Isn't that a great title for a blog post? But don't get too excited, it's just my two latest book reports.
Bittersweet is Susan Cain's new book, available to order online in Switzerland in what confusingly appears to be the "airport paperback" version. This book suffered from too-high expectations on my part: Quiet was life-changing for me, and I'd heard that Bittersweet was excellent too. It certainly wasn't bad, but maybe because I very much run these days in the enlightened-American-women crowd (see: Glennon Doyle, Brené Brown, Esther Perel, Elizabeth Gilbert, Cheryl Strayed), I felt like I was in the choir being preached to. And the nominal motivating question of the book - why do so many people like to listen to sad music? - struck me as a bit contrived, or anyway, this is not something I've ever thought to wonder about because the answer seems obvious. We listen to music that resonates with our experience, and life is often beautiful and tragic ("brutiful" says Glennon)...I'm not sure where the big mystery is? But in any case the question leads Cain to all sorts of interesting places and she often lands where I've spent a lot of time lately: life is messy, and it is in loving the messiness rather than fighting it that we're able to live calmer, more fulfilled lives. She concludes that melancholy music expresses our yearning for a more perfect world, and perhaps at its best leads us to realize what we ourselves are yearning for. In the last chapter she talks about her own yearning to become a writer, and how her now-husband reacted to her tentative self-revelation with unconditional encouragement.
he says...and at this point in the book I was crying because this is my big question: can this "self" we are yearning for even exist without a relationship like this? I was raised on the legend of the self-made man and have spent a great deal of my life feeling fully a loser for not managing to be a self-made woman. But the more biographies I read the less I'm convinced that self-making is even possible, and I so desperately long for that person or those people in my life who say/s you can do it, or even you can't do it, not in a wishy-washy "you can do anything you set your mind to" kind of way, but as a concrete vision (or challenge) that resonates with the potential inside me and helps midwife it into the real world.
On a related - in the sense of being about how we co-create each other's realities - note, Hysteria: the disturbing history by Andrew Scull (2009) is about the sordid history of psychosomatic disease and the doctors who attempt to treat it. It's fascinating, as long as you can maintain some emotional distance from the subject matter: paternalism, misogyny, rape, torture anyone? Scull has hoards of hysterics pinning their hopes on one cure after another, playing a leading role in the differentiation of medicine into the specialties of psychiatry, neurology, and gynecology in the process. The medical profession, for its part, alternately courts these patients (to the extent that they have money to pay for treatment) and shuns them, accusing them of inventing their maladies for attention or effect. Religious leaders fall outside the scope of the book but are undoubtedly implicated in the mess too.
The long history of hysterical women (and a few men) and their all-too-often-predatory "healers" takes an especially grim turn in the 20th century, when literally legions of male soldiers join their ranks. I'd hoped there would be some glimmer of light at the end of all this, but no: according to Scull, while the term "hysteria" itself has disappeared into the murky depths of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, its sufferers and their mysterious symptoms are still out there, still searching for a cure. It strikes me, not for the first time, that we're not half as enlightened as we think we are.
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| Hector Egger, Infinity |
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