Can't Get No Satisfaction

Sunday's New York Times carries a piece "Companions in Misery" by a professor of philosophy, Mariana Alessandri, which is one of those occasional exercises in thought capable of redeeming the value of philosophy in every day life.

Reacting to a study which found New York City "the unhappiest city in America," she  questions the survey which formed the basis for this conclusion , a survey which asked about people's "satisfaction" not about their "happiness."  What the professor suggested is these are not at all the same, and in fact people can be quite dissatisfied and quite happy at the same time.

The reason, presumably, this CDC study got so much attention is it confirmed the widespread belief, primarily among people who do not live in New York and who know it only from "Sex in the City" or "Midnight Cowboy" that New Yorkers lead unhappy lives.

But, the fact is, the Phantom has met many ex patriot New Yorkers who were profoundly depressed--unhappy--because they had been forced to leave New York to take a job, or because of marriage or other factors, and they missed New York intensely.  Of course, many of these transplants were living in Washington, D.C., which can be a place which can foster homesickness. 

Professor Alessandri quotes John Stuart Mill, "a person can be satisfied by giving the body what it craves, but ...human happiness also involves motivating the intellect."  the Phantom generally hate the academic's obligation to cite some centuries old work to show we are only experiencing now what has long been part of the human condition, and mostly, to show she has read John Stuart Mill.  But she makes it work with the observation that "This means that happiness and satisfaction will sometimes conflict, and that those of us who seek happiness and even attain it, may still be dissatisfied."  As Mill says, "It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied, better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. "

This made the Phantom think back on his 8 years in New York City and, being profoundly superficial, the Phantom tried to bring all this down to his own insignificant experience, his formative years, there.  He remembers New York as a tumultuous, frustrating, wonderful time. He made his best friends there, and lots of them. Except for the people who were born and raised in New York, all his friends who lived there felt it was a great accomplishment just to wake up in the morning and to be able to walk out on the streets and become part of that energy and dynamism which was the city.

And this brought to mind a conversation the Phantom had with a good friend, a nurse named Kathleen, who came from Kansas, which she felt fortunate to have escaped. She lived in an airy one room apartment with huge windows near the Village and she wanted to live in New York the rest of her life.  We were talking about a nurse we both knew who was married to an orthopedic resident. He was a local heart throb at the hospital. He had played football at Princeton, was tall, blonde, good looking, and as most orthopedic residents, supremely self confident. She was having an affair with a medical resident the Phantom knew, who was a nice guy, humble, funny, but not in the demi god category. 
"Why would she do that?" the Phantom asked. "What more could she want?"
Kathleen looked at the Phantom, incredulously, one of those how-dense-can-you-be looks. "Nobody's satisfied," Kathleen said, almost embarrassed to have to say something so obvious.
"You mean nobody, anywhere?" the Phantom said. Thinking back to the sunlit lawns of his suburban youth, to the young parents, getting their first homes and cars after the Second World war, raising tow headed families, going on vacations, going to little league baseball and soccer games, the Phantom objected. "I know people who were satisfied. Are satisfied still, probably."
"Who?" Kathleen asked. 
"Lots of people, back in Bethesda."
"That," she said, "Is why they are back in Bethesda. If they were seekers, they'd be here, in New York."

Professor Alessandri observes that in Texas, where she teaches, she is told to not complain, to "'look on the bright side' of rotten things." Many people, she notes, think complaining "won't get you anywhere." She argues complaining may in fact make you feel better, and practically speaking, may be a good thing. "Two strangers complaining on a subway platform can end up cracking a smile or laughing, and though it would hardly be considered the beginning of a lifelong friendship, it is still neighborly."

True that, the Phantom has to say. How many times a quick exchange in a subway or on the street or waiting on line was a nice moment. We are suffering together and we feel the same way about that obnoxious person we both have to contend with. It was one of the things which made New York so much fun--the brotherhood of the anonymous sufferers.

On Moral Superiority

He was nice to his dog. Not so much to the prisoners.

Noah Cross enlightens.

"Some day, you may  discover that under the right circumstances, at the right time, you are capable of doing just about anything."

--Noah Cross to Jake Gittes, "Chinatown"

With those words, Noah Cross explains how he could impregnate his own daughter and shrug it off.

Watching a BBC documentary about Auschwitz, the Phantom asks himself how anyone could be capable of the cruelty, the indifference of the camp guards, who ushered children to the gas chambers, who fired their guns into helpless prisoners.

But thinking back, the Phantom asks himself the disquieting question: Just how incorruptible is he, his own self?

At Memorial Sloan Kettering, people died in such numbers, with such relentlessness, we got numb.  Call off the efforts; end the code; wrap the body. 

One day, after the Grim Reaper had made a particularly thorough sweep of the ward, the Phantom came face to face with his own limitations of empathy. One of his patients, a twenty-three year old,  was the youngest person on the ward. She was a joy--always full of stories and questions.  He looked forward to reaching her room on rounds and felt disappointed if she was off the ward, having some test. She was a colonial archaeologist, working on some site near Battery Park when she noticed a mass in her neck and two days later wound up on our ward with a nasty variety of Hodgkins Disease. That morning, her aunt was visiting,  and the Phantom noticed a certain vacancy in his patient's  face, and asked if she felt all right. 

