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**Alchemist** · 12-17-2010, 10:33 AM

GUYS VS. MEN

Dave Barry

Dave Barry (b. 1947) is a syndicated columnist for the Miami Herald, where he won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1988. He is the author of twenty-three humor books, including Dave Barry's Complete Guide to Guys (1995), the introduction of which is included here. Despite its title, "Guys vs. Men" is not a comparative study of these two basic types of
males. Men and manhood have been written about far too much already, says Barry. But guys and guyhood are neglected topics, and even though he "can't define exactly what it means to be a guy," Barry's essay lays out "certain guy characteristics" that distinguish his quarry from other warm-blooded animals in the field.

This is a book about guys. It's not a book about men. There are already way too many books about men, and most of them are way too serious.
Men itself is a serious word, not to mention manhood and manly. Such words make being male sound like a very important activity, as opposed to what it primarily consists of, namely, possessing a set of minor and frequently unreliable organs.
But men tend to attach great significance to Manhood. This results in certain characteristically masculine, by which I mean stupid, behav*ioral patterns that can produce unfortunate results such as violent crime, war, spitting, and ice hockey. These things have given males a bad name. And the "Men's Movement," which is supposed to bring out the more positive aspects of Manliness, seems to be densely populated with loons and goobers.
So I'm saying that there's another way to look at males: not as aggressive macho dominators; not as sensitive, liberated, hugging drum*mers; but as guys.
And what, exactly, do I mean by "guys"? I don't know. I haven't thought that much about it. One of the major characteristics of guyhood is that we guys don't spend a lot of time pondering our deep innermost feelings. There is a serious question in my mind about whether guys actually have deep innermost feelings, unless you count, for example, loyalty to the Detroit Tigers, or fear of bridal showers.
But although I can't define exactly what it means to be a guy, I can describe certain guy characteristics, such as:

Guys Like Neat Stuff
By "neat," I mean "mechanical and unnecessarily complex." I'll give you an example. Right now I'm typing these words on an extremely powerful computer. It's the latest in a line of maybe ten computers I've owned, each one more powerful than the last. My computer is chock full of RAM and ROM and bytes and megahertzes and various other items that enable a computer to kick data-processing butt. It is probably capable of super*vising the entire U.S. air-defense apparatus while simultaneously proc*essing the tax return of every resident of Ohio. I use it mainly to write a newspaper column. This is an activity wherein I sit and stare at the screen for maybe ten minutes, then, using only my forefingers, slowly type something like:
Henry Kissinger looks like a big wart.
I stare at this for another ten minutes, have an inspiration, then amplify the original thought as follows:
Henry Kissinger looks like a big fat wart.
Then I stare at that for another ten minutes pondering whether I should try to work in the concept of "hairy."

This is absurdly simple work for my computer. It sits there, hum*ming impatiently, bored to death, passing the time between keystrokes via brain-teaser activities such as developing a Unified Field Theory of the universe and translating the complete works of Shakespeare into rap.
In other words, this computer is absurdly overqualified to work for me, and yet soon, I guarantee, I will buy an even more powerful one. I won't be able to stop myself, I'm a guy.
Probably the ultimate example of the fundamental guy drive tol1ave neat stuff is the Space Shuttle. Granted, the guys in charge of this pro*gram claim it has a Higher Scientific Purpose, namely to see how humans function in space. But of course we have known for years how humans function in space: They float around and say things like: "Looks real good, Houston!"
No, the real reason for the existence of the Space Shuttle is that it is one humongous and spectacularly gizmo-intensive item of hardware. Guys can tinker with it practically forever, and occasionally even get it to work, and use it to place other complex mechanical items into orbit, where they almost immediately break, which provides a great excuse to send the Space Shuttle up again. It's Guy Heaven.
Other results of the guy need to have stuff are Star Wars, the rec*reational boating industry, monorails, nuclear weapons, and wristwatches that indicate the phase of the moon. I am not saying that women haven't been involved in the development or use of this stuff. I'm saying that, without guys, this stuff probably would not exist; just as, without women, virtually every piece of furniture in the world would still be in its original position. Guys do not have a basic need to rearrange furniture. Whereas a woman who could cheerfully use the same computer for fifty-three years will rearrange her furniture on almost a weekly basis, sometimes in the dead of night. She'll be sound asleep in bed, and suddenly, at 2 A.M., she'll be awakened by the urgent thought: The blue-green sofa needs to go perpendicular to the wall instead of parallel, and it needs to go there RIGHT NOW. SO she'll get up and move it, which of course necessitates moving other furniture, and soon she has rearranged her entire living room, shift*ing great big heavy pieces that ordinarily would require several burly men to lift, because there are few forces in Nature more powerful than a woman who needs to rearrange furniture. Every so often a guy will wake up to discover that, because of his wife's overnight efforts, he now lives in an entirely different house.
(I realize that I'm making gender-based generalizations here, but my feeling is that if God did not want us to make gender-based gener*alizations, She would not have given us genders.)

