Perfect Storm

I'm doing what I was made to do―and I've got a feeling I'm going to do it even better this time.

― Capt. Billy Tyne

You know the drill.

A colleague phones―often he has sizable obligations―to say his job or business has withered.

Fortunately, all of my colleagues are sensible people with emotional and financial reserves, so there's no hint of "talking them off the ledge."

But I can imagine there are people who are making desperate calls―or none at all. 

In fact, suicide-prevention experts are worried the Great Shutdown will trigger a spike in unattributed deaths.

The difference between the sensible and the suicidal is hope. Behavioral scientists have correlated hope with coping.

In my opinion, people find hope in one of three places. 

Some people find hope in belief in a savoir; others, in substance abuse; still others, in sheer will.

The philosopher and psychologist Eric Fromm thought hope was the evolutionary counterweight to our acquaintance with finitude. 

Unlike the other animals, Fromm said, we are self-aware; and the price we pay for that awareness is insecurity.

"How can a sensitive and alive person ever feel secure?" Fromm wrote.

"Just as a sensitive and alive person cannot avoid being sad, he cannot avoid feeling insecure. The psychic task which a person can and must set for himself, is not to feel secure, but to be able to tolerate insecurity, without panic and undue fear."

Why aren't my colleagues hobbled by insecurity? 

What makes them hopeful?

A team of behavioral researchers in the UK think they've found the answer: self-esteem. 

In four different studies, the researchers separated respondents into two groups: those who tested positive for high self-esteem, and those who tested positive for low self-esteem. 

They then asked them to write about death. 

The researchers found that people in the first group felt very little after the exercise, while the people in the second group felt hopeless.

I've also noticed my colleagues aren't only hopeful; they're thinking of others. 

Who's depending on them to come through? 

How can they help customers? 

Can they find in this mess an opportunity to contribute more to society than they have in the past?

The nuns taught me back in Catechism class that hope is a virtue that aspires to "the to happiness which God has placed in the heart of every man." 

Hope is life-preserver. 

"Buoyed up by hope," the Catechism says, "man is preserved from selfishness and led to the happiness that flows from charity."

The nuns had that right.

Stay well.

Downtown

Her breasts jiggled fetchingly, but Larry wasn't fetched.

— Stephen King, from The Stand

A recent radio interview with the author has prompted me to re-read Stephen King's 40-year-old doorstop The Stand. 

On Page 101, I encountered the sentence above: perhaps the worst in all of King's novels; perhaps the worst in American literature.

I have relished reading trash ever since high school, where the Jesuits, hoping to instill in us "catholic tastes," encouraged our indulgence in "middlebrow" literature (after all, they said, Shakespeare aimed to please the groundlings as much as the audience in the seats; and Faulkner supported a family of ten writing short stories for Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Mademoiselle and The Saturday Evening Post).

And so I've consumed scores of best-sellers by the likes of Upton Sinclair, John O'Hara, James M. Cain, Henry Miller, Jim Thompson, Philip K. Dick, James Michener, Ross Macdonald, John D. MacDonald, Herman Wouk, John leCarre’, Robert B. Parker, Ken Follett, James Lee Burke, Henning Mankell, John Grisham, Dean Koontz and, yes, Stephen King.

My teachers understood: reading middlebrow authors would help us appreciate the skills of highbrow ones (authors like Hardy, Conrad, Maughm, Hemingway, Faulkner and Heller).

I adore all those best-selling writers; and, besides, sometimes you need to go downtown to get uptown.

Determined. Defiant. Dumb.

No condition, no government can destroy the will
among a few to be individualists.

— William Faulkner

Axios reports that many colleges will bring students back in the fall, just in time for a second—and worse—outbreak of Covid-19.

Among the schools that have announced they'll open in the fall are the University of Alabama, the University of North Carolina and Baylor.

No surprise here. Southerners have a long history of certitude, insurgency and self-defeating idiocy.

Scientists say the virus will be back in fall with a vengeance? 

The scientists be damned!

When a Southerner thinks he's right, by jiminy, he's right; so right, he'll ignore all the facts; so right, he'll take pride in his ignorance; so right, he'll turn on fellow Southerners—even at the price of defeat.

In September 1862, after a resounding victory outside Washington, General Robert E. Lee led 55,000 Southern troops toward the Potomac River, intent on marching into Maryland.

But when the troops reached the river's shore, one in five deserted, most saying they had not volunteered for an offensive war. Lee could lead where he wanted; they wouldn't follow.

The Rev. Joseph Stiles, a Confederate chaplain from Georgia, was an eyewitness to the desertions. Malcontents claimed "as a matter of prudence we should not leave our own soil; that it looked a little like an invasion." Firm of belief, "a large number hung back and would not cross the river."

Two weeks later, Lee's army was walloped at Antietam.

No condition, no government, as Faulkner said, can deter individualists—even when they're being stupid.

