Recently, I finished reading Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. (I read the Kindle version, which costs $0.99. There is a free version at Google Books, with a different translation, but it doesn't seem to have page numbers and overall it seems to have somewhat more pages than the Kindle version.) For a retired person, like me, long books are something to cherish. Anna Karenina is quite long, over 1200 pages, though not nearly as long as War and Peace. The benefit from the length is that the reading then lingers within the same narrative framework and the mind becomes comfortable with the familiarity that provides. Further, apart from the Russian names, which take a bit of getting used to, Tolstoy is quite readable. The meaning making that the reader must do is not overly challenging, though readily identifying the Russian names of the leading characters takes a bit of time.
This is in contrast with Ulysses by James Joyce and Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon, also very long books, both of which had lengthy segments that were over my head. I had started each of those books multiple times in the past, only to put them down when the reading wasn't resonating with me. Within the past year I've completed reading them, earning a mental badge I bestowed on myself, if not getting the satisfaction from the effort that one wishes for ahead of time. There were segments of illumination for me, so it wasn't all for naught. But there were other parts where I couldn't make heads or tails from what I was reading. Trying to read those parts, the experience was something like what I had as an undergraduate in a course on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, which is why for now I'm sticking with great works of fiction and not trying to read philosophy, though if I maintain the present regime for long enough maybe I'll give philosophy another try.
Without giving away the storyline of Anna Karenina, I do want to observe several different aspects of the narrative that I enjoyed very much. First, much of the "action" takes place within the heads of the characters. I think this is a main reason for continuing to read fiction rather than getting the story in remakes from movies or TV. Apparently there have been several such reproductions of Anna Karenina. If I do watch any of them, it will be a while before that happens. I know there are cinematographic techniques, flashbacks come to mind, which try to simulate what is going on inside the mind of a character. But I've found that too much reliance on flashback becomes tedious and sometimes one can't tell the present action from the flashback. With reading fiction there is no such difficulty.
Second, Tolstoy is able to make each of the primary characters the focus, now and then, so their point of view comes across fully. It's not just about how others regard the character. It is how the character reflects on her/his own situation. The reader having this perspective enriches the story a good deal. Third, the story is told longitudinally and encompasses different segments of the characters lives. This allows Tolstoy to pose the general question - does success or failure at one segment of life prepare oneself for the next segment, to make success more likely then? In turn, success or failure itself should be taken not so much by the absolute circumstances as events unfold but rather by the character's disposition to those circumstances - optimism or pessimism, a harsh and rigid tone or a gentle and flexible tone - that's what seems to matter.
I've deliberately written the above in an abstract way, so as to make the questions applicable to the present in America, although Anna Karenina is about nineteenth century Russia and all of the main characters are members of the aristocracy. This gives them traditional roles to play, even as the world is changing around them. I thought the story applicable to my own situation, financially and professionally, both as a former tenured faculty member at a major research university and as someone whose family has been in the top 10% of the income distribution for at least the past 20 years, with both my wife and I being campus administrators before we retired. This doesn't make us rich, but it does mean we're financially comfortable. Many of the aristocrats in Tolstoy's story were, in fact, in debt. But they were able to navigate the situation, nonetheless, because of their privileged position. Even some who were well off financially didn't seem that remote to me. I want to get back to this bit below.
But first, let me talk a little about personal philosophy. To me, this is something the individual cultivates in advance to prepare oneself both for life's challenges and for life's rewards, how to mentally react to either and then move on from there. When I was a junior and senior in college, in graduate school too, I thought of the personal philosophy as learning to live within one's own skin. It takes a good deal of time to develop and the personal philosophy itself might evolve quite a bit over time, as circumstances change and as perspective about past events also change. In Anna Karenina, the character most taken up with finding a personal philosophy is Levin, and for that reason I related to him more than to the other characters.
It may have been easier to come up with a personal philosophy around the time when I was in college as the term, the generation gap, was in vogue then. (The reader might also enjoy this music of the same name from Eddie Harris and Les McCann.) It becomes imperative, therefore, for the kid to find his own set of beliefs if he is not going to simply accept the expectations placed on him by his parents. Many evenings at college, I spent a good deal of time lying in bed asking myself the meaning of life questions, as they applied to my own situation. I have a sense that many college kids today would benefit from doing something similar, but they don't. They haven't come to grips with making their own decisions and quite possibly disappointing their parents. Student loan debt, of course, adds to the pressure here. But other things matter too and I'm very much afraid that so much of the depression and loneliness you read about in college students today is because they don't try to work through their own personal philosophy. Indeed, they don't know how to do that.
However, the need for a personal philosophy is not just for those who are on the cusp between adolescence and adulthood. To imagine life is full of peace an harmony thereafter, which it did seem to me when I got married and then during the years when the kids were very young, fails to recognize that life's circumstances change. Does the personal philosophy accommodate those changes or does the personal philosophy need to be modified in order to do that?