Guys Like a Really Pointless Challenge
Not long ago I was sitting in my office at the Miami Herald's Sunday magazine, Tropic, reading my fan mail when I heard several of my guy coworkers in the hallway talking about how fast they could run the forty-*yard dash. These are guys in their thirties and forties who work in jour*nalism, where the most demanding physical requirement is the ability to digest vending-machine food. In other words, these guys have absolutely no need to run the forty-yard dash.
But one of them, Mike Wilson, was writing a story about a star high-school football player who could run it in 4.38 seconds. Now if Mike had written a story about, say, a star high-school poet, none of my guy coworkers would have suddenly decided to find out how well they could write sonnets. But when Mike turned in his story, they became deeply concerned about how fast they could run the forty-yard dash. They were so concerned that the magazine editor, Tom Shroder, decided that they should get a stopwatch and go out to a nearby park and find out. Which they did, a bunch of guys taking off their shoes and running around barefoot in a public park on company time.
This is what I heard them talking about, out in the hall. I heard Tom, who was thirty-eight years old, saying that his time in the forty had been 5.75 seconds. And I thought to myself: This is ridiculous. These are middle-aged guys, supposedly adults, and they're out there bragging about their performance in this stupid juvenile footrace. Finally I couldn't stand it anymore.
Hey!" I shouted. "I could beat 5.75 seconds."
So we went out to the park and measured off forty yards, and the guys told me that I had three chances to make my best time. On the first try my time was 5.78 seconds, just three-hundredths of a second slower than Tom's, even though, at forty-five, I was seven years older than he. So I just knew I'd beat him on the second attempt if I ran really, really hard, which I did for a solid ten yards, at which point my left hamstring muscle, which had not yet shifted into Spring Mode from Mail-Reading Mode, went, and I quote, "pop."
I had to be helped off the field. I was in considerable pain, and I was obviously not going to be able to walk right for weeks. The other guys were very sympathetic, especially Tom, who took the time to call me at home, where I was sitting with an ice pack on my leg and twenty*-three Advil in my bloodstream, so he could express his concern.
"Just remember," he said, "you didn't beat my time.”
There are countless other examples of guys rising to meet pointless challenges. Virtually all sports fall into this category, as well as a large part of U.S. foreign policy ("I'll bet you can't capture Manuel Noriega!" "Oh YEAH??")

Guys Do Not Have a Rigid and Well-Defined Moral Code
This is not the same as saying that guys are bad. Guys are capable of doing bad things, but this generally happens when they try to be Men and start becoming manly and aggressive and stupid. When they're being just plain guys, they aren't so much actively evil as they are lost. Because guys have never really grasped the Basic Human Moral Code, which I believe, was invented by women millions of years ago when all the guys were out engaging in some other activity, such as seeing who could burp the loudest. When they came back, there were certain rules that they were expected to follow unless they wanted to get into Big Trouble, and they have been trying to follow these rules ever since, with extremely irregular results. Because guys have never internalized these rules. Guys are similar to my small auxiliary backup dog, Zippy, a guy dog4 who has been told numerous times that he is not supposed to (1) get into the kitchen garbage or (2) poop on the floor. He knows that these are the rules, but he has never really understood why, and sometimes he gets to thinking: Sure, I am oydinarily not supposed to get into the garbage, but obviously this rule is not meant to apply when there are certain exten*uating5 circumstances, such as (1) somebody just threw away some per*fectly good seven-week-old Kung Pao Chicken, and (2) I am home alone.
And so when the humans come home, the kitchen floor has been transformed into Garbage-Fest USA, and Zippy, who usually comes rushing up, is off in a corner disguised in a wig and sunglasses, hoping to get into the Federal Bad Dog Relocation Program before the humans discover the scene of the crime.
When I yell at him, he frequently becomes so upset that he poops on the floor.
Morally, most guys are just like Zippy, only taller and usually less hairy. Guys are aware of the rules of moral behavior, but they have trouble keeping these rules in the forefronts of their minds at certain times, especially the present. This is especially true in the area of faith*fulness to one's mate. I realize, of course, that there are countless exam*ples of guys being faithful to their mates until they die, usually as a result of being eaten by their mates immediately following copulation. Guys outside of the spider community, however, do not have a terrific record of faithfulness.
I'm not saying guys are ****. I'm saying that many guys who consider themselves to be committed to their marriages will stray if they are confronted with overwhelming temptation, defined as "virtually any temptation.”
Okay, so maybe I am saying guys are ****. But they're not mean-*spirited ****. And few of them—even when they are out of town on business trips, far from their wives, and have a clear-cut opportunity*—will poop on the floor.

