I found the 's The
Republic. I know not when or where it was first published, but I know
exactly why many years ago I cut it out and saved it.
I found the 's The Republic. I know not when or where it was first published, but I know exactly why many years ago I cut it out and saved it.
BE KIND TO YOURSELF
"...too many Americans reject what they are in the name of what they should be, could be, almost were, or would have been were it not for..."
English humor is not Russian or French or American. Each nation laughs in its own way. Each grieves in its own way too. Each despairs in its own way. Each destroys in its own way.
Jan. 1 is, in the United States, the year's peak day for suicides. Why? Is it just that lonely people feel their loneliness more keenly at the end of a season of loving groups? That's surely a part of it. But the land of endless opportunity is also a land of psychic hazard. Having come so far, the young success asks as the old year runs out, why have I not gone all the way? All the way to where? A brilliant sociologist has coined the phrase masochistic narcissism for this distinctly American form of depression.
Not long ago, a gifted lawyer - Princeton Phi Beta Kappa, editor of the Yale Law Journal, Fulbright scholar, dazzingly successful in both private and public life - strangled himself in a Las Vegas hotel room... but willed some of his frozen sperm to his girlfriend. His actions, simultaneously ending and seeking to continue his biological life, were a contradiction in terms, but, alas, a familiar American contradiction.
Like nations dreaming of lost or never-won empire, too many Americans reject what they are in the name of what they should be, could be, almost were, or would have been were it not for...
The culture of infinite possibility can be, in short, a cruel culture. Those in its grip might well take as New Year's resolution an English poet's advice: "Let me to mine own self be a little kind."
