In Praise of the Mama's Boy: The Case of the Telltale Eyeglasses

Mother's boy, also called mama's boy, is a term for a man who is excessively attached to his mother at an age when men are expected to be independent (e.g. live on their own, be economically independent). A mother's boy may be effete or effeminate, or might be perceived as being macho, might have a personality disorder, such as avoidant personality disorder, or might be schizophrenic, so that the mother acts as a caretaker. In any case, a mother's boy cannot maintain a healthy partnership with a woman.

Being mother-bonded is sometimes seen as a sign of weakness, and has a social stigma attached to it in many places, although in other places it may be more acceptable or perceived as normal. A mother-bonded man is seen to give control of his own life to his mother, in exchange for a sense of security. If the mother has more than one son, then she will have, at the most, one mother's boy, usually the eldest son. The relationship between mother and mother's boy is thought to be "symbiotic": the mother enjoys controlling her mother's boy.

Alternatively, in recent years, some have begun using the term in a milder sense, merely meaning a man who is emotionally attached to his mother. Though this sense of the phrase is still uncommon compared to the original pejorative intent, mothers in particular may state their pride in their "mama's boy" sons. It is also occasionally used to describe an infant or toddler son who is unusually attached to his mother, even crying or resisting when the father attempts to care for him. In this sense, the 'mama's boy' designation carries little stigma, but is simply an observation of the young child's primary attachment.

The term "mama's boy" has a pejorative connotation. But why? What's wrong with a man who is close to his mother?

I used to have a friend named Brad Dolinsky who lived in my apartment building. He was an army captain from New Hyde Park, New York. I remember Brad Dolinsky, on one occasion talking on the cell phone to a friend, saying that his girlfriend thought he was a mama's boy. "Am I a mama's boy? Do you think I am a mama's boy?" Brad Dolinsky was clearly a superior person, whatever his relationship with his mother. I saw Brad's mom and dad once; they came to visit. "We're Brad Dolinsky's parents," they said to the front desk clerk; "he lives in apartment 600."

President Franklin D. Roosevelt was a mama's boy. You’d have to be a pretty formidable woman to intimidate Eleanor Roosevelt, and FDR’s mother Sara was just that. Franklin was her only child and she was quite protective of him. She even homeschooled him -- on the Roosevelt estate in Hyde Park, New York -- until he went to boarding school, and when he was admitted to Harvard she followed him there. She was upset when Franklin got engaged to Eleanor, but when he got married against her wishes, she committed herself to controlling both of them. Sara picked out the newly-married couple’s first house, had it decorated, and bought herself a house just three blocks away. In 1908 she gave them a townhouse in Manhattan which conveniently connected to her own townhouse –- it had adjoining doors on every single floor. Franklin later admitted he had been terrified of his mother his whole life.

Douglas MacArthur was the youngest of three sons and apparently his mom didn’t want to deal with empty nest syndrome when he left for the United States Military Academy at West Point: she camped out in a hotel room overlooking the Academy grounds for two years. Supposedly she even bought a telescope so she could make sure he was studying instead of getting up to shenanigans, but that smells like an urban legend to me. But one book does say that he met with his mother for at least half an hour every night after dinner, and if he couldn’t get away, she would meet him so they could walk and talk on school grounds instead.

One biography, William Manchester's "American Caesar: Douglas MacArthur," tells us that MacArthur "was a well-born victim of Uberangstlichkeit, a mama's boy who reached his fullest dimensions in following maternal orders to be mercilessly ambitious." In his early thirties, MacArthur, extremely solicitous of the well-being of his mother Pinky, kept her with him on the post at Leavenworth. Describing MacArthur's life in the Philippines in the 1920s, Manchester remarks, "Always in the background lurked the formidable figure of General MacArthur the Elder's widow, eleven thousand miles away but very much present in spirit." There she used supposed ill health to manipulate her son. Manchester continues, "Up and about, the old lady threw her redoubtable energy into a campaign for her remaining son's further rise in rank. It was time, she decided, that the War Department made him a major general."

There is circumstantial evidence that my friend Craig Dye was a mama's boy. Craig and I worked together at the law firm of Hogan & Hartson in Washington, DC. Craig was brought to the firm by Espe Rebollar, with whom Craig had worked at a previous place of employment. Craig and Espe had a special bond from the outset of Craig's employment at Hogan, in early October 1986. The two had lunch together often during the first several months of Craig's employment, and Espe championed Craig's career advancement at the firm. The two protected each other in what seemed to be a symbiotic, mother-son like bond. Espe was several years older than Craig and was matronly in appearance. Oddly enough, the first time Craig asked me to go to lunch with him, in June 1987, he invited Espe to come along with us. The three of us had lunch in Pershing Park. Perhaps Espe was a protective presence for Craig. Earlier, in February of that year, I had asked Craig to go to lunch with me but he refused; when I invited him to lunch he said, "I like your glasses, Gary" in an affectedly effeminate tone.

Craig said that his mother was a teacher. "My mother was hard on me," he said more than once. Perhaps his mother inculcated a drive in Craig to be "mercilessly ambitious." Craig was academically talented; he earned a master's degree in international relations, and was later accepted to Harvard Law School. His academic pursuits contrasted with the world of his father, who had worked in a steel mill. Craig had grown up not planning to go to college, anticipating that he would get a job in a steel mill, like his father.

Craig had tried to enlist in the Air Force -- in apparent emulation of his (maternal?) grandfather, a member of the German Luftwaffe -- but was refused because of poor eyesight. The U.S. Air Force decision to refuse Craig's enlistment must have been a narcissistic injury for him, and a psychologically castrative experience at that. When I knew him, Craig wore contacts. No pair of eye glasses were going to detract from that shayna punim of his, no doubt!

Craig's macho personality fits the profile of the "Douglas MacArthur" type of mama's boy. His sexual conquests of women may have been a reaction formation to a contrary trend. My former psychiatrist Dr. Abraha said that Craig was probably a latent homosexual. But then, Freud believed that all people were bisexual--which raises the question: precisely who is not a latent homosexual? Craig was convinced that I was in love with him, in a true Schreber-like paranoid delusion. Craig believed that I had purchased a pair of eye glasses in February 1987 in order to sexually impress him. A pair of eye glasses? Has anyone ever seduced another person with a pair of eye glasses? In fact, I had dropped my previous pair on the tile floor in the men's room at the firm, and the plastic frame broke.

Mark this well -- I used to work in the same organization as my mother, but I never had lunch with her.

I suffer from a schizoid personality disorder, and early in my life I internalized my mother as an anti-libidinal object.

Salman Akhtar's extensive review has shown that rejection, traumatic overstimulation, and neglect in the first two years of life are common in the history of schizoids. The schizoid condition was first described by the Scottish psychoanalyst Fairbairn in the 1940s. Fairbairn found that his patients had withdrawn from parents who were overtly rejecting. They preferred to live in a rich, imaginary world. Many fiction writers are schizoid because the ability to create a vivid inner world in one's head gives one a head start at writing fiction. The downside is that the schizoid's sense of other people is impoverished.

Not hatred, but love is the problem. Fairbairn observed that the child with the rejecting or disappointing parent develops an internalized image of the rejecting parent, called the anti-libidinal object, to which he is desperately attached. The rejecting parent is often incapable of loving, or preoccupied with his or her own needs. The child is rewarded when he is not demanding, and devalued or ridiculed as needy when he expresses his dependent longings. Thus the schizoid's picture of 'good' behavior is distorted. The child learns never to nag or even yearn for love, because it makes the parent more distant and censorious. The child then may cover over the incredible loneliness, emptiness and ineptness he feels with a fantasy (often unconscious) that he is self-sufficient. Love and anger get hopelessly intertwined. Fairbairn argued that the tragedy of the schizoid child is that his conscience has been warped: he believes his love, not his hatred is the destructive force within. Love consumes. Hence the schizoid child's chief mental operation is to repress his or her normal wish to be loved.

Perhaps, I am pathologically attached to the image of a cold, unresponsive mother. In that sense I am a mama's boy -- but a sad one, indeed.

2003: A Year of Transitions

I have nostalgic memories of the year 2003. I'm not precisely sure why that is. I think perhaps the reason is that I turned 50 that year. Fifty is a transitional age, I suppose; the year 2003 was a transitional year for me in some ways.

One of my former psychiatrists, Dr. Lawrence C. Sack, MD, died on August 5, 2003; his office was located on the second floor of my apartment building. I remember the note Dr. Sack's son, Robert Sack, MD -- also a psychiatrist --left on Dr. Sack's office door advising his father's patients of Dr. Sack's death. I remember so clearly the Saturday following his death. I lay on my couch all afternoon, stared into space, and listened to the slow movement of Beethoven's ninth symphony again and again. I was devastated by Dr. Sack's passing.

My apartment building opened up its new fitness room, and I started using the elliptical machine for the first time. I remember it was around the time of the Iraq war, specifically the fall of Saddam Hussein. I remember watching coverage of the Iraq war on the TV in the fitness room.

I turned 50 on December 23, 2003.

I started writing letters to my friend Brian Brown in about April 2003, leaving the letters on the hard drive on the public access computers at the library. Brian used to be the branch manager at the library. He later lied to the DC police, saying he never read the letters -- and that he just happened to read the one letter I wrote to him in which I called him a fag, in April 2004. Ha!

Brad Dolinsky, MD, moved into my building (apartment 600), and we became friends. He's now moved to California. He never writes. He never calls.

My apartment manager David Castleberry left and we got a new manager.

My apartment building was redecorated. The lobby was totally redone. A new faux marble floor was installed. The halls were painted, and molding was installed on the doorways to all the apartments.

Elizabeth Joyce, the front desk manager at my apartment building, went on vacation in July 2003 and never returned. She retired at the end of her vacation. Tim Norton replaced Elizabeth Joyce, then Mardi replaced Tim.

I saw Dr. Israella Bash as my case manager for the first time on about May 3, 2003. She said: "Why aren't you working? You can work. I'm not saying you can work as a lawyer. Lawyers work 70-80 hours a week. But you can work as a paralegal. It's a sin in the Jewish religion not to work." I said, "Dr. Bash, where are you from?" She said: "Israel. I'm a fifth generation Israeli."

My therapy with Dr. Nancy Shaffer ended in early 2003. I had started to see Dr. Shaffer in September 1999. I started seeing Meghana Tembe at the George Washington University Center For Professional Psychology in early 2003.

I remember Yom Kippur so clearly. It was a beautiful, warm late summer day: Monday October 6, 2003. I visited the Madison Building at the Library of Congress. October 6 was also a Monday in the year 1986; it was the day Craig W. Dye started working at Hogan & Hartson.

