Diagnosis

Barry Schwartz, in The Costs of Living, describes a former student, Allen, who has returned to campus for his tenth college reunion. Allen is a lawyer. Schwartz says, "He came to my office looking healthy and prosperous. He was doing well at his (large, New York) law firm, and expected to make partner in another year or two. While he worked very hard, and didn't like all the clients he had to work for, his work was often interesting, and he knew that he was good at it. His wife, Nancy, enjoyed the same things, liked the same people, had fun together, and rarely argued. . . . They owned a nice, though small condo on Third Avenue in Manhattan, and a spot for their car in a garage just two blocks away. In the summer, they had a share in a rental in Southampton, a quarter mile from one of Long Island's more beautiful beaches."

It sounds like a good enough life, a man enjoying a success he deserves. But, it turns out, all is not well. Schwartz says, "there was a dullness in his eyes and a weariness in his voice. . . ." When Schwartz suggests that he must love his work, Allen makes clear that "love" is not the word he would use. Schwartz reports that Allen "wasn't sure that he was really doing anything especially worthwhile. Mostly he just helped rich people get richer or larger corporations get larger. He rarely felt, at the end of a day, that he had spent his time making the world a better place, and he had thought, when he started to law school, that he would sometimes get to do that." [Barry Schwartz, The Costs of Living: How Market Freedom Erodes the Best Things in Life 17, 18 (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1994)]

"Absently he held the barrel of the Luger to his nose, then to his temple, and turned his head to and fro against the cold metal of the gunsight. Is it too much to wonder what he is doing there, this pleasant prosperous American, sitting in a $35,000 car and sniffing cordite from a Luger? How, one might well ask, could Will Barrett have come to such a pass? Is it not a matter for astonishment that such a man, having succeeded in life and living in a lovely home with a lovely view, surrounded by good cheerful folk, family and friends, merry golfers, should now find himself on a beautiful Sunday morning sunk in fragrant German leather speculating about such things as the odd look of his wrist (his wrist was perfectly normal), the return of North Carolina Jews to the Holy Land (there was no such return), and looking for himself in mirrors like Count Dracula?

At any rate, within the space of the next three minutes there occurred two extraordinary events which, better than ten thousand words, will reveal both Barrett's peculiar state of mind and the peculiar times we live in. First, as he sat in the Mercedes, Luger in hand, gazing at the cat nodding in the sunlight, there came to him with the force of a revelation the break through he had been waiting for, the sudden vivid inkling of what had gone wrong, not just with himself but, as he saw it, with the whole modern age.

* * * *

But first his "revelation." As he sat gazing at the cat, he saw all at once what had gone wrong, wrong with people, with him, not with the cat--saw it with the same smiling certitude with which Einstein is said to have hit upon his famous theory in the act of boarding a streetcar in Zurich.

There was the cat. Sitting there in the sun with its needs satisfied, for whom one place as long as it was sunny--no nonsense about old haunted patches of weeds in Mississippi or a brand-new life in a brand-new place in Carolina--the cat was exactly a hundred percent cat, no more no less. As for Will Barnett, as for people nowadays--they were never a hundred percent themselves. They occupied a place uneasily and more or less successfully. More likely they were forty-seven percent themselves or rarely, as in the case of Einstein on the streetcar, three hundred percent. All too often these days they were two percent themselves, specters who hardly occupied a place at all. How can the great suck of self ever hope to be a fat cat dozing in the sun?

There was his diagnosis, then. A person nowadays is two percent himself. And to arrive at a diagnosis is already to have anticipated the cure: how to restore the ninety-eight percent?" [Walker Percy, The Second Coming 15 (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1980)]

"Each soul at some time or another demonstrates illusions and depressions, overvalued ideas, manic flights and rages, anxieties, compulsions, and perversions. Perhaps our psychopathology has an intimate connection with our individuality, so that our fear of being what we really are is partly because we fear the psychopathological aspect of individuality. For we are each peculiar; we have symptoms; we fail, and cannot see why we go wrong or even where, despite high hopes and good intentions. We are unable to set matters right, to understand what is taking place or be understood by those who would try. Our minds, feelings, wills, and behaviors deviate from normal ways. Our insights are impotent, or none come at all. Our feelings disappear in apathy; we worry and also don't care. Destruction seeps out of us autonomously and we cannot redeem the broken trusts, hopes, loves." [James Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology 55 (New York: Harper Colophon ed., 1977)]