My Cups Runneth Over

Moderation in all things.

 ― Terence

Some men collect women; some, guns; some, cars and trucks.

I collect British cups.

Specifically, blue and white porcelain cups made in Worcester in the mid-18th century by a one Dr. Wall.

Like Colonel Sanders later did for fried chicken, Dr. Wall perfected a "secret recipe" for making porcelain that rocketed his pottery to fame throughout England.

Collecting is a mania, according to psychologists, but an innocuous one.

Until it slides into the form of slavery known as compulsion.

Then, what began as a hobby looks like pathology.

Mine might be termed cuppamania.

I have it badly, but not as badly as British porcelain scholar Michael Berthoud. He owns 1,743 British cups.

Book collectors are also prone to compulsion.

They can swiftly slide from bibliophilia into bibliomania.

They can slide even further into bibliophagy (eating books), bibliotaphy (burying books) and bibliokleptomania (stealing books).

The notorious "Book Bandit" Stephen Blumberg clearly suffered from bibliokleptomania. 

He stole over 23,600 books before he was caught and convicted in 1991. A forensic psychiatrist claimed at the trial Blumberg was schizophrenic, but the judge didn't buy it and gave him four and a half years.

Psychoanalysts note that the collecting bug bites men more than women, except when it comes to shoes.

When my wife cracks wise about my cups, I can point to her shoes.

And if that doesn't work, I can point to her books.

She owns nearly as many books as Michael Berthoud owns cups. Most, for some reason, are about Charlemagne.

That makes her officially a francobioliomaniac.

Shoes

Give a girl the right shoes, and she can conquer the world.

― Marilyn Monroe

Fashion footwear―boots, shoes, sandals and slippers―no longer captures the bulk of consumer spending in the category, according to retail analysts. 

"Athleisure"―sneakers, flats, slip-ons and flip-flops―has walked off with it.

The reasons for the shift lie deep in women's psyches. 

I suspect they're taking over the world, and need the proper gear.

But who knows where this will end?

Will women acquire even more pairs of shoes?

The average American female, surveys show, already owns 17 pairs of fashion shoes; and many own three times that number.

How many pairs of world-dominion footwear will they buy?

Psychologists, of course, have puzzled for more than a century over women's shoe-fetish. 

Sigmund Freud thought shoes symbolized vaginas; and feet, penises. So for Freud, trying on shoes was a sex act. 

Jacques Lacan thought buying shoes represented an act of domestic defiance. You're proving to yourself you're a master, not a slave. (If you're old enough, you'll remember Nancy Sinatra's hit song.)

Psychologists today are more apt to point to the physical "high" that buying shoes triggers.

Trying on shoes releases a flood of dopamine, serotonin and oxytocin; and paying for them tickles the part of the prefrontal cortex psychologists call our "collecting spot."

But I think the mystique assigned to women's footwear is overblown. 

Most women, if you asked them, would say that buying lots of shoes is simply practical. 

Like belts and purses, shoes are a cheap way to stay abreast of fashion trends without replacing your whole wardrobe every year.

Which leads me to Vincent van Gogh...

A Pair of Shoes by Vincent van Gogh

In the year 1886, Vincent bought a pair of old shoes at a flea market in Montmartre and took them home to use as prop.

That prop turned into one of of art history's most renowned paintings.

Philosophers in particular have celebrated "A Pair of Shoes."

In "The Origin of the Work of Art" (1935), the Existentialist philosopher Martin Heidegger―who exalted German peasants―claimed Vincent's painting was the very embodiment of the peasant's fate: food insecurity, ceaseless poverty, over-size families, and premature death.

The shoes, Heidegger wrote, are "pervaded by uncomplaining anxiety as to the certainty of bread, the wordless joy of having once more withstood want, the trembling before the impending child-bed, and shivering at the surrounding menace of death."

Heidegger's interpretation came under fire 30 years later in "The Still Life as a Personal Object" (1968), by the philosopher Meyer Schapiro.

Schapiro―a Marxist who exalted the urban poor―claimed that "A Pair of Shoes" didn't depict a peasant's shoes at all. 

It depicted the artist's own shoes.

Vincent always painted peasants' shoes in a "clear, unworn shape," Shapiro wrote, because (like Heidegger) he believed peasants were noble. 

But Vincent depicted his own shoes as rumpled and ratty, because―down and out in Paris―he was rumpled and ratty.

Shoes don't star only in paintings, however. 

They star in countless fairy tales, story books and motion pictures, as well. 

Just think of all the plots that feature shoes: Cinderella, The Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe, Puss in Boots, The Red Shoes, The Wizard of Oz, The Absent-Minded Professor, The Devil Wears Prada, Kinky Boots, Barefoot in the Park, Forrest Gump, Pee Wee's Big Adventure and Get Smart, to name but a few.

That's a lot of shoes!

Hiking Boots by Bob James