Of Forensics and Fiddles

My sister worked as a secretary at the Temple University Law School in Philadelphia in the mid-1960s while she pursued an undergraduate degree in education at Temple. She worked in the law school's Unit in Law and Psychiatry.

One of the young psychiatrists in the Unit was Robert L. Sadoff, MD. When I was 13 years old, during the winter of 1967, I spent the afternoon at my sister's office where I met Dr. Sadoff. I wonder if he remembers that? Dr. Sadoff has gone on to have a notable career in forensic psychiatry. Incidentally, the building in which Temple Law School was located used to be a synagogue -- the home of the reform congregation, Keneseth Israel.

Dr. Sadoff is currently a clinical professor of psychiatry, director at the Center for Studies in Social-Legal Psychiatry, and director of the Forensic Psychiatry Clinic at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. He is board certified in psychiatry, forensic psychiatry, and legal medicine, and has added qualifications in forensic psychiatry with the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology.

Dr. Sadoff was born in the wake of the great depression to Midwestern parents who emphasized the value of doing good for others. They exposed him to a unique set of humanistic qualities that later contributed to his acquiring an unyielding commitment to those in need. His family espoused traditional Jewish principles of charity (tzedakah), repairing the world (tikkun olam), and respect for others in need. His parents influenced him significantly through their professional and personal values. They were graduates of the University of Minnesota School of Pharmacy, and his maternal grandmother was an herbalist. Many of his cousins became physicians or attorneys. His maternal aunt was one of the early women graduates from the University of Minnesota Law School. Sadoff has always been guided by his religious beliefs and his faith. He recalls, with great wonder, what might have been had his father not taken a morning off in 1941 to say prayers for a recently departed relative. Having decided to carry out this good deed, his father left his post at the prescription desk of the small neighborhood drugstore that he owned in South Minneapolis. At the same time, a fire engine was racing to an emergency when it missed the turn and careened into the drugstore, ending up in the prescription department. He lived to tell the tale, and the family welcomed the miracle. Sadoff was a Hebrew scholar who graduated from the University branch (Beth Midrash) of the Talmud Torah of Minneapolis, where most of the other students in his class either became rabbis or married rabbis. He matriculated at the University of Minnesota at the age of 16, after graduating as valedictorian from North High School. He had to overcome a stuttering problem to deliver his speech. He began with a biblical saying: “Everything is foreseen and yet the freedom of choice is given” (Avot 3:19). These words became a guiding creed for his future lifestyle.

Dr. Sadoff's cousin, Norman Carol, served for 28 years as concert master of the Philadelphia Orchestra -- the lead "fiddle player" of the orchestra and the musical heart of several incarnations of the "Philadelphia Sound." Norman Carol has a flair for the undramatic. He is so unassuming — in a world where people are so full of, well, assumption — that offstage he seems determined to not only demystify life in the symphony, but to de-romanticize it as well. I met Carol in 1984 while doing a story on Riccardo Muti. I sat with him during a train trip to New York for a Carnegie Hall concert, and, another day, he took me backstage at the Academy of Music in Philadelphia to give me a glimpse of what being in the orchestra was really like. It was a bunch of guys, mostly guys, standing around in sports shirts smoking cigarettes and talking about sports, mortgage rates, anything but music. And when the break was over, they all shuffled back onto the Academy stage and did their job, which was to play incredible music and send shivers down my spine. But from my new vantage point, it seemed almost a royal-blue-collar occupation — “Hey, can you give me some more of those shivers over here?”

The Leeds Connection

One of my Facebook friends, Andie Oglensky Mandel, attended Leeds Junior High School in Philadelphia. She knew Fred Cohen and Jeffrey Orchinik. Andie said she liked Jeffrey Orchinik's "bad boy" image. Apparently Jeffrey Orchinik was the James Dean of Leeds Junior High School. I wonder if he wore a leather jacket?

My Skills as a Plagiarist: Otherworldy Dreams

I did not write the following essay, which appears in several of my blogs.  The blog post is actually a paraphrase of an essay about the German poet/novelist Hermann Hesse.  The post is an exemplar of my unexcelled skills as a plagiarist.

If the truth be told I am not suited for the practicalities of life; my mind floats in otherworldly dreams, more preoccupied with the potential of the spirit than with everyday vicissitudes. I love language, books, and music, and the most splendid moments of my uneventful existence have been the few operas I have attended, or the books I have perused in isolation from my fellows. I treasure every detail of the times I have spent in isolation. As I read I imagine every sentence, every page and every chapter as a mirror of my life, my passions and my afflictions. I take refuge in this extravagant, romantic atmosphere whenever I feel weighed down by the vulgarity of life.

I am an artist, really. Or at least I am an individual with an artistic temperament. My moments of highest joy are those I have spent alone. And that is the triumph and tragedy of my existence. Despite the gratifications afforded by my splendid isolation I still long for the Other in my loneliness: the Other who might complete me. Failing to find that Other I live in perpetual disillusion and frustration.

I am a rebel individualist divorced from established dogma and institutions, a lonely incorrigible seeker of new norms. For me life presents itself as a struggle for individualism; I experience my life at times as humorously petulant and at other times as a mystically yearning estrangement from the world and the times. I sometimes feel, in my grandiose moments, that I belong to the highest and purest spiritual aspirations and labors of our epoch.

My spiritual and emotional struggles can be traced to my alienation from my family in childhood. The roots of my estrangement from established institutions and settled norms began in the peculiarities of my early family life. Like most parents mine were no help with the new problems of puberty to which no reference was ever made. All they did was take endless trouble in supporting my hopeless attempts to deny reality and to continue dwelling in a childhood world that was becoming more and more unreal. I have no idea whether parents can be of help, and I do not blame mine. It was my own affair to come to terms with myself and to find my own way, and like most well-brought up children, I managed badly. My parents seemed wedded to some vague suggestions of old-world, Victorian morality with its belief in the inherent sinfulness of man, in the necessity of breaking the will of the individual, and with its uncompromising renunciation of all that is of this world. My family was the first of many social structures which were to rouse the rebel in me.

I was a hypersensitive, imaginative, lively and extremely headstrong child, and proved to be a constant source of despair and annoyance to my parents and my teachers. School held as little attraction for me as it did for any incorrigible. Hardly had the fourth year of high school begun before I became delinquent and was almost dismissed.

College and law school were meant to end the morbid estheticism into which I had allowed myself to drift. I hoped thereby to become an established, respected member of society. This hope was never realized. Except for the first few years, my law school education did not alleviate my feeling that life is essentially meaningless, nor could my idyllic retreat into academia long contain my inherent restlessness. By 1984, upon completion of my LL.M. program at American University, the life in the law had lost any meaning at all. It had become quite apparent to me that I could not be both a creative dreamer and a "solid citizen," a Phantasiemensch and a Burger, as the Germans would put it.

I am but a gifted misfit. My life has long been restive and discontented. I am unable to bear a comfortable, established mode of existence for any period of time. My life is grim and I live in endless mental agony.

I live the life of a romantic vagabond, forever exhausted and distraught in my quest for solitude. Before life can ever become meaningful for me, I must find and come to terms with myself. I am forever taking painful stock of myself and devote myself assiduously to solitary pleasures. I live like a hermit in my emotional and financial poverty and for years now, I have rarely left my apartment for more than routine outings.

In 1993 I began a writing that was to occupy me for the next ten years. That writing would be my autobiography, “Significant Moments.” The writing reflected my relentless quest for my self, and it assumed a fresh impetus and a new stylistic direction from my restless spirit during those years. I became an uninhibited and exciting innovator. The autobiography was really a tense psychological study and reflected the intoxicating emotional release of a Buddha-like search for the basic unity and meaningfulness of life. I am sure if it were ever to be published it would be greeted with a curious mixture of awe, bewilderment, antagonism, and disgust. My own uninhibited self-exposure would no doubt trouble even the staunchest of my supporters. I must remind you, my friend, that my new literary venture was not an irresponsible deviation but a necessary culmination in my self-quest. It has always been my belief that repressions had to be exposed, even at the price of unpleasant notoriety.

The letters I have written to you, my friend, are actually an article of faith and not a document of despair. Yes, I wallow in despair but I live in faith, a faith in the ultimate meaningfulness of life. For me, life has never become the perplexing absurdity it was for Franz Kafka or the Sisyphean monotonous senselessness it was to become for Albert Camus. As I like to say, there is always tomorrow.

I am oppressed by my personal life, but also by the times we live in. Our era is for me one of moral depravity and intellectual mediocrity; of surface glitter, smug comfort, sham conventionality, and foolish optimism. Man has lost his soul in the world of money, machines and distrust. He has exchanged his spiritual peace for physical comfort. All vital rapport with God and nature has been lost, reason has supplanted faith and society has forgotten the individual. I’m starting to sound like His Holiness, the late Pope John Paul II!

But the fact remains that the middle-class core of our civilization has never ceased to be the butt of my ire. The bourgeois represents all that is negative. A stalwart and stodgy nonentity, he is governed in all his ideals and pursuits solely by the impulse of self- preservation. He fears individualism, and deliberately sacrifices the precarious but precious intensities of life for comfort and security. He is the characterless Philistine who epitomizes mediocrity, cowardice, compromise, irresponsibility, and servility. He is the strapping, insensitive, physical specimen who enjoys health and wealth but lacks all culture. He has a sound appetite but no taste, a good deal of confidence but no ideals. He possess a surfeit of zeal and diligence but has no lofty aspirations or worthy goals. It is to him that the world belongs, while persons like me -- the sensitive worshippers of beauty and the earnest seekers after truth and the meaning of life -- are misfits and outcasts.

Every day for me is an effort. A seemingly senseless effort to survive. So much of my day is marked more by strained effort than by spontaneity, more by futile persistence than by passion, and more by recollection than by new horizons. I relive the past day-by-day.

There has always been a very close relationship between the circumstances of my life and my artistic aspirations. Each represents a different stage in my struggle with myself and with life at large, and each reflects a correspondingly different phase in both the substance and the form of my art. My writings are replete with uncertainty and vague presentiment. I live as a sensitive outsider who cannot cope directly with my particular problem of existence. I resort instead to fantasy and withdraw into the realm of beauty there to indulge in the extremes of late esthetic gratification. My world is one of perfumed melancholy. It is characterized by exclamatory remarks and rhetorical questions, by sensuous adjectives and adverbs in languid cadence.

The form of my autobiography is loose: a random succession of vignettes and dramatic monologues, held together primarily by their common spirit of decadent romanticism. A Hoffmanesque fusion of fantasy and reality, which is both cynical and morbidly intimate. You, no doubt, would call it the work of a talented beginner whose world of experience is still too limited, and whose imagination is entranced by the facile flow of beautiful language. In the absence of discipline and restraint, I fear that the whole is sacrificed to the part, and what is meant to be art fails to become more than picturesque patter.