For me this question manifest most directly in dealing with the work stress I faced as a campus administrator and the compulsive eating and drinking I indulged in as an unhealthy way to compensate for the stress. Until around 9/11 I kept it somewhat in check, with jogging the one regular form of exercise I could do to attain some balance. But then my knees gave out and goodbye jogging. Foolish me, I didn't find a sensible alternative for many years. As a result, my weight ballooned up, as did my blood pressure. Ultimately, I found that going for long walks was something I could do regularly and while it wasn't aerobic exercise like the jogging, it was significant. And more recently I've gotten the compulsive eating and drinking under control, with the diet modified to include lots of fruits and vegetables, and not so much starch and processed sugar. I'm far from perfect this way but much better than I was.
This gets to the question of whether the source of the stress itself can be reduced and if so whether that should happen. My personal philosophy says its important for me to take care of myself both mentally and physically, on the one hand, and be a socially responsible person, on the other. The issue is when these two goals are at odds with each other, in particular, when being socially responsible means taking on additional stress. In fact, since the election last November I've largely been ignoring the news and the various opinion pieces I used to read, for peace of mind. But it seems the country is going to hell in a handbasket, hardly a novel observation. Doesn't a socially responsible person have an obligation to do their bit to make things right? Might the answer to that question depend on how serious the health problems seem to be at the time and what consequences the additional stress would be for that? I am vexed by these questions.
There are also questions of ineptitude that lie behind this issue of personal philosophy. Given the present situation in America, what could I possibly do that would be both socially responsible and at least marginally effective in this domain? It might very well be that I'm too late to the party and too old for all of this. But I'm not certain this is true. And I know from when I was doing ed tech at the campus level that I was a reasonably good analyst about the issues that concerned the profession at the time. I developed something of a reputation nationally, mainly expressing my opinions in certain widely read listservs and also on my blog. I often had the feeling then that the profession was missing things and it was my job to make others aware of those things. But then I had a ready audience for my expressions of thought. Now I don't. I do have the same sort of feeling now with respect to national politics, the politicians and the pundits are missing things of importance, and I've written a few posts as of late that hint at those. Yet it seems like the proverbial tree falling in the forest. It doesn't make a sound. Nonetheless, I will close this post by taking out my metaphorical saw and cutting down a couple of metaphorical trees.
With the great big beautiful bill that has been recently passed, my household will experience a modest tax cut. Why are we getting this "benefit" and does it make any sense? There was enough written about raising the SALT (State and Local Taxes) deduction cap that some of it penetrated my defenses and I became aware of it. And, of course, with the Federal Income Tax, it depends on your time horizon. Once upon a time there was no cap for this deduction, as there is no cap on the mortgage interest deduction. I'm on the fence about this one. Maybe it makes sense, but maybe not. The other reasons for our tax cut, however, make no sense to me. They seem a bribe for voters in my income category. If they are still working then they likely will attribute it to the meritocracy and that they "deserve" the tax cut, regardless of the social circumstances and the budget implications. It's the not realizing it's a bribe where perhaps I can make a contribution, by raising a stink about. I think it's a commonplace now that hardcore MAGA types have been played by the uber rich, who are the real beneficiaries of Trump's Presidency. But it makes you want to ask whether voters in my income category (in the top 10% but below the top 1%) have also been played. This hasn't been discussed much at all. Maybe it should be. If these voters were less concerned about their own pocketbooks, might they raise a big stink about the uber rich claiming way too much of the pie? At least those in the income category who claim to be Democrats should be making such a stink. Shouldn't this be getting some attention?
The other matter I'm taking from Einstein and the Bomb, a short movie that can be found on Netflix. I watched it just a few days ago. I was taken with a quote from Einstein that wasn't central to the rest of the story being told, but is relevant to our current politics. Einstein was a pacifist. But he had experienced the horrors of Nazi Germany and wanted to see Hitler defeated and the Nazis halted. Einstein was pragmatic enough to know that this would take a war; diplomacy would not work. The quote, which I'm paraphrasing, is that to counter nationalized force, one needs a nationalized force.
If you look at today in America and see the various organizations in America being attacked by Trump's government, each organization seems to respond on its own (often via a lawsuit of some sort before caving in). It's as if Trump is picking off each individually, one by one, and they lack the power to resist. During the time period that Einstein and the Bomb was devoted to, the primary opposing forces to Nazi Germany came from England, America, and Russia. What if now in America we need a nationalized force to oppose Trump, yet that force comes from within America? How would that work? Is it even possible? Back in March I wrote a post called Should There Be A Remake Of Seven Days In May? It offered up a hypothetical about how such a counter force that would function on a national level might work. I felt the need to write the post, yet I also felt quite out of my element in doing so. At best, the post might bring about a superior version written by someone far more competent to do so. However, I wouldn't expect such a superior version to emerge from our usual politics. The politicians seem fixated on fighting the battle at the ballot box, rather than fighting a real civil war.
Let me stop here by noting that even if I've made these point before they still linger within me, so it feels good to get this off my chest. For now I can move onto other things. But I will also note that while I was in the midst of writing this post I really wanted to have a drink. Not all of the demons we face are external.
