another; of Forster, the man she was deeply in love with ten years later, she wrote: “I have always felt that it was life with him that brought me natural happiness, that brought me to God. His ardent love of creation brought me to the Creator of all things.” And in coming to God, she destroyed her common-law marriage with the antireligious Forster.
Mapping the Landscape of Love
There are other loves. But we have little language for them. In an era whose sense of the human psyche is dominated by entertainment and consumerism and by therapy culture—that amalgamation of ideas drawn from pop psychology and counseling—the personal and private are most often emphasized to the exclusion of almost everything else. Even the scope of psychotherapy generally leaves out the soul, the creator, and the citizen, those aspects of being human that extend into realms beyond private life. Conventional therapy, necessary and valuable at times to resolve personal crises and suffering, presents a very incomplete sense of self. As a guide to the range of human possibility it is grimly reductive. It will help you deal with your private shames and pains, but it won’t generally have much to say about your society and your purpose on earth. It won’t even suggest, most of the time, that you provide yourself with relief from and perspective on the purely personal by living in the larger world. Nor will it ordinarily diagnose people as suffering from social alienation, meaninglessness, or other anomies that arise from something other than familial and erotic life. It more often leads to personal adjustment than social change (during the 1950s, for example, psychology went to work bullying women into accepting their status as housewives, the language of Freudianism was deployed to condemn their desires for more power, more independence, more dignity, and more of a role in public life). Such a confinement of desire and possibility to the private serves the status quo as well: it describes no role for citizenship and no need for social change or engagement.
Popular culture feeds on this privatized sense of self. A recent movie about political activists proposed that they opposed the government because they had issues with their fathers. The implication was that the proper sphere of human activity is personal, that there is no legitimate reason to engage with public life, that the very act of engaging is juvenile, blindly emotional, a transference of the real sources of passion. What if that government is destroying other human lives, or your own, and is leading to a devastating future? What if a vision of a better world or just, say, a better transit system is a legitimate passion? What if your sense of self is so vast that your well-being includes these broad and idealistic engagements? Oscar Wilde asked for maps of the world with Utopia on them. Where are the maps of the human psyche with altruism, idealism, and even ideas on them, the utopian part of the psyche, or just the soul at its most expansive? In his book Arctic Dreams , Barry Lopez writes of whalers in the far north in 1823: “They felt exhilaration in the constant light; and a sense of satisfaction and worth, which came partly from their arduous work.” The sentence stands out for measuring human purpose and pleasure by different standards than the familiar ones. Work gives worth, light gives exhilaration, and the world becomes larger and richer, even for men toiling in cold and dangerous seas far from home.
I don’t have a television. For many years the devices seemed like forbidden fruit when I encountered them in hotels and motels, and I would eagerly turn on the TV and look for something to watch. Situation comedies would catch my attention, for several always seemed to be in rerun on the cable channels. In them, the world often seemed reduced to a realm almost without the serious suffering of poverty, illness, and death that puts minor emotional trials in perspective, but
Mapping the Landscape of Love
There are other loves. But we have little language for them. In an era whose sense of the human psyche is dominated by entertainment and consumerism and by therapy culture—that amalgamation of ideas drawn from pop psychology and counseling—the personal and private are most often emphasized to the exclusion of almost everything else. Even the scope of psychotherapy generally leaves out the soul, the creator, and the citizen, those aspects of being human that extend into realms beyond private life. Conventional therapy, necessary and valuable at times to resolve personal crises and suffering, presents a very incomplete sense of self. As a guide to the range of human possibility it is grimly reductive. It will help you deal with your private shames and pains, but it won’t generally have much to say about your society and your purpose on earth. It won’t even suggest, most of the time, that you provide yourself with relief from and perspective on the purely personal by living in the larger world. Nor will it ordinarily diagnose people as suffering from social alienation, meaninglessness, or other anomies that arise from something other than familial and erotic life. It more often leads to personal adjustment than social change (during the 1950s, for example, psychology went to work bullying women into accepting their status as housewives, the language of Freudianism was deployed to condemn their desires for more power, more independence, more dignity, and more of a role in public life). Such a confinement of desire and possibility to the private serves the status quo as well: it describes no role for citizenship and no need for social change or engagement.
Popular culture feeds on this privatized sense of self. A recent movie about political activists proposed that they opposed the government because they had issues with their fathers. The implication was that the proper sphere of human activity is personal, that there is no legitimate reason to engage with public life, that the very act of engaging is juvenile, blindly emotional, a transference of the real sources of passion. What if that government is destroying other human lives, or your own, and is leading to a devastating future? What if a vision of a better world or just, say, a better transit system is a legitimate passion? What if your sense of self is so vast that your well-being includes these broad and idealistic engagements? Oscar Wilde asked for maps of the world with Utopia on them. Where are the maps of the human psyche with altruism, idealism, and even ideas on them, the utopian part of the psyche, or just the soul at its most expansive? In his book Arctic Dreams , Barry Lopez writes of whalers in the far north in 1823: “They felt exhilaration in the constant light; and a sense of satisfaction and worth, which came partly from their arduous work.” The sentence stands out for measuring human purpose and pleasure by different standards than the familiar ones. Work gives worth, light gives exhilaration, and the world becomes larger and richer, even for men toiling in cold and dangerous seas far from home.
I don’t have a television. For many years the devices seemed like forbidden fruit when I encountered them in hotels and motels, and I would eagerly turn on the TV and look for something to watch. Situation comedies would catch my attention, for several always seemed to be in rerun on the cable channels. In them, the world often seemed reduced to a realm almost without the serious suffering of poverty, illness, and death that puts minor emotional trials in perspective, but
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