In the last year, in my extreme isolation, my writing has become more human and less shadowy; inertia and desperation yield to movement and humor. My prose has achieved a more narrative style, and my language has become leaner, crisper and more forceful.

And yet, despite the emotional gratifications of my splendid isolation in the past year, I was forced to face the overwhelming accumulation of tensions. I was compelled to realize that in my desire to make existence less painful I had been avoiding a close look at the true nature of my inner discord, and had blindsided myself to the morally and spiritually impoverished world around me. In my imagination I left the comfortable fold of the bourgeois world, which had never afforded me the security I had hoped it might, and accepted the more difficult existence of an outsider. Did I have a choice in the matter, my friend? In a desperate and determined effort to find myself, I began systematically to diagnose my inner conflicts, to go my long-shunned inward path. Only now did I finally come to grips with the intrinsic problems of human existence -- and of my place in the human world.

In my isolation escape became quest, and in quest my inner problems resolved themselves into the basic malaise humain, into the tension between the spiritual and the physical. For the past year I oscillated between these poles, acclaiming first one, then the other, then neither. I never ceased hoping for a harmonious accord, though well aware that for me this was impossible. I acclaim spirit, stressing self-knowledge and self realization with a Nietzschean emphasis upon the superior being. But spirit as a guiding principle of life can only mean greater individuation and more painful isolation. I still lack the firm conviction and the inner fortitude necessary to endure these consequences. The immediate reaction has been as extreme as the initial impulse. My assertive Nietzschean activism has yielded suddenly to a Schopenhauer-like passivity, a restless quest to a quietistic acceptance, and self-realization to a yearning for self-obliteration.

In the sober tone of acceptance which is evident in the present letter, I realize that despite all efforts to the contrary, my existence will probably continue as a restless tension, a constant oscillation between life's opposing poles.

My path to myself has reached its climax in a fascinating confusion of symbol and irony, fantasy and realism.

It is only now that I at last have found the peace of sincere self-affirmation and life affirmation. The individual must take and continue along that path which the predominant aspect of his nature impels him to choose. Each, whether given to the senses or to the spirit, must be prepared to suffer the lot of his kind; to attempt in curiosity or desperation to do otherwise is to foster a perpetual dissension of the divided self.

My center is the individual, opposed to society, its mores, and its institutions. And that individual is myself. I recall, nostalgically, the simpler years of childhood. I re-experience youth with its excruciating years of awakening. I think about modern man, the intellectual and the artist in particular, within the framework of a declining culture.

It is in this, its intimately egocentric nature, that my artistic temperament bears the stamp of its age, an age of cultural decline, of spiritual and moral distress, and of extreme loneliness.

I am predominantly an esthete who lives only in dreams, hopes, and anticipation, and who shrinks before realization. I am a self-preoccupied, temperamental artist who vainly seeks a kindred soul. I am paralyzed by chronic indecision and indulge in romantic morbidity. I am an outsider consumed by my own hopelessness and loneliness -- a misfit, to whom the art of life and the art of love are foreign, a timid soul who asks too little of life and expects too much of it. I live in perpetual frustration and disillusionment.

This is what the past year has taught me about myself. The past twelve months that I spent in exile from the library were not wasted months. I learned many things about myself and in these letters I have tried to memorialize my discoveries and share them with you, my friend.

A Message from Matt Burke

I have a Facebook friend named Matt Burke. He lives in Manchester, England. He once telephoned me; we chatted for a while. He's a professional musician: a trumpet player and teacher. He's a fan of jazz and classical music, especially Mahler and Bruckner. Here's a recent message I got from Matt:

Hi Gary,

I loved reading about your trip [to Atlantic City], it made me smile! Sounds like you had a lovely time and spent just the right amount of time away too? I enjoyed how music was a nice feature of your trip and I'm impressed that you work out everyday - a leaf I need to take from your book!

I've had a great summer, playing music, making a short film with some friends and I'm just getting down to arranging some music for the kids' ensembles ready for this term, which starts next week.

My girlfriend Michelle got into City College, London to do a masters in communication disorders/speech therapy, so she's flying to England on Thursday, which is very exciting! She's very emotional at the moment though, dealing with such a big move. I'll be doing everything in my power to help her when she's over here.

Also, over the summer, I got a new trumpet (pitched in C). It's a beautfiul instrument that will open up repertoire and sounds that just weren't available to me before. All the guys in the American orchestras play C trumpets, but the tradition over here has always been Bb trumpets for standard use.

By the way, have you ever heard Celibidache's recordings of Bruckner? I find them inspired.

Glad your well and happy,

Speak soon

Matt

The Ice-Cream Man Cometh: My Vacation in Atlantic City

Monday August 3, 2009: I left my house at 9:00 AM for Union Station in Washington, DC, and took the 10:20 AM train to Philadelphia. I arrived at 30th Street Station in Philadelphia at 12:20 PM and asked the information station where I could catch the train to Atlantic City. The information desk said there was no train to Atlantic City; the track was being repaired and I had to take the bus at the 29th Street entrance. I took the 1:30 bus. The bus only went as far as Hammonton, where I got off and took the train to Atlantic City. I arrived in Atlantic City at 3:30 PM. Beautiful weather. It would have been a perfect beach day, but I was suffering from “jet lag.” I got a hoagie for dinner and bought a six pack of nonalcoholic beer. I took a walk uptown on the boardwalk and stopped off at Bally’s. I went into the casino at Bally’s. The people at the slot machines looked like pod people. Man, they were hard-core. One woman was puffing away on her cigarette and intently dropping her coins in the machine. These people are nuts!

Tuesday August 4, 2009: Worked out for 1 hour on stairclimber. Beautiful beach day. I stayed at the beach from 12:00 PM to 5:00 PM. Stayed at the pool from 5:00 PM to 5:30 PM. Laid in sun for half hour on each side. No sunburn. The sunscreen really worked!

Wednesday August 5, 2009: Sunny, warm. Worked out for an hour and ten minutes. Stayed at beach from 12:00 PM to 5:00 PM. Stayed at pool from 5:00 PM to 5:30 PM. Sky becomes overcast in late afternoon. The sand on the beach was blowing. It looks like a scene from Lawrence of Arabia. While I was in the ocean, I could hear a lifeguard blowing her whistle. I thought, “that can’t be for me. The water is only waist deep.” She blows the whistle again. I thought, “that can’t be for me. The water is only waist deep.” She blows the whistle again. Finally, I got up out of the water, turned around, and the lifeguard was standing behind me! She said, “You need to be swimming in front of a lifeguard station.” She pointed at the lifeguard stations: “There’s a lifeguard station and there’s a[nother] lifeguard station.” I said to the lifeguard: “Thank you.” Ask not for whom the whistle blows, it blows for thee! I had a hoagie for dinner.

Thursday August 6, 2009: Worked out for an hour and twenty minutes on stairclimber. Drizzle off and on all day. Cloudy all day. No beach. Only about 72 degrees. Walked to Tennessee Avenue on boardwalk (Central Pier). I’m glad I brought an umbrella. The walk took about an hour and a half. Picked up two containers of oatmeal at grocery store on Atlantic Avenue. Got two rolls of quarters at Wachovia Bank for laundry. “Can I have two rolls of quarters, please?” The teller said, “Here you go, sir. Thanks for banking at Wachovia.” Well, I wasn’t exactly banking at Wachovia. Today is the sixth anniversary of the death of Lawrence C. Sack, MD, my former psychiatrist. He died while on vacation. Sonia Sotomayor was confirmed by the U.S. Senate. An auspicious date. It was on this date that Wagner penned in the final bars of Tristan und Isolde, in the company of a young musician.



Friday August 7, 2009: Gorgeous day. Clear blue sky. Worked out for an hour and twenty minutes on stairclimber. Cool in the morning. I stayed at the beach from 11:00 AM to 5:00 PM. Later in the day very warm: puffy cumulus clouds. Late in the afternoon there was a problem with biting flies on the beach. Man, they are so annoying! Went to Burger King for dinner (Iowa Avenue on the boardwalk). Listened to the Mahler 8th Symphony on the beach after a swim. Fantastisch! The Mahler 8th never sounded so magnificent! Perfect beach music. I hear a man on the beach say to a boy, probably his son: “The spider webs that spiders build today – are they the same as the webs that spiders built two million years ago?” Yeah, I never thought of that. Have spiders evolved any in two million years? Big night out. Went to market at Ventor and Bartram Avenues. Bought bananas!!! Watched the movie “Burn After Reading” on HBO. Coen Brothers. Excellent movie about CIA sleuths! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burn_After_Reading

August 7th fell on a Friday this year. It occured to me that August 7th also fell on a Friday in the year 1987, 22 years ago. I began to reminisce about Friday August 7, 1987. At that time I worked at Chief Justice Roberts' old law firm, Hogan and Hartson, in Washington, DC. I worked in the Computer Applications Department.

Craig W. Dye, a coworker and fair-weather friend, left for a Miami vacation on Friday afternoon August 7, 1987. That morning I gave Craig a copy of a book of essays by Freud titled "Character and Culture." Craig later said he read the book on his flight to Florida. I also gave a copy of "The Making of a Psychiatrist" (by the late David M. Viscott, MD) to Tom Veatch, a summer employee who was going into his second year at the University of Virginia that fall. Tom said he wanted to become a doctor, perhaps a psychiatrist. His mother was a medical doctor. I wonder if Tom Veatch ever realized his ambition. He was an avid rower. Tom had also worked at the firm during the summer of 1986. He left the firm on Friday August 15, 1986 to start his first year of college. Coworkers gave him a transistor radio as a going away gift in August 1986. I remember when he was hired by Sheryl Ferguson earlier that summer. Sheryl Ferguson had said that Tom had a chance of making the U.S. Olympic rowing team.

I remember Miriam Chilton, our supervisor, saying to Craig at lunch on August 7, 1987: “Use lots of sunscreen.” Brett Rome, a Princeton student who worked in the department for the summer, was leaving to go back to school. I sat between Craig and Tom MacIsaac at Brett Rome’s farewell lunch. Craig and Tom were joking about the manhood of members of Princeton's football team. Tom MacIsaac said to me: “You’re right handed, aren’t you?” I said: “How do you know?” He said: “Because you wear your watch on your left hand. I said to Tom: “Sleuth! You’re a sleuth.” Yeah, Craig and Tom were real men -- they wouldn't be caught dead playing football for Princeton. By the way, Tom MacIsaac went to Vasser. Didn't that used to be a girl's school? Be that as it may.