"A little dizzy," she replied. Then she turned to her aunt and said, "Aunt Sally, remember when uncle Kevin died and we got those little white cards to write thank you notes to all the people who came to the funeral?"
"Yes, dear," the aunt replied, looking alarmed. 
"Well, I think you are going to need to get some more cards, now."

Those were the last words she ever said. Her eyes rolled up into her head and she slipped into cardiac arrest  right in front of the Phantom, and despite all his efforts, the paddles, the IV epinephrine and Lidocaine, the chest compression, she was gone.

The nurses stayed behind to wrap her body and the Phantom lingered but then looked at his watch, realizing how much time he had lost, thinking of how he could catch up on all the things he had to do now that he had got behind schedule on rounds. He had thirty two more patients to see and attending rounds in just 90 minutes.

Then it struck him:  One of your favorite people just died and you are thinking about being late for rounds. What have you become?

Of course, had he been thinking about how much he liked her, he could never have functioned during the code. He could never have slipped in the three large bore IV lines, one in each arm and one in her neck, and he could  never have ordered the right drug syringes to be slapped into his hand, or cleared the bed to apply the paddles and detonate the 400 watt seconds to her chest to restart her heart.  But now it was over, he just didn't feel much. Just another body in the bed, now.

The Phantom stepped into a bathroom and composed himself and told himself he had better feel something or he was in trouble, and then he went on with rounds.

As a high school student, the Phantom got persuaded to go off to some "leadership training" camp at the U.S. Naval Academy. It was supposed to be a big honor and it would look good on your college applications, he was told.  He found himself living in the plebe's dorms, making his bed so a quarter would bounce off the tightly strung blanket, getting molded into a functioning unit by the Marine drill instructors.  At first he thought it was great fun--a boy's fantasy about becoming a soldier, a lean, green, killing machine. Within days, all he cared about was running his company's flag up the hill ahead of all the others, knocking down boys from other companies in the combat drills with the padded cudgels. What a thrill to be the first company, to lead all the other companies into the dining hall and to be seated first. We were told someday we might be able to do this for real. To serve our country. As if what was happening inside each of us was somehow going to keep Americans free. Within a few years a lot of the boys who played at Marine that week were doing it for real in Vietnam.  Killing babies to serve their country and to fight for freedom. 

All this happened within a single week, and then he was sent home.

What the Phantom learned is how quickly and effectively he could be socialized into group think, to behave without thinking as an individual, to react to command. This is necessary for any military unit to be effective, but the Phantom had learned something about himself which disturbed him.  If people you like are doing something, you sometimes become part of it. You don't want to let other people down.

Now, the Phantom is less capable of despising those who transgress, who do things which seem morally outrageous.  He thinks back to Noah Cross and thinks: What am I capable of doing?

Dust in the Wind: On Being and Nothingness, Courtesy of Netflix

Down in the basement, on the treadmill, the Phantom confronts cosmic questions, which is the only way to keep running.  Netflix provides the magic carpet.

"Inside Llewyn Daivs" is set in the Greenwich Village of the 1960's, the time Bob Dylan, and a lot of others who you never heard of,  tried to find their voices. This is as bleak a picture of a search for meaning, success, significance as anything since "Midnight Cowboy."  Thank God for the cat. Llewyn has got the girlfriend of his best friend pregnant and he has to come up with the money for the abortion, a tall order in his financial circumstances--he is homeless. He shoulders his obligation--he does not shirk responsibility, for the pregnant woman or for the cat he allows to escape, until he can no longer help. But he learns in the end, other people have made their own choices--his former girlfriend chooses to have his child and the new pregnant  woman may be carrying someone else's child. You just don't know in this life what other people are up to. In the end, we get a glimpse of something else Davis does not know--Bob Dylan is in the wings doing something which is again beyond Davis's reach.

In "The Last Picture Show," the big surprise is again about what you cannot know or have not  guessed.  Seeing her cry at the funeral of Sam the Lion, Sonny asks the   rich, beautiful Lois Farrow why she has come. He didn't know she even knew who Sam was, and it's a small, small town. Sam had owned a down and out diner where the Lois seldom set foot.  It suddenly dawns on Sonny  that Lois  is the woman Sam had once told him about. Sam had an affair, in his youth, with a young woman. They stripped naked and  had ridden horses across the water in "the tank," a pond outside of town. Sonny had asked  Sam why he never married this woman with whom he was so obviously still in love and Sam had shrugged and said she was already married. "You were the woman at the tank. The one Sam rode horses with."  Lois looks at him and smiles, "Sam told you about that?" Yes, Sonny says, still astonished these two could have ever been connected, ever found anything in common.  "He was the only man," Lois says, "Who ever knew what I was worth." And you can see that is all that ever mattered to her.

If we are dust in the wind, then the only way to seem relevant or meaningful seems to be from that sort of meaning and connection.

Somehow, as bleak as "The Last Picture Show" and "Inside Llewyn Davis" are, there is that glimmer of hope.