps most poignantly he does NOT articulate that grief – but walks, bereft, through the town, with others knowing, perhaps from his silence, how deeply he is affected by the loss.

The duel with Burr, when it comes, is drawn out – but time has folded over on itself throughout this play.  We have seen an introduction take place twice, and seen regret that one sister let the other have a man that may have been better suited for her.  Now we see the bullet travel in ultra-slow mo and get to hear Hamilton’s thoughts as he confronts his fate.  And then, in a move that surprised me (but shouldn’t have), we get to hear how his wife misses him and spends the next fifty years working to cement his place in the history of the United States. 

This should not have surprised me because the play plays fast and loose with race and gender roles.  Not having read the material that Lin-Manuel Miranda drew from I am handicapped, but this play brings humanness not just to the men, but to the women as well.  They are not passive pawns in the games that are being played around them by men – but active, engaged women with rich internal lives and public lives that are certainly less empowered than they would be if they lived today, but lives in which they are essential – both to themselves and to the nation.  The sister he does not marry helps Hamilton figure out how to move the nation forward through what looks like will be an impasse.  These women – and these men – built a nation – one that would be the economic and political envy of the world.  Hamilton provided the economic basis, despite Jefferson’s disapproval.

In one of the few overt references to race, Hamilton confronts Jefferson about the South producing the majority of the nation’s wealth through relying on the labor of slaves.  But this play has gotten all kinds of press about casting the Nation’s founding fathers as blacks and using hip hop as the vernacular for them to express themselves.  From the perspective of a psychoanalyst who portrayed all kinds of unwanted but vital and essential aspects of himself in black characters in his dreams, if we think of the stuffiness of the characters in the musical 1776 or a play with people wearing powdered wigs and speaking with haughty tones, this play allows the verve – the essential excitement and edginess of creating a nation – of building a culture – but also building the various selves that are part of that culture – and Hamilton’s self in particular, to come to life.  Having a rawer palate with which to work allows the artist to paint not what appeared to be happening, but what was happening, psychologically, between the major protagonists.  I was moved in my own particular way – we can call my feelings towards Lin-Manuel Miranda countertransference – meaning that I imagined him as one of the characters in my own internal play- at least in part as a kind of second son – but my feelings were also being stirred in the ways that everyone else’s in the theater were being stirred.  We were witnessing and being moved by great art – art that was propelled by the medium that best stirs feeling – music – and we were privy to a version of what happened – not on the outside, not in the historical narrative – but in the internal worlds of those men and women – and of the current version of that – what happened in this one man, Lin-Manuel Miranda as he became, before our eyes, both Hamilton and himself.

I posted on Hamilton on Disney during the summer of COVID and BLM here.

To access a narrative description of other posts on this site, link here.     For a subject based index, link here.

To subscribe to posts (which occur 2-3 times per month), simply push the button on the side bar.

Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome – The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Reflects on the Cost of Passion

Psychoanalysis of Ethan Frome, Psychology of Ethan Frome, Why Ethan Frome is a classic.

Ethan Frome is a very short work of fiction – and, if you haven’t read it, please do.  It will take only  a couple of hours, and I think you will find it enthralling – at least I did.  Here is a link to a free online version of the text. 

As much as I liked it, Ethan Frome’s structure is a bit clunky.  We start out with a first person account of a fellow who comes into a small (imaginary) rural village in Massachusetts, in 1910 and observes Ethan Frome, “the most striking figure in Starkfield, though he was but the ruin of a man.”  Tall and once strong, he was crippled in a “smash up” – a wonderfully ambiguous term – especially in a village that didn’t have automobiles: we assume that he was in a carriage crash – or maybe a train crash.  He now walks with a twist, turned sideways, and can’t take full steps – I pictured him wearing ankle cuffs connected by a chain the way that prisoners do.  The narrator does what he can to discover who this man is, interviewing people in town and closely observing him, and ultimately he hires him – not to discover more about him, but because the horses in town are sick and Ethan can drive him to the nearby train depot to get the supplies that they need.  On the way back from the depot, a blizzard blows up and Frome invites the narrator into his home – and from there the narrator pieces together Ethan Frome’s life – one that he tells, then, not in the first person, the way he does in this introductory bit, but in the third person, laying it out as flashback as it were, in the subsequent eight chapters.  Finally, in a sort of double post script, the narrator returns in the first person and we see through his eyes the result of the “smash up.”

So, the reader is fed a tidbit, a morsel.  Our interest is piqued.  We want to know what happened, and then we are told that – the story moves from Frome’s imprisonment in Starkfield, where he returns after engineering school and a brief stint in Florida – what could be more freeing from the Massachusetts winters than a bit of tropical Florida? – to care for his ill father.  After his father dies, his mother falls silent – and he must care for her as she “listens” – to my mind for auditory hallucinations – when the wind blows.  Frome’s cousin comes to help him out and he is so relieved to hear a real voice – and distraught at the death of his mother – that he asks her to stay on – to marry him – but wonders later if he would have done this if his mother had died in the spring instead of the winter.  He imagines that his wife, Zeena, will move with him to the city, but she is insecure and afraid of being anything less than the top dog, which she will never be able to do in a place even a tiny bit more sophisticated than Starkfield where she is notorious for being the most ill of all the women in town – what a badge of honor!  She spends her time seeking new patent medicines to cure her woes while Ethan labors to scratch out a living from their hard scrabble farm and water driven sawmill.