Saturday August 8, 2009: “Wochenend und Sonnenschein.” “Weekend and Sunshine.“ – The lyrics to the German-language version of “Happy Days Are Here Again!” I worked out for an hour and 15 minutes on the stairclimber. Mostly sunny. Went to beach at 12:00 PM. By 4:00 PM it was cloudy, overcast and chilly on the beach. People started to head home from the beach in droves. I left the beach at 4:00 PM. I went to the pool at 4:15 PM. Lounge at the pool till 5:15 PM. I listened to the conversation of about 6 old Jewish ladies. They were talking about taking vitamins and fish oil and eating fruit. Did you ever stop to think that the little old Jewish ladies you see in Atlantic City today are not the same little old Jewish ladies you saw in Atlantic City thirty years ago? Well, I stop to think thoughts like that. Had a hoagie for dinner. Half my beach days are gone. I need to buy more beer. I can only drink nonalcoholic beer because of the medications I take. This is a Mormon vacation. I’m not getting laid. I’m not hiring a hooker. I’m not gambling. And I’m drinking non-alcoholic beer. Senator Orrin Hatch would be so proud!

Sunday August 9, 2009: I worked out for an hour and 15 minutes this morning. It’s totally overcast with drizzle. I’m waiting for the coming heat wave. Sun appears at 11:20 AM. I hope it lasts. At 12:20 I start to see a broad-based clearing. There’s no one on the beach. The condo I’m staying at has a view of the beach. The lifeguards are on duty. I ended up going to the beach at 1:00 PM. The sky is torn between storm and sunshine all afternoon. At 3:15 PM light raindrops start to fall; this continues for about an hour. Nobody leaves the beach. I suspect that anybody on the beach at all today is a hardcore beachgoer. Water is warm: 72 degrees. I left the beach at 4:30 PM and went to the pool where I stayed until 5:30 PM. I took a walk on the boardwalk to Iowa Avenue to have it my way at Burger King. The air is stifling. It’s cloudy, hot and very humid. I got home at 7:00 PM. There were claps of thunder at about 9:00 PM. I had a couple of beers and watched TV. I reminisce about the wonderful life I’ve lived. Fifty-five fantastic years!

Monday August 10, 2009: I got up at 6:00 AM and went to the fitness room at 7:00 AM. I worked out for an hour and 15 minutes. Gorgeous, ultra-clear day. It’s warm and not too humid. I watched a group of old women doing pool aerobics to an exercise tape. They actually think they’re exercising! I went to Rite-Aid to get my prescription filled. Walked on Atlantic Avenue to Indiana Avenue, across the street from the Claridge Hotel. It’s very hot (88 degrees)—It’s supposed to go up to 91 this afternoon. A Christian tried to convert me on the boardwalk. He asked me: “Did you ever hear of Jesus?” I said: “Yeah, I heard of him.” “Would you like to accept Jesus as your Savior?” I said: “No.” He said: “Is it because you’re Jewish?” I said “yes.” He said: “We have an organization called ‘Jews for Jesus’.” Right—like that’s an inducement! I got to the beach at about 1:00 PM. It was unbearably hot. I headed straight for the ocean. The water was warm and calm. Once I got out of the water and got on dry sand, I felt the super-heated air hitting me. It was unbearable. Without sunscreen I think I’d get serious burns. Had to leave the beach at 3:30 PM. I couldn’t stand the atrocious heat any longer. In my entire life I can’t recall ever having to leave the beach because of the heat. This heat is one for the books. I hope it’s cooler tomorrow. I’m looking forward to having a cheesesteak for dinner. – The cheesesteak ended up being a dud: it was very greasy and it left a strange aftertaste in my mouth. It tasted like the oil had been sitting on the grill all day. About a half hour after I ate it, my stomach felt like it had a lead weight in it. Don’t eat at “Pizza Party” at 4309 Ventnor Avenue unless you have good medical insurance! The stuff they serve at that place is toxic. I just learned that the heat index today was 102 degrees! WOW!! Quiet evening: too hot to go out for a walk on the boardwalk. I fulfilled a lifelong dream. I watched a DVD of the Bruckner 7th Symphony. It had been my life’s dream to watch the Brucker 7th in Atlantic City. I remember falling in live with that work when I was 16 years old, in May 1970.

Tuesday August 11, 2009: I worked out for an hour and ten minutes this morning on the stairclimber. It’s supposed to be about 8 degrees cooler today than yesterday. I was up at 6:00 AM this morning. It looks beautiful this morning. I went to the fitness room at 7:00 AM. I’m undecided about going to the beach today. Maybe I’ll stay at the condo, sit in the shade at the pool and watch a DVD of Gotterdammerung: that’s about 4.5 hours. Later in the morning I sat on the balcony while I waited for my laundry to get done. It’s actually cool today! What a relief from yesterday’s inferno. I went to the beach from 12:45 PM to 2:45 PM. It was cooler than yesterday, but it was still uncomfortably hot. It’s just not an “all day” beach day. The water is still delightful, though. I’m headed for the pool. I hope I can find a shady spot. – I found my shady spot at the pool; stayed at pool till 3:30. At 4:30 PM while watching TV I notice that it’s 89 degrees in Philadelphia, but 92 degrees on the boardwalk in Atlantic City. I should be vacationing in Philadelphia! The heat index is 96 degrees at the Atlantic City Airport.

Wednesday August 11, 2009: I worked out for an hour and 20 minutes this morning on the stairclimber. Well, I’m down to my last two beach days. I hope they’re good days. It’s supposed to be a little cooler the rest of the week. I got up at 6:00 AM and exercised from 7:00 AM to 8:20 AM. At noon it is overcast. That’s good. It’ll be cooler today. I went to the beach from 12:00 PM to 3:30 PM. It was overcast all day. There were rumblings of thunder throughout the afternoon. Nice reprieve from the heat of the last few days. At 4:30 PM it started to rain. I went out for a turkey hoagie in the rain. I stopped off at the liquor store for a six-pack of beer. The store owner asked me to leave my umbrella outside next time. Buddy, there isn’t going to be a “next time.” I’m leaving Atlantic City on Friday morning and if I come back next year I won’t remember to leave my umbrella outside. (Or will I?) I’m starting to feel like Bob Strauss in Russia. Toward the end of his ambassadorship he said he couldn’t wait to get back to Washington to get his life in order, as he put it. I’m looking forward to getting back to Washington to get my life in order—my life, such as it is!

Thursday August 12, 2009: I got up at 6:00 AM and worked out for an hour and ten minutes, beginning at 7:00 AM. It’s rainy with dark clouds. At 9:15 AM it’s deeply overcast, but the rain has stopped and the streets are dry. At 12:00 PM the lifeguard is on duty but no one is on the beach. It’s very overcast. I feel some raindrops. I hope I don’t have to stay in all afternoon. I watched all of the first act of Gotterdammerung this morning—all two hours of it! I went to the beach from 12:30 to 3:30 PM. It was solidly overcast and cool: about 72 degrees. But it was not uncomfortably chilly. There are only a handful of people on the beach. There’s a group of people playing volleyball in their street clothes. I laid on the beach, and maybe fell asleep. There are a few people in the water. I didn’t go in the ocean; the air temperature was too cool. I would never have warmed up. I went to the pool from about 3:35 to 4:10 PM. Something strange happened while I was at the pool. I looked up at the upper floors of The Plaza, the condo where I’m staying, and a guy in a unit on the 12th floor stepped out on his balcony with binoculars—and started to look into the units in the building across the street, The Berkley. I couldn’t believe it! In broad daylight, a flagrant peeping Tom. Isn’t that illegal in Atlantic City? I went home, took a shower, washed my clothes, and had a couple of beers. My last night in Atlantic City! I’ve been sleeping really well here. Maybe it’s the Futon. But one thing: I remember distinctly that last year I used to wake up at 8:00 AM every morning. During this stay I’ve been waking up at 6:00 AM. I like getting up early and exercising early. At 5:00 PM the skies are clearing.

Friday August 14, 2009: I worked out for an hour and ten minutes beginning at 7:00 AM. I left The Plaza at 9:30 and took the 10:20 train out of Atlantic City. I arrived home in Washington, DC at about 3:30 in the afternoon. Thus ends my summer vacation.

Crimes Against The State: Confession of a Party Member

To begin with I wish to disclaim the possession of those high gifts of imagination and expression which would have enabled my pen to create for the reader the personality of the man who called himself Gary Freedman.

If I have ever had these gifts in any sort of living form they have been smothered out of existence a long time ago under a wilderness of words. Words, as is well known, are the great foes of reality. I have been for many years a librarian. It is an occupation which at length becomes fatal to whatever share of imagination, observation, and insight an ordinary person may be heir to. To a librarian there comes a time when the world is but a place of many words and man appears a mere talking animal not much more wonderful than a parrot.

This being so, I could not have observed Mr. Freedman or guessed at his reality by the force of insight, much less have imagined him as he was. Even to invent the mere bald facts of his life would have been utterly beyond my powers. But I think that without this declaration the readers of these pages will be able to detect in the story the marks of documentary evidence. And that is perfectly correct. It is based on a document, or more precisely, those portions of a document of which I have a certain knowledge: all I have brought to it is my knowledge of the human species, which is sufficient for what is attempted here.

"Words, words, words," so Hamlet said.

Mr. Freedman was a lover of words, a lover of language. We spoke to each other infrequently. But those few exchanges we had were enough to convince me that he was always happy to talk; he was a "word-child," hyperarticulate. Fully formed paragraphs issued forth in conversation with a hypnotic, limpid ease. Sooner or later, his would-be debater would be charmed and silenced.

There was an element of the demoniacal in his tireless search for just the right word to round a sentence into its proper unity, for the exact juxtaposition of words and movement that would slyly lead the reader or listener along the periphery of a story to its turning point and then propel them effortlessly to its climax. . . . No moment, however small, seemed unimportant enough to escape his almost fierce attention, and his grasp of a social situation's latent values was immediate and complete. My eyes and ears were opened anew each day to the thousand-and-one endless details that go to make up the subtle and infinitely fragile clockwork of an anecdote's interior mechanism, and to the slow cultivation of its subsoil that gradually makes it blossom into something vital and alive. I watched and listened with the consecration of a yogi.

Early in our relationship I sensed that Mr. Freedman was a lonely man, an isolated man. He seemed desperate for a kind of friendliness that he could not achieve naturally and spontaneously and he found that closeness -- or at least he imagined that he found that closeness -- in the person of his local librarian. On occasion he shared with me his views on the world: he talked about politics, literature, the arts, and science. It was his gift for language that held my interest, no matter what the topic. His knowledge of these various fields was not remarkable. Yet with his gift for words he could turn the most commonplace observations into arresting remarks.