Barry, Dave. “Guys vs. Men.” The Norton Sampler, Sixth Edition. Ed. Thomas Cooley. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2003. 246-251.

**Sheenka** · 12-17-2010, 10:44 AM

thats really good idea

thanks for share

**Alchemist** · 12-17-2010, 11:26 AM

Max Stirner

The False Principle of Our Education

Because our time is struggling toward the word with which it may express its spirit, many names come to the fore and all make claim to being the right name. On all sides our present time reveals the most chaotic partisan tumult and the eagles of the moment gather around the decaying legacy of the past. There is everywhere a great abundance of political, social, ecclesiastical, scientific, artistic, moral and other corpses, and until they are all consumed, the air will not be clean and the breath of living beings will be oppressed.
Without our assistance, time will not bring the right word to light; we must all work together on it. If, however, so much depends upon us, we may reasonably ask what they have made of us and what they propose to make of us; we ask about the education through which they seek to enable us to become the creators of that word. Do they conscientiously cultivate our predisposition to become creators or do they treat us only as creatures whose nature simply permits training? The question is as important as one of our social questions can ever be, indeed, it is the most important one because those questions rest on this ultimate basis. Be something excellent and you will bring about something excellent: be “each one perfect in himself,” then your society, your social life, will also be perfect.
Therefore we are concerned above all with what they make of us in the time of our plasticity; the school question is a life question. They can now be seen quite clearly; this area has been fought over for years with an ardor and a frankness which far surpasses that in the realm of politics because there it does not knock up against the obstructions of arbitrary power.
A venerable veteran, Professor Theodor Heinsius,[1] who, like the late Professor Krug[2] retained his strength and zeal into old age, has recently sought to provoke interest for this cause by a little essay. He calls it a “Concordat between school and life or mediation of humanism and realism from a nationalistic point of view.” Two parties struggle for victory and each wants to recommend his principle of education as the best and truest for our needs: the humanists and the realists. Not wanting to incur the displeasure of either, Heinsius speaks in his booklet with that mildness and conciliation which means to give both their due and thereby does the greatest injustice to the cause itself since it can only be served by a sharp decisiveness. As things stand, this sin against the spirit of the cause remains the inseparable legacy of all faint-hearted mediators. “Concordats” offer only a cowardly expedient.

Only frank like a man: for or against!
And the watchword: slave or free!
Even gods descended from Olympus,
And fought on the battlements of their ally.