Wharton describes Ethan and Zeena’s characters largely from the outside – largely from how they are perceived by others.  We don’t have access to the center of their marriage directly – but I begin to experience it as one of shared and even desperate misery as they each blame the other for the straits they are in.  They are both bleak and unhappy, but Ethan is by far the more sympathetic character as he appears interested and capable of growing into something else – something – someone – who is alive, while Zeena appears to be hanging on with a death grip to misery.

Into this deadened world waltzes Mattie, Zeena’s relation who shows up to be her helper after her father dies and after she is found incapable of supporting herself.  Taken on as kind of favor, but clearly an indentured servant, she has the unenviable task of trying to do something that Zeena will approve of.  Of course she fails, but she stays the course – continuing to try to bring order and even a little joy into this tight and deadened household.  As her stay with the Frome’s approaches a year, Zeena becomes interested in marrying Mattie off – in part to relieve them of the burden of having to care for her, but also, it becomes apparent, because she may have been aware of a growing affection between Mattie and Ethan even before they, themselves, are aware of it.

The way I am telling the story does not do it justice.  This story, while told in the third person, is also told from the point of view of Ethan.  He is caught, unawares, by a love that moves from 0 to 60 in no time and one that has been on slow boil forever.  We (or I) worry that he is misreading Mattie – doesn’t she have a big crush on the kid in town? – meanwhile we know that we are headed in a rush towards the big mash up – and when that comes, it comes not once but twice and we get to experience all the delicious anticipation and excitement – the exhilaration that leads up to it – but also the masochistic and sadistic foreshadowing – the sense of being trapped – the wish to die – intense and powerful feelings and hopes and fears that are only hinted at but that we can imagine deeply as we head down toward the mash up in the gathering gloam.

Lionel Trilling, among others, criticized this work for lacking a moral or ethical center.  I think it is about nothing but the moral quandary of loving – freely and openly, with hope, and moving towards what brings us joy – and the terrible, awful consequences of that.  Does it matter that this, Ethan’s first love, comes in the context of a marriage?  Wouldn’t his ruined self – and the ruins of his love – have haunted his marriage even if that marriage had not come after losing his first love?  To know freedom is to, forever, chafe at what once felt like fate – because suddenly there is a new possibility – and continuing as we are means that the rest of our lives will be lived as if we are dragging around a ball and chain rather than simply doing what comes next.

Once upon a time, when I was young, I worked on a big research project in which we were studying the family members who care for folks with Alzheimer’s disease.  The folks who were most affected by the work – physical and emotional – of caregiving were spouses – and female spouses were the ones who were likely to hang in there longest – and therefore to experience the most distress.  We did a small project in which we expected to bring good to the people we were working with.  We hired respite caregivers who would relieve the spousal caregivers of their duties for four hours every Wednesday afternoon.  They could use that time to go get their hair done, or to shop, or to just take a bath or a nap – whatever they wanted to do.  Well, the effect was the opposite of what we intended.  The caregivers, instead of feeling better, suddenly felt that they could not return – that their lives were too difficult.  We should have seen this coming – it was not unusual in our interviews with them for them to say something to the effect of, “I didn’t know how bad it was until I started talking about it.”

Ethan Frome had been in the traces for a very long time.  He set aside his dreams to care for his father, then his mother, then his wife.  It wasn’t a good life, but it wasn’t bad – it was what it was, until a little fresh air blew in in the person of Mattie.  And this killed him.  He couldn’t leave – as badly as he wanted to – and she couldn’t stay, but it turns out she couldn’t leave either.  Each of the protagonists ends up leading a life they don’t want to – confronted by what they have caused by being themselves.  What a perfect tragedy.  This has been made into a movie with Liam Neeson as Ethan Frome - it sounds like perfect casting - but I think it would make an excellent opera.  The protagonists could all sing about how are ruined in three part harmony while the stranger narrates.  And what an everyday experience this is.  I know this sounds grim – especially as we start a new year – and it is.  This delicious, delicious book, which draws us into the warmth of love and a love that is reflected, ultimately reflects a much harsher reality.  We are freighted more by our moments of freedom than by the uninterrupted drudgery that we would otherwise engage in with resignation.  Hope is definitely a double edged sword - while it can help us move out of the space we are in - it can also illuminate just how trapped we are withing that space. 

Earlier today, on a walk, I was thinking about how happiness is so elusive for those of us who have so much – it feels like if we had just a little more we would be able to more fully live – and yet is that little bit more ever enough?  It certainly wasn’t for the Queen of Versailles (follow the link for a review of the documentary about an American who seemed to have everything).  And for those of us who have very little I think there is also a starkness to living – we can’t deny how miserable it is to live (OK, Hobbes, for some of us life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short).  Would that there were a mean – a place that is a sweet spot – maybe somewhere in the 1950s in a sitcom – where what we have is enough and the people we love bring us joy.

Edith Wharton was born Edith Jones and her family had so much wealth that they were the ones about whom the phrase “keeping up with the Joneses” may have been termed.  All of her wealth apparently bought her a loveless marriage.  Was it duty that led her into it?  Was she tempted with something sweet and joyous that brought her nothing but misery?  Ethan Frome would suggest that even – or especially – those things that bring us joy can be the most difficult of all.  

To access a narrative description of other posts on this site, link here.     For a subject based index, link here.

To subscribe to posts (which occur 2-3 times per month), if you are on a computer, hit the X button on the upper right of this screen and, on the subsequent screen, hover your cursor over the black line in the upper right area and choose the pop out box that says subscribe and then enter the information.  I'm sorry but I don't currently know how you can subscribe from a mobile device - hopefully you have a computer as well...