I can give you an example. "Every man is born a Faust," he said, "a Faust with a longing to grasp and experience and express everything in the world. Faust became a scientist thanks to the mistakes of his predecessors and contemporaries. Progress in science is governed by the laws of repulsion, every step forward is made by refutation of prevalent errors and false theories. Faust was an artist thanks to the inspiring example of his teachers. Forward steps in art are governed by the law of attraction, are the result of the imitation of an admiration for beloved predecessors." Well, I ask you: is there anything novel in that observation? Not in the least. But what Mr. Freedman managed to do was to get to the core of the matter: the structural dialectic inherent in the Faust story was laid bare by Mr. Freedman's use of an appealing, aphoristic turn of phrase.

Mr. Freedman was an eccentric (I don't think he'd mind my saying so) and a self-styled genius.

He spent much of the day, every day, at the library. I didn't know how he subsisted, and I never inquired.

Mr. Freedman used to sit in the reading room of the library, where he perused newly-arrived books and magazines. He read the newspaper everyday. The reading room had several windows and could seat about a hundred people. Long tables stood in rows that ended by the windows. The library closed at sunset; in the spring Moscow had no lighting. Mr. Freedman left before dark. Of his life before he began visiting the library I know nothing.

I wish to state quite definitely that it is by no means out of any wish to bring my own personality into the foreground that I preface with a few words about myself and my own affairs this report on Mr. Freedman. What I here set down are my impressions of Mr. Freedman. I intrude myself, of course, only in order that the reader -- I might better say the future reader, for at this moment there exists not the smallest prospect that my manuscript will ever see the light of day unless, by some miracle, it were to escape the scrutiny of the party and bring to those without some breath of the secrets of our prison-house (for has not our entire country become a kind of prison?) -- to resume: only because I consider that future readers will wish to know who and what the author is do I preface these disclosures with a few notes about myself.

I have been employed, since the Revolution, as head librarian of Public Library no. 18. The work has been agreeable. From time to time party functionaries visit to inquire about a specific patron. "What does he read?" "Does he follow a set routine of arrival and departure?" "Does the patron speak to you?" "What about?" I never fail to provide information that might be useful to the party. It has not been an infrequent occurrence that after speaking with a party official about a patron, I would never see that individual again at the library. Yes, I have been useful to the party and to the work of social reconstruction that the party has been carrying out.
God Bless the Communist Party of the Soviet Union!

I and my two assistants sit on a dais in a recess in the wall opposite the window, separated from the rest of the room by a high counter. From this vantage point little that goes on in the reading room escapes our attention.

From the outset, Mr. Freedman's demeanor set him apart from other patrons of Public Library no. 18. During the early years of his daily visits he read quietly, and but for the fact that he took a seat adjacent to my post -- which occasioned a good many chance encounters, we should have remained practically unacquainted. For he was not a sociable man. Indeed, he was unsociable to a degree I had never before experienced in anybody. He was, in fact, as he called himself, a real wolf of the Steppes, a strange, wild, shy -- very shy -- being from another world than mine. How deep the loneliness into which his life had drifted on account of his disposition and destiny and how consciously he accepted this loneliness as his destiny, I certainly did not know until I read the records he left behind him (that is, the documentary evidence to which I referred above). Yet, before that, from our occasional talks and encounters, I became gradually acquainted with him, and I found that the portrait in his records was in substantial agreement with the paler and less complete one that our personal acquaintance had given me.

He gave at the very first glance the impression of a significant, an uncommon, and unusually gifted man. His face was intellectual, and the abnormally delicate and mobile play of his features reflected a soul of extremely emotional and unusually delicate sensitivity. When one spoke to him and he, as was not always the case, dropped conventionalities, and said personal and individual things that came out of his own alien world, then a man like myself came under his spell on the spot. He had thought more than other men, and in matters of the intellect he had that calm objectivity, that certainty of thought and knowledge, such as only really intellectual men have, who have no axe to grind, who never wish to shine, or to
talk others down, or to appear always in the right.

What I know of him is little enough. Indeed, of his past life and origins I know nothing at all. Yet the impression left by his personality has remained, in spite of all, a deep and sympathetic one.

I mentioned that Mr. Freedman's conduct in the library set him apart from other patrons. For years I had observed him retrieving books from the shelves. He read these books, or passages from them, with a special intensity of expression. In truth the intensity of his emotions while occupied in this fashion, the exquisite sensitivity of his face, far exceed what I had ever experienced while talking to him. He appeared to reserve his deepest emotions for books, ideas, and the act of writing. Mr. Freedman took copious notes as he read. He appeared to be working on a kind of manifesto -- well, that's what I imagined. At times I feared for his personal safety. I knew many intellectuals. I knew how easily it was for intellectuals, for writers, to fail to heed the boundaries of conformity set by the party. As a class, intellectuals tended to be rebellious nonconformists who, not infrequently, seemed oblivious of the consequences of their independent spirit. After all, there exists a certain Communist style. Few people measure up to it. But no one seems to flout that way of life and thought as openly as do intellectuals. Why they have to flirt with danger, I can't imagine. The free thinker is a mockery of the whole world of conformity, a walking insult to it. If at least one's past is one's own secret -- but, as is often the case, there are people in the party who know such renegades inside out.

For many months, Mr. Freedman had been working ferociously on the manuscript that he hoped would finally make his literary reputation, or so I imagined. From what I could gather, both in my brief conversations with him and from my first-hand observation of him at work, he appeared to have grand visions for his manifesto. But I must say, I never really became acquainted with the content of the document in its entirety. My knowledge of the text was limited to what I gleaned from occasional scraps of notes that he discarded, from chance comments Mr. Freedman made, and from the books he borrowed from the library.

I got on well with Mr. Freedman. As is sometimes the way with men whose natures are really quite opposed, we got on very well. During our brief exchanges I would hold forth gregariously on topics that interested me: German Romanticism, the state of the poor, the struggle to find one's own private truth consistent with the common good, and so forth. Mr. Freedman, thin, angular, and restrained, listened more than he spoke, and when he talked -- of contemporary politics, or social reform, or the importance of education -- he did so with Euclidean clarity and a modesty that tended to obscure the firmness of his convictions.

As I say, I knew little of the content of Mr. Freedman's manifesto, and it was not in my power to verify the truth of the experiences related in his manuscript. I have no doubt that they are for the most part fictitious, not, however, in the sense of arbitrary invention. They are rather the deeply lived spiritual events which he has attempted to express by giving them the form of tangible experiences. The partly fantastic occurrences in Mr. Freedman's fiction come presumably from the later period of his patronage of the library, and I have no doubt that even they have some basis in real occurrence. At that time Mr. Freedman did not in fact change very much in behavior and in appearance.

Overall I had a favorable impression of Mr. Freedman. Many held contrary views. Mr. Freedman was not universally loved. In truth, Mr. Freedman presented layer upon layer of difficulty to disentangle. His neighbors said of him that after an hour you love him, after a week you hate him, and after ten years you start to understand him. One of the local shopkeepers said that if you didn't have a personality conflict with Mr. Freedman, you didn't have a personality. Those who had known of Mr. Freedman's past said that he was a combination of Machiavelli and Mr. Rogers: "The conventional image of an engaging man is one who is hard on the outside and soft on the inside. Mr. Freedman is just the opposite." Part of his mystique for some was his careful and successful positioning as someone "above the fray." He gave off an air that he was too good for others, or certainly better than the rest of his peers.

According to some he was a maddeningly-contradictory figure. An avatar of morality and truthfulness, Mr. Freedman bent the truth and had a singularly nasty side to his character that ultimately contributed to his difficulties with other people. One patron warned me: "Despite his intelligence, he has a vindictive streak, a mean streak, that surfaced frequently and antagonized people." Another patron said that Mr. Freedman liked to carve up an opponent, make others laugh at him, and then call it a joke. He stretched the truth to the point where it became dishonest to call it exaggeration." I heard someone say that Mr. Freedman was "a hyperbole addict." I must confess that generally not a week would go by when I didn't hear some criticism of Mr. Freedman. "He usually claimed the moral and ethical high ground" but "practiced an interpersonal style based on exaggeration, disingenuousness, and at times outright deception." It was said of Mr. Freedman that he seldom, if ever, repented of his nastiness or asked forgiveness. Instead, when called out for an egregious personal attack, he displayed the advanced skills of evasion that made him such an effective manipulator. All in all the picture that emerged was one of "narcissistic loner." Mr. Freedman was never a regular guy, the sum of his parts never quite added up to that. He talked his way through life, yet in some profound way he never learned the language of men.

Small wonder that friendship -- lasting and meaningful friendship -- eluded Mr. Freedman. He seemed, as I've already said, desperate for a kind of friendliness that he could not achieve spontaneously and naturally. He once asked me: "Are you familiar, Comrade Brown, with the small German ceremony called 'Duzen'? The ritual calls for two friends, each holding a glass of wine or beer, to entwine arms, thus bringing each other physically close, and to drink up after making a promise of eternal brotherhood with the word Bruderschaft. When it's over, the friends will have passed from a relationship that requires the formal 'Sie' mode of address to the
familiar 'Du.'"

I recoiled at Mr. Freedman's remarks. It was as if Mr. Freedman were making a personal proposal of some kind to me. I must admit I found Mr. Freedman's innuendo revolting. That degree of closeness between two men seemed to me unnatural. I ended the conversation abruptly.

My impression of Mr. Freedman was that of a man who was desperately lonely, who lived in deep emotional pain, and who lacked the means or motivation to change his life.

I often wondered: "What must the sleepless nights of such a man be like? What occupied his thoughts?"

Be that as it may.

I will now tell you about the significant and fantastic events that transpired on an early spring day in the year 19--. Mr. Freedman -- or Comrade Freedman, as he had been known (as we all had been known) officially since the Revolution -- had set out alone from his house in Prince Alexei Street, Moscow, for an extended walk. It was a spring afternoon in that year of 19--, when Russia was just beginning to emerge from the ravages of the Great War and the Revolution and its aftermath. He was overwrought by a morning of hard, nerve-taxing work, work which had not ceased to exact its uttermost in the way of sustained concentration, conscientiousness, and tact; and after the noon meal found himself powerless to check the onward sweep of the productive mechanism within him, that motus animi continuus in which, according to Cicero, eloquence resides. He had sought but not found relaxation in sleep -- though the wear and tear upon his system had come to make a daily nap more and more imperative -- and now undertook a walk, in the hope that air and exercise might send him back refreshed to a good evening's work.

April had passed its midpoint, and after weeks of cold and wet a mock summer had set in. Mr. Freedman had barely begun his walk when he was accosted by two uniformed men. The two men stopped Mr. Freedman and inquired of his identity. It was a mere formality; they knew it was Mr. Freedman. The two men were party functionaries: pallid and plump bureaucrats in the employ of the governing regime.

"Tenth-rate old actors they send for me," said Mr. Freedman, glancing round again to confirm the impression. "They want to finish me off cheaply." He turned abruptly toward the men and asked: "What theater are you playing at?" "Theater?" said one, the corners of his mouth twitching as he looked for advice to the other, who acted as if he were a dumb man struggling to overcome a stubborn disability. "They're not prepared to answer questions," said Mr. Freedman to himself and walked on with the men. "Just follow us," said one officer. "And remain quiet," said the other. "Nothing will happen to you if you cooperate with us. No harm will come to you if you follow orders." Mr. Freedman accompanied his two warders in
silence.

Someone must have traduced Mr. Freedman, for without having done anything wrong -- as he saw it -- he was arrested on that fine morning in April 19--, as the noon hour approached.

Mr. Freedman, a 50-year-old unemployed attorney, was eventually brought to the maximum security ward of the Moscow Central Institute for Forensic Psychiatry. I later learned through my contacts in the party that four months earlier, while searching the house of an acquaintance, the KGB agents discovered a book -- or rough draft of a book -- written by Mr. Freedman, that was critical of the Soviet social system. In this book Mr. Freedman defined himself as a "Marxist partisan" and a patriot of his country. He used language indistinguishable from that of the "official" and "approved" concepts current in Soviet social and political thought. However, the book was an impassioned argument for reform of the state in order to bring about greater prosperity and free expression in the country.

Mr. Freedman was arrested and charged with "antigovernment propaganda and agitation harmful to the interests of the Socialist state." Because he was uncooperative during his detention, he was referred for a psychiatric evaluation by a KGB investigator, who wrote in the referring document that "There are strong reasons to suspect that this detainee suffers from chronic mental illness, which is responsible for his behavior and has resulted in serious crimes against the state, with which he is charged."

The prisoner arrived in handcuffs, looking anxious and fearful. At the beginning of his admission report, the forensic psychiatrist, Comrade Dr. Martin, took note of "burning and penetrating eyes and an unearthly calm."

During the interview the prisoner insisted on his right to take notes and to write down the questions asked him; when this was denied, he refused to participate in the evaluation interview. On the ward, surrounded by seriously ill offenders, he kept to himself, and was described as "withdrawn, with long staring spells, and persistent refusal to discuss his thoughts and feelings." The ward staff was puzzled by his "excessive wariness, and his belief that something had been put into his food was described in ward notes as 'paranoid.'"

By the end of the first week, the prisoner was demanding to see the medical director of the hospital; when the director obliged, the prisoner confronted him with an accusation of "collaborating in crimes against humanity." The prisoner categorically denied the criminal nature of his activity and claimed that he pursued his chosen profession in writing a book about legal guarantees for freedom of expression.

From the information provided by the secret police investigator and summaries of treatment obtained from the local health center and the district mental health clinic, the forensic psychiatrist learned that the patient had "a stormy adolescence," during which he pursued, with abandon, the study of his country's history, literature, and art. He was described by his teachers as "stubborn, oppositional, and obsessed with his ideas." His principal wrote: "This young man is far too sensitive and intense for his age. He is negative about everything our country stands for and his tastes in art and music are bizarre. However, he is a highly intelligent young man, and with proper guidance and education, can be an asset to our country."

The records of the local employment board revealed that the prisoner was relieved from compulsory employment because of a diagnosis of "psychoneurosis" established by a psychiatrist at the district mental health clinic. The records from the clinic described a man who was "moody, preoccupied with his interest in history, precise and compulsive in his habits with some excessive concern about his health."

By the end of the third week, the prisoner was forcibly given small doses of a medication. He became weak and apathetic, complained of dryness of the mouth, increased appetite, and grogginess throughout the day, and an increasingly troublesome tremor. This was described in the record as "paranoid refusal to believe in the good intentions of the medical personnel, and inability to develop insight into his condition and his own needs."

When medication produced no change in the prisoner's attitude except for obvious side effects, it was discontinued. One week after this, the prisoner was looking more cheerful, and finally agreed to cooperate with the expert committee, consisting of three forensic psychiatrists. When the committee saw the prisoner, none of its members had had a chance to read the manuscript that brought the man to the attention of the authorities. During the interview, the prisoner was attentive and guarded, and later was described by one of the members as "hypervigilant" with obvious "ideas of reference." The committee unanimously agreed on the diagnosis offered by the forensic psychiatrist: schizophrenia. The committee recommended compulsive psychiatric treatment for Mr. Freedman "because of his inability to have a critical attitude toward his own condition and circumstances and failure to cooperate with necessary medical treatment."

The KGB investigator knew that the state world have considerable difficulty in prosecuting Mr. Freedman since it would have had to prove that he had a malicious intent to "undermine and harm the interests of the Socialist State." Because Mr. Freedman is articulate and persuasive, a public trial would have been embarrassing to the government. Knowing that Mr. Freedman had been given a psychiatric diagnosis that exempted him from compulsory employment, the KGB investigator reasoned that a trial would be unnecessary and that the credibility of Mr. Freedman's ideas would be undermined if his behavior could be attributed to a mental disorder.

The forensic psychiatrist was given inadequate and biased information, had no access to his "patient's" family or former colleagues, and had to deal with a frightened and unwilling man. Practicing within a social system with an extremely narrow range of "permissible" behavior and within a profession that uses an extraordinarily broad concept of schizophrenia, the forensic psychiatrist could very well have been sincere in considering Mr. Freedman mentally ill. It is also possible that the psychiatrist was cynically using his power to make diagnoses, hospitalize, and treat in order to satisfy an implicit request from the KGB to take this "troublesome" man off their hands.

Whether or not the forensic psychiatrist actually believed that Mr. Freedman was ill, he probably justified his diagnoses as follows: The onset of Mr. Freedman's schizophrenia was, as is usual in this illness, at the time of adolescent transition to adult life. He exhibited overvalued ideas, instability of mood, inappropriately intense and single minded pursuit of interests unusual for boys of his age, and obsessive compulsive personality traits. He developed a system of rationalized obsessive preoccupations with seeking reforms in Soviet society. His tragic world view is evidence of chronic dysphoria and anhedonia. His belief that he can make a contribution to the social theory and well-being of his country is evidence of an overvalued idea that has progressed into a fantastic delusion of reform. His cautious attitude toward authorities and state-appointed physicians is an expression of paranoid and self-referential perceptions.

In any event, we heard about Mr. Freedman's arrest at the Public Library. I, for one, was not surprised. For years I had feared for Mr. Freedman's safety, given the unusual nature of his ideas and his passionate investment in the act of putting his ideas in writing. But was Mr. Freedman truly mentally ill? Is it possible that the decision to arrest Mr. Freedman was unjustified? Is it not possible to view his difficulties as the result of the interaction between his personality traits and the prevailing political and social norms? Perhaps in another society Mr. Freedman's personality traits might not cause any particular difficulties -- indeed, might even be rewarded. Of course, I dare not make these sentiments public knowledge. The party deals harshly with those who question the correctness of its actions. Still, one wonders.

I have not seen Mr. Freedman since the day of his arrest. No, I am sure he has not taken his life. If he has been discharged from the hospital I am sure he still goes wearily up and down the streets somewhere in Moscow, sits for days in libraries, or lies on a hired sofa, listens to the world beneath his window and the hum of human life from which he knows that he is excluded. But he has not killed himself, for a glimmer of belief still tells him that he is to drink this frightful suffering in his heart to the dregs and that it is of this suffering he must die. I think of him often. He has not made life lighter for me. He had not the gift of fostering strength and joy in me. On the contrary! But I am not he, and I live my own life, a narrow middle-class life, but a solid one, filled with duties. And so we can think of Mr. Freedman peacefully and affectionately, William and I.

Mr. Freedman belongs to those who have been caught between two ages, who are outside of all security and simple acquiescence. He belongs to those whose fate it is to live the whole riddle of human destiny heightened to the pitch of a personal torture, a personal hell.

I neither approve nor condemn Mr. Freedman. Let every reader of these notes do as his conscience bids him.

/s/ Comrade Brian P. Brown

Reflections of a Solitary on a Snowy Afternoon in January

On Saturday I occupied myself with Mr. Frost together with a host of other authors who populated my imagination as welcome guests: Jane Hamilton, Marya Hornbacher, Edith Wharton, Primo Levi, Boris Pasternak, Henry David Thoreau, and Margaret Brenman-Gibson. Stanley Greenspan was here too. But then, Dr. Greenspan is always here; he holds the key to my inner world, and he comes and goes at will. Oh, and lest I forget, Lord Byron visited briefly to convey a unique message "To Ellen."

In my loneliness I become a spectator. My imagination leads a procession of living creatures before me. I watch and listen to these guests of my imagination as I would a performance at the theater. And at times these fantastic creations of my inner world seem more real than reality itself. I may be affected by a theatrical exhibition; on the other hand, I may not be affected by an actual event which appears to concern me much more. I only know myself as a human entity; the scene, so to speak, of thoughts and affections; and am sensible of a certain doubleness by which I can stand as remote from myself as from another. However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but a spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it, and that is no more I than it is you. When the play, it may be the tragedy, of life is over, the spectator goes his way. It was a kind of fiction, a work of the imagination only, so far as he was concerned. This doubleness may easily make us poor neighbors and friends sometimes.

I came across a poem of Robert Frost's that seemed especially appropriate: "Brown's Descent." The opening lines read: "Brown lived at such a lofty farm that everyone for miles could see his lantern where he did his chores in winter after half-past three. And many must have seen him make his wild descent from there one night, 'cross lots, 'cross walls, 'cross everything describing rings of lantern-light. Between the house and barn the gale got him by something he had on and blew him out on the icy crust that cased the world, and he was gone!"

I hope you got home safely if you drove through the snow, Brian. My own life is like an unending slip and slide; I seem to be continually at the edge of an abyss, mere seconds and a few feet from swerving involuntarily into oncoming traffic. I fear crashing into the traffic in the opposite lane, hurling into the windshield -- hurting myself and damaging the rearview mirror.

My entire existence, in some sense, can be viewed as the lived aftermath of an accident, or series of accidents -- a fall from grace. I used to think if you fell from grace it was more likely than not the result of one stupendous error or else an unfortunate accident. I hadn't learned that it can happen so gradually you don't lose your stomach or hurt yourself in the landing. You don't necessarily sense the motion. I've found it takes at last two and generally three things to alter the course of a life: You slip around the truth once, and then again, and one more time, and there you are, feeling, for a moment, that it was sudden, your arrival at the bottom of a snowdrift.

That's the way I feel now. I feel as if I'm at the bottom of the heap, struggling to ascend from the snowdrifts that ensnare me in a winter wasteland.

At this moment, the problem is compounded by a writer's block. I feel I'm straining for something to say, something to express. I feel immobile, locked in the grip of a creative and emotional deep freeze.

There is a stillness without and a confused tumult within. I gaze out my window. I seem a part of the mute melancholy landscape, an incarnation of its frozen woe, with all that is warm and sentient in me fast bound below the surface; but there is nothing unfriendly in the silence. The silence is a balm for my inner disquiet. I simply feel that I live in a depth of moral isolation too remote for casual access, and I have the sense that my loneliness is not merely the result of my personal plight, tragic as it is, but has in it, as I've hinted many times before, the profound accumulated cold of many stark and harshly-demanding winters.

The night following the storm was perfectly still, and the air so dry and pure that it gave little sensation of cold. The effect produced on me was rather a complete absence of atmosphere, as though nothing less tenuous than ether intervened between the white earth and the gray sky above.

I let the vision possess me as I contemplated what to write to you, buddy. I am never so happy as when I abandon myself to these epistolary dreams. A wave of warmth goes through me as I think about the fact that for me the act of writing (not to mention paraphrasing, as well as outright plagiarizing) is the prolongation of a vision.

Saturday night. I set about to write. I scribbled some notes in longhand. What I wrote that night fell into two parts. Clean copies -- improved versions of earlier scribbling -- were set out in my best penmanship. New work was written in an illegible scrawl full of gaps and abbreviations. In deciphering these scribbles, I went through the usual disappointments. Last night these rough fragments had moved me, and I myself had been surprised by some felicitous passages. Now these very passages seemed to me distressingly and conspicuously strained.

The passages didn't flow. A clear and pleasing narrative did not materialize. I felt torn between a fevered urgency and a bitter languor. I cannot blame my inner censor for the block; that censor, like a good psychoanalyst, contemplated my outpourings with evenly-hovering attention. The ideas were there all right, but they failed to materialize into a cohesive communication. I not only feel that I am incomprehensible to others; I am sometimes incomprehensible to myself as well. There were many false starts -- and jarring stops. It was like driving through a winter storm. My thoughts made slow headway, and a vague fear gripped me as I envisioned veering off a train of thought or, alternatively, into a jarring wreck of incompatible ideas. The driver in a winter storm strives vigilantly for a commodious path, and is dismayed when he finds how far, after a seemingly interminable ride, he still remains from home.

It has been the dream of my life to write with an originality so discreet, so well concealed, as to be unnoticeable in its disguise of current and customary forms; all my life I have struggled for a style so restrained, so unpretentious that the reader or the hearer would fully understand the meaning without realizing how I assimilated it. I strive constantly for an unostentatious style, and I am dismayed to find how far I still remain from my ideal.

Saturday evening I had tried to convey, by words so simple as to be almost childish and suggesting the directness of a poem, my feelings of mingled idealism and fear and longing and courage, in such a way that should speak for itself, almost apart from the words.

Looking over my rough sketches now, I find that they needed a connecting theme to give unity to the lines, which for lack of it fell apart.

I take a break from my writing, and look out the window. I peer closely and inquisitively at the flakes of snow on the window ledge. Each crystal flake has an individual identity. Like a poem, each flake speaks of itself alone in a lyrical manner. Each six-sided flake expresses its own self in a broad, spacious hexameter. The regularity of the rhythm, independent of the meaning and inherent in the meter itself, does not strike me as doggerel; rather it contains a unique message expressed in infinite variety within a set form. Variety of expression within a strict form is difficult but engaging; the structural exigencies of poetry obviate verbosity just as nature imposes simplicity of form on the snowflake as a hedge against crystalline "windiness." The snowflake exalts in the concise and strong. It describes itself with the greatest rigor and the least clutter. The snowflake is compact, discrete; it is delineated by neat boundaries. Its individual identity is secure. The snowflake is a paradigm of firm, but precarious, self-delineation. Time and temperature will soon conspire to fuse the individual snowflakes into a crust amounting to a loss of individual identity.

Like the narrative of the psychoanalytic patient, every detail of the snowflake's form, however trivial, has a meaning. In the snowflake each crystalline projection has a structural function just as the analytic patient's outpourings follow narrative necessity.

The patient expresses his thoughts with clinical parsimony. In psychoanalysis the preferred explanation for a series of symptoms tends to be cast in terms of single events from the patient's past rather than different events on different occasions. The single event may be repeated again over time but the form of the event tends not to change. Similarly, nature endows each snowflake with an economy of expression within a hexagonal form.

The flake makes you think of something solid, stable, well-linked. In fact it happens also in crystallography as in architecture that "beautiful" edifices, that is symmetrical and simple, are also the most sturdy; in short the same thing happens with the crystal as with cupolas of cathedrals, the arches of bridges, or the well-designed theater whose structure follows the demands of acoustical science. And it is also possible that the explanation is neither remote nor metaphysical; to say "beautiful" is to say "desirable," and ever since man has built he has wanted to build at the smallest expense and in the most desirable fashion, and the aesthetic enjoyment he experiences when contemplating his work comes afterward. Certainly, it has not always been this way: there have been centuries in which "beauty" was identified with adornment, the superimposed, the frills; but it is probable that they were deviant epochs and that the true beauty, in which every century recognizes itself, is found in the upright stones of a simple farmhouse or the blade of the farmer's ax.

Early Saturday afternoon I looked out my window. The old park -- or what remains of it -- came right to the tool shed, as if to peer at my face and remind me of something. The snow was already deep. It was piled high on the tool shed. Snow hung over the edge of the shed, like the rim of a gigantic mushroom. A solitary raven was perched on the roof devouring, in Lord Byron's words, "the yellow harvest's countless seed." For a moment the bird freezes in an upright position, fixed like a stage prop suspended in time. The world stops.

Although it was early afternoon and full sunlight, I felt as if I were standing late at night in the dark forest of my life. Such was the darkness of my soul, such was my dejection. The new moon shining almost at eye level was an omen of separation and an image of solitude.

I paused and reflected. My mind wandered. Thoughts and images emerged unbidden as I contemplated the blinding whiteness of the snow. A mirage appeared, as a thought out of season. I was in Bayreuth, Germany, in January. The tool shed directly across from my apartment window appeared to me as a chimera; it was Wagner's Festival Theater in mid-January, six months before the summer opera festival will begin. The theater has fallen into its customary winter disuse. As for the out-of-season festival theater -- a "beautiful" edifice of magnificent symmetry and noble and imposing forms -- on a lofty hill outside the town, when there was only the falling snow to be seen and the auditorium was bare, comfortless, and shadowy, it felt to me less like a place of high art and pleasure than a vacant library that had closed early on a snowy January day -- or, perhaps, a New England barn, atop a hill that everyone for miles can see.

The mirage seemed to give the appearance of a somewhat arcane sensation, a suggestion of something simultaneously flaunted and guarded, a sort of a private delusion waiting to be revealed. Through the charms and simplicities of Bayreuth, during the months before the summer festival, the image of Richard Wagner perpetually looms, like an icon or an ideal -- the comforting presence of an imagined friend, perhaps -- and in my fancy left my mirage of Bayreuth in a condition of half-bewitched expectancy. Just you try putting Wagner out of your mind in Bayreuth -- even in January! Wagner became in this moment a symbol of All-Things-wished-for but denied: an embodiment of frustrated enticement. He became a symbol of the special friend one despairs of ever finding. I recognized my emotional emptiness in the phantasm of the out-of-season, vacant theater at Bayreuth. And then, in a moment the image of Wagner that had gripped my fantasies disappeared, as if it had been blown out on the icy crust that cased the world, and he was gone!

I was left with a spiritual hunger borne of a disconnected feeling. The disconnected mood which strains for closure more in the artist than in others is the same bridge that joins me to Victor Hugo's "miserables." My emotional starvation welcomes as a brother fellow seekers: idealistic souls who pursue an inner vision of truth and meaning in defiance of the compact majority. But my starvation, however painful, also aids me in that central necessity for any artist -- to find a communicative Form or structure whereby I can simultaneously heal my inner disconnections and end my disconnection from others. My gift -- if it be called a gift -- permits me, while integrating the contrarities within, to provide such integration for my audience as to unite me with it. This is the self-healing and other-healing function of all art.

It is only by writing these letters that I seem able to derive any satisfaction from life. Social avenues of engagement with others seem blocked by the barrenness of my frozen soul. I am forever locked in the grips of a slippery slope that I desperately want to ascend, but to which I -- like Camus's Sisyphus -- am forced to submit in fatal descent. I lack the capacity for true engagement with others, and so I occupy myself with an imaginary connection with a distant and unseen audience through the communicative form of these letters.

For the genuine artist, the search for a suitable form competes in importance with the need to express a particular content. Mere content alone veers toward dissolution and incomprehensibility in the absence of a unifying structural barrier or boundary.

Structural issues of a different kind also mediate social relatedness, for, as Erik Erikson has observed, true engagement with others is the result and the test of firm self-delineation. Where this is still missing, the individual when seeking tentative forms of friendship is apt to experience a peculiar strain, as if such tentative engagement might turn into an interpersonal fusion amounting to a loss of identity, and requiring, therefore, a tense inner reservation, a caution in commitment. Because I myself have never resolved this strain I isolate myself and enter, at best, only stereotyped and formalized interpersonal relations. For where an assured sense of identity is missing even friendship becomes a desperate attempt at delineating the fuzzy outlines of identity by mutual narcissistic mirroring: to make a friend then often means to fall into one's mirror image, hurting oneself and damaging the mirror.

I seek a real person, an actual other, a comrade-in-arms -- a psychical ballast, as it were -- with whom I can share my thoughts and feelings.

If I can't make a friend, I would hope I might find a therapist with whom I could communicate: someone whose opinions I can respect, someone who might offer narcissistic nourishment to ease my emotional starvation. But at the moment there is no one.

What I desperately need at this time is a therapeutic process, including a transference relationship and the skillful guidance of a seasoned therapist to avail myself of opportunities for new growth: someone who can appreciate the needs, limitations, and capacities associated with my ego structure. What I need is a therapist who has a road map of the structural components of my ego processes to go alongside a road map of intrapsychic content (e.g., wishes, conflicts, fears), that can increase my understanding of my Self and improve my day-to-day adjustment.

Let me tell you something important, Brian. An important fact: I grew up in the theater. My parents were actors and directors, and I myself began performing when I was just a child. There is no place on earth that fosters narcissism like the theater, but by the same token, nowhere is it easier to believe that you are essentially empty, that you must constantly reinvent yourself in order to hold your audience in thrall. In childhood I became fascinated with transformations, with mirage and smoke and mirrors (rearview or otherwise). Perhaps a genetically less sensitive, less porous, and less gifted youngster would have responded with greater resilience to his family and would have achieved a more comfortable day-to-day adjustment. But I was hypersensitive to the goings-on in my family, and my early life in the theater exacted its toll.

I need a therapist who has a rich understanding of the various dramas played out in my intrapsychic life. I need a therapist who will sit quietly as he watches the play unfold, while being in his or her own mind also a co-actor. I need a therapist who appreciates the psychodrama of therapy: one who, within the walls of his office, is able to surrender his identity to the phantoms that haunt his patients, continually attending to the form of the moment of communication while bearing in mind the whole session as it echoes and repeats the form of the patient's life drama. I require a therapist who can accommodate the multifarious diffusion of my identity -- my inner gallery of characters -- and who can surrender himself to the act of witnessing the entire process of my inner drama play out.

Put another way, I need a therapist who understands the structure of my ego -- my psychic terrain, one might say -- and whose map of that structure will permit me to arrive home safely on a snowy, winter afternoon. Someone who knows which roads are navigable, which ones are temporarily blocked, and which roads are permanently impassable. There is nothing more frustrating to a passenger riding in a winter storm than the driver's self-aggrandizing false promises: promises about the ease of travel along a particular road that are based on the driver's foolhardy failure to appreciate the severity of the road conditions.

It's especially important clinically to understand the structure of the ego, in addition to the particular dynamic phenomenon the ego is struggling with at any moment so that therapist and patient can knowledgeably journey across the patient's mental landscape: to observe the patient's wishes and abstracted feeling states, make connections between different wishes and feelings (as well as different sides of a conflict), and understand these in historical, current, and future contexts.

Be that as it may.

It is now early evening on this snowy day in mid-January. The storm has all but passed. The stir is over. I step forth once again to peer outside my window. I strain to make the far-off images beyond my windowpane yield a cue to the events that may come in the days ahead. Night and its murk transfix and pin me, staring through thousands of stars. I cherish this moment, this rigorous conception of a snowy winter evening, and I consent to play my part therein as spectator. But another play is running at this moment, so, for the present, I seek a premature release. And yet, the order of the acts has been schemed and plotted, and nothing can avert the final curtain's fall. The January thaw will soon take off the polish of the snow's crust. I bow with grace to natural law. I stand alone. All else is swamped in fuzzy dissolution. To live life to the end, while peering back to the path one has already traversed, is not a childish task.

The Glenn A. Fine National Monument

The past few years have been some of the most tumultuous in the Justice Department's history. Nearly the entire department leadership resigned in a scandal over politicized hiring and firing.

In the controversy and its aftermath, the most important person at the department arguably has been Inspector General Glenn Fine.

Fine has been chief watchdog since December 2000. During that period, his predecessor Michael Bromwich says: "Glenn has had to deal with a series of challenges and issues that I think not only exceed what I faced, but probably have exceeded what any inspector general in any agency has faced over a long period of time."

A Leader On And In The Court

Fine stood out even during his days at Harvard University. Eric Mandelbaum met Fine at the beginning of their freshman year and says that as he struggled to adjust, Fine was confident and welcoming.

"There are a few people … that you meet over the course of Harvard who are really exceptional, and everybody knows why they're there, and Glenn was one of those," Mandelbaum says of his friend.

All of 5-foot-9, Fine was co-captain of Harvard's basketball team and "one of the smoothest, silkiest point guards that any of us had ever seen," Mandelbaum recalls. Fine had "one of the best-looking jump shots I ever saw. And the backspin on the ball, the arc of the ball, the way it would hit the inside of the net, the net would pop up. It was really something to behold."

Fine graduated from Harvard in 1979 and won a Rhodes scholarship. He went to Oxford, then Harvard Law School. He moved to Washington to practice labor and employment law. In the mid-'90s, he applied for a job working for Bromwich at the Justice Department.

"I'd seen his resume, which was an extraordinarily impressive resume," Bromwich says. "But the one thing I'd never seen on anybody else's resume was that he'd been drafted by the San Antonio Spurs."

Bromwich hired Fine in 1995 as special counsel. Soon, Fine became the office's first special investigative counsel and was running a whole investigative unit.

When Bromwich decided to step down after five years, he says it was natural to recommend Glenn Fine to succeed him. No one knew just how big Fine's task would become.

Confronted Challenging Issues

Fine's team has issued reports on harsh interrogations at Guantanamo Bay, on the Justice Department's politicized hiring of career lawyers, and on the FBI's abuse of national security letters. The inspector general's most recent opus was more than 350 pages on the dismissal of U.S. attorneys.

He has other major investigations in the works. One is about the civil rights division. Another focuses on the president's domestic spying program.

Fine's reports are often brutal. They have eviscerated the Justice Department's leadership.

Although Fine was a Clinton appointee, Republicans rarely attack him.

"Evidence is evidence … and you had people who were not behaving properly, and there was waste or fraud or abuse in the system, and it was quantifiable," says Mark Corallo, a Republican strategist. He adds, "You're not going to hear a lot of complaints when the behaviors are admittedly bad."

Corallo was chief spokesman for Attorney General John Ashcroft, who served the Bush administration from 2001 to 2005. Ashcroft's successor, Alberto Gonzales, stepped down in August 2007 amid accusations of having politicized law enforcement. Current Attorney General Michael Mukasey pledged at his confirmation hearings that he would follow the rule of law and get partisan politics out of the department's decision-making.

Bipartisan Kudos

When Fine testifies before Congress, lawmakers from both parties treat him as a hero. They've described him as a model inspector general.

"Glenn Fine has done an outstanding job as inspector general," says Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, the top Republican on the Judiciary Committee.

He sees Fine's success as a combination of good performance and good timing. "Fine has had more opportunities … to prove his mettle," Specter says.

Fine's reports explain in detail how the Justice Department went off the rails in the last few years.

For his part, Fine says he does not think about the magnitude of his work.

"We try and do our job … as fairly and aggressively as we can," he says of himself and his colleagues. "We take each issue as it comes, and we try and be as thorough as possible. So we don't stop and say, 'This is a historic time or tumultuous time.' Each one has its own challenges."

He's the longest-serving inspector general in the Justice Department's history — and says he has no plans to leave. After all, he says, in this job you're fortunate to be able to do only what you think is right.

The Birth of a New Self

I see a psychotherapist once a week. I've been thinking about cutting down the sessions to once every two weeks, or even once a month. There is no magic in our sessions. I attach no feeling of specialness to our interaction. Psychotherapy should be magical, it should be special. Special in the sense that one feels sensations that are not experienced in the mundane world. One should feel some connection to one's inner self, a connection to one's past and one's future possibilities. One should begin to see the grand connection between the inner world of wish fulfillment and the everyday human world of real objects. Psychotherapy should inspire a sense of the connectedness between past and present, between the self and others, and between conscious and unconscious. Therapy should be a process of synthesis and integration of the consciously-experienced self and the world of the seemingly alien. The revelations of the patient should be allowed to flow naturally, they should not be forced. The patient should act, feel, and say in the moment things that resonate at all the levels of his existence -- that resonate with the past; with unconscious wishes, conflicts and prohibitions; and with the Others of his life. Therapy should be a succession of moments of greater than normal psychological sensitivity. The therapist needs to confer significance upon the patient's suffering by making meaningful interpretations.

My therapist treats our interaction as an interrogation: an Inquisition of the self, as it were. It is an unholy Inquisition that torments and troubles me. I don't like being closely questioned. It seems that my therapist is only capable of asking questions, one after another. I like being questioned as much as a resistance fighter likes being interrogated by the Gestapo or an atheist by the Inquisition! But I don't, as some seem to think, just blindly disregard my therapist. There are therapists like mine who want facts, facts, facts, and of course I know their pursuit is profoundly useful. It's just that my daily, present world sometimes seems very remote from theirs. Therapy should be like old love affairs -- there is so much, not all bad, that one doesn't want to talk about, so much one can't talk about -- either because of reservations or repression. A great deal of therapy's beauty and excitement for the patient lies in the now in which the facts of one's life are being revealed. Like most, I am a bit manic-depressive, though the poles for me seem to lie much more between an active self and a nonentity. One self knows profoundly that it is neither important nor socially relevant at all; another, seen at far rarer moments, seems sometimes possessed. I feel identity with the average tribal shaman or the object of the shaman's ministrations.

The shaman, healer and spiritual expert in aboriginal Siberian culture, acts as the intermediary between humanity and the alien forces of disease and environmental catastrophe. Thus he fills the void wrought in the texture of existence by the incomprehensible experience of suffering. He serves as the link between the everyday human world and the realm of the ineffable, the unconscious, or, in his subjective belief the supernatural, and like Persephone he inhabits both worlds. He must experience the alien in himself as a prerequisite for interpreting and conferring significance upon the suffering of those who consult him for help against illness or misfortune. This personal experience of the alien, which resembles a mental disorder, is a major source of the apparent effectiveness of his form of psychotherapy, as it encourages the development of a greater than normal psychological sensitivity for his ever-renewed attempts to heal himself and his culture mates.

The ultimate aim of psychotherapy should be a kind of hatching: the birth of a new self out of the shells and slime of one's past existence. Psychotherapy should not simply be the accumulation of more and more facts about the patient.

What Are We Going To Do About Stanley Schmulewitz?

There's this old guy who lives in my apartment building. He's lived in the building for about 35 years. He's in his late seventies.

This is what gets me about the guy. He works out every day in the building's fitness center. In his street clothes. He uses the reclining stationary bicycle. I know this isn't the Christian thing to say, but neither I nor Stanley Schmulewitz is Christian. The guy is a total pain in the ass. He listens to the radio while he works out. He laughs, talks to himself, sings to himself, makes weird jerky movements -- the guy is a veritable freak show on ice. He's very distracting to me as I work out. The stationary bicycle is next to the elliptical machine that I use. I can see Schmulewitz in the wall mirror directly in front of us.

Why can't Stanley work out at a different time of the day. You're a pain in the ass, Stanley Schmulewitz.

This is my Stanley Schmulewitz impression: "Mu-ah, mu-ah. Hahahahaha. Yea. Yea. Oh, yea. Hahahahahaha. Hehehehehe. Mu-ah, mu-ah. That's right. Yea. Yea. Hahahahaha. Oh, yea." This goes on for an hour every morning. I can't stand it anymore.