Before arriving at his own proposals, Heinsius draws up a short sketch of the course of history since the Reformation. The period between the Reformation and the Revolution is which I will assert here without support since I plan to show it in greater detail at another opportunity that of the relationship between adults and minors, between the reigning and the serving, the powerful and the powerless, in short, the period of subjection. Apart from any other basis which might justify a superiority, education, as a power, raised him who possessed it over the weak, who lacked it, and the educated man counted in his circle, however large or small it was, as the mighty, the powerful, the imposing one: for he was an authority. Not everyone could be called to this command and authority; therefore, education was not for every one and universal education contradicted that principle. Education creates superiority and makes one a master: thus in that age of the master, it was a means to power. But the Revolution broke through the master-servant economy and the axiom came forth: everyone is his own master. Connected with this was the necessary conclusion that education, which indeed produces the master, must henceforth become universal and the task of finding true universal education now presented itself. The drive toward a universal education accessible to everyone must advance to struggle against the obstinately maintained exclusive education, and in the area also the Revolution must draw the sword against the domination of the period of the Reformation. The idea of universal education collided with the idea of exclusive education, and the strife and struggle moves through phases and under sundry names into the present. For the contradictions of the opposing enemy camps, Heinsius chose the names humanism and realism, and, inaccurate as they are, we will retain them as the most commonly used.
Until the Enlightenment began to spread its light in the Eighteenth Century, so called higher education lay without protest in the hands of the humanists and was based almost solely on the understanding of the old classics. Another education went along at the same time which likewise sought its example in antiquity and mainly ended up with a considerable knowledge of the Bible. That in both cases they selected the best education of the world of antiquity for their exclusive subject matter proves sufficiently how little of dignity our own life offered, and how far we still were from being able to create the forms of beauty out of our own originality and the content of truth out of our own reason. First we had to learn form and content; we were apprentices. And as the world of antiquity through classics and the Bible rule over us as a mistress, so was which can be historically proven being a lord and being a servant really the essence of all our activity, and only from this characteristic of the era does it become plain why they aspire so openly toward a “higher education” and were so intent upon distinguishing themselves by that means before the common people. With education, its possessor became a master of the uneducated. A popular education would have opposed this because the people were supposed to remain in the laity opposite the learned gentlemen, were only supposed to gaze in astonishment at the strange splendor and venerate it. Thus Romanism continued in learning and its supporters are Latin and Greek. Furthermore, it was inevitable that this education remained throughout a formal education, as much on this account because of the antiquity long dead and buried, only the forms, as it were, the schemes of literature and art were preserved, as for the particular reason that domination over people will simply be acquired and asserted through formal superiority; it requires only a certain degree of intellectual agility to gain superiority over the less agile people. So called higher education was therefore an elegant education, a sensus omnis elegantiae, an education of taste and a sense of forms which finally threatened to sink completely into a grammatical education and perfumed the German language itself with the smell of Latium so much that even today one has an opportunity to admire the most beautiful Latin sentence structures, for example, in the just published History of the Brandenburg-Prussian States. A Book for Everyone.[3]
In the meantime, a spirit of opposition gradually arose out of the Enlightenment against this formalism and the demand for an all-encompassing, a truly human education allied itself with the recognition of the secure and universal rights of man. The lack of solid instruction which would interact with life was illuminated by the manner in which the Humanists had proceeded up to that time and generated the demand for a practical finishing education. Henceforth, all knowledge was to be life, knowledge being lived; for only the reality of knowledge is its perfection. If bringing the material of life into the school succeeded in offering thereby something useful to everyone, and for that very reason to win everyone over for this preparation for life and to turn them towards school, then one would not envy the learned gentlemen anymore for their singular knowledge and the people would no longer remain of the laity. To eliminate the priesthood of the scholars and the laity of the people is the endeavor of realism and therefore it must surpass humanism. Appropriating the classical forms of antiquity began to be restrained and with it the sovereign-authority lost its nimbus. The time struggled against the traditional respect for scholarship as it generally rebels against any respect.
The essential advantage of scholars, universal education, should be beneficial to everyone. However, one asks, what is universal education other than the capacity, trivially expressed, “to be able to talk about everything,” or more seriously expressed, the capacity to master any material? School was seen to be left behind by life since it not only withdrew from the people but even neglected universal education with its students in favor of exclusive education, and it failed to urge mastery in school of a great deal of material which is thrust upon us by life. School, one thought, indeed has to outline our reconciliation with everything life offers and to care for it so that none of the things with which we must some day concern ourselves will be completely alien to us and beyond our power to master. Therefore familiarity with the things and situations of the present was sought most vigorously and a pedagogy was brought into fashion which must find application to everyone because it satisfied the common need of everyone to find themselves in their world and time. The basic principles of human rights in this way gained life and reality in educational spheres: equality, because that education embraced everyone, and freedom, because one became conversant with one's needs and consequently independent and autonomous.
However, to grasp the past as humanism teaches and to seize the present, which is the aim of realism, leads both only to power over the transitory. Only the spirit which understands itself is eternal. Therefore, equality and freedom received only a subordinate existence. One could indeed become equal to others and emancipated from their authority; from the equality with oneself, from the equalization and reconciliation of our transient and eternal man, from the transfiguration of our naturalness to spirituality, in short, from the unity and supreme power of our ego, which is enough for itself since it leaves nothing alien standing outside of itself : Hardly any idea of it was to be recognized in that principle. And freedom appeared indeed as independence from authorities, however, it lacked self-determination and still produced none of the acts of a man who is free-in-himself, self-revelations of an inconsiderate[4] man, that is, of one of those minds saved from the fluctuating of contemplation. The formally educated man certainly was not to stand out above the mirror of the ocean of universal education anymore, and he transformed himself from a “highly educated man” into a “one-sided educated man” (as such he naturally maintains his uncontested worth, since all universal education is intended to radiate into the most varied single-mindednesses of special education); but the man educated in the sense of realism did not surpass the equality with others and the freedom from others, neither did he come out ahead of the so-called practical man. Certainly the empty elegance of the humanist, of the dandy, could not help but decline; but the victor glistened with the verdigris of materiality and was nothing better than a tasteless materialist.[5] Dandyism and materialism struggle for the prize of the dear boys and girls and often seductively exchange armor in that the Dandy appears in coarse cynicism and the materialist appears in white linen. To be sure, the living wood of the materialist clubs will smash the dry staff of the marrowless Dandy; but living, or dead, wood remains wood, and if the flame of the spirit is to burn, the wood must go up in fire.
Why, in the meantime, must realism also, if (not denying it the capacity) it assimilates the good aspects of humanism, nevertheless perish?
Certainly it can assimilate the inalienable and true of humanism, formal education, and this assimilation is made ever easier through the scientific method which has become possible and through the sensible treatment of all objects of instruction (I draw attention by way of example only to Becker's[6] rendering of German Grammar) and can through this refinement push its opponent from its strong position. Since realism as well as humanism proceeds from the idea that the aim of education is to produce versatility for man and since both agree, for example, that one must be accustomed to every turn of idiomatic expression, must mathematically enjoin the turn of the proof, etc., so that one has to struggle towards mastery in handling the material, towards its mastery: thus it will certainly not fail that even realism will finally recognize the formation of taste as the final goal and put the act of forming in first place, as is already partly the case. For in education, all of the material given has value only in so far as children learn to do something with it, to use it. Certainly only the practical and the useful should be stressed, as the realists desire; but the benefit is really only to be sought in forming, in generalizing, in presenting, and one will not be able to reject this humanistic claim. The humanists are right in that it depends above all on formal education — they are wrong, in that they do not find this in the mastery of every subject; the realists demand the right thing in that every subject must be begun in school, they demand the wrong thing then when they do not want to look upon formal education as the principal goal. If it exercises real self-abnegation and does not give itself over to materialistic enticements, realism can come to this victory over its adversary and at the same time come to a reconciliation with him. Why do we nevertheless now show enmity to it?
Does it then really throw off the husk of the old principle and does it stand on the ramparts of the time? In that respect everything must be judged, whether it admits the idea which time has achieved as its most valuable or whether it takes a stationary place behind it. That indelible fear which causes the realists to shrink back in horror from abstractions and speculations must surprise and I will therefore now set down here a few selections from Heinsius who yields nothing to the unbending realists upon this point and saves me quotations from them which would be easy to cite. On page 9 it says:

“In the higher institutions of learning one hears about philosophical systems of the Greeks, of Aristotle and Plato, also, no doubt, of the moderns, of Kant, that he has put away the ideas of God, freedom, immortality, as unprovable; of Fichte, that he has set moral world order in place of the personal God; of Schelling,[7] Hegel, Herbart,[8] Krause,[9] and whomsoever may be called discoverers and heralds of supernatural wisdom. What, they say, should we, should the German nation set about to do with idealistic enthusiasms which belongs to neither the empirical and positive sciences nor to practical life and which do not benefit the state which, with an obscure perception which only confuses the spirit of the time, leads to disbelief and atheism, divides the minds, chases the students themselves away from the professorial chairs of the apostles, and even obscures our national tongue in that it transforms the clearest conceptions of common sense into mystical enigmas? Is that the wisdom that should educate our youth to be moral, good people, thinking, reasonable beings, true citizens, useful and able workers in their professions, loving spouses and provident fathers for the establishment of domestic well-being?”

And on page 45:

“Let us look at philosophy and theology, which, as sciences of thinking and faith are put in first place for the welfare of the world; what have they become through their mutual friction since Leibniz broke the path to them? The dualism, materialism, idealism, supernaturalism, rationalism, mysticism, and whatever all the abtruse-isms of exaggerated speculations and feelings may be called: what kind of blessings have they brought the state, the church, the arts, the national culture? Thought and knowledge have certainly expanded in their sphere; however, has the former become clearer and the latter more certain? Religion, as a dogma, is purer, but subjective belief is more confused, weakened, lacking supporters, shaken by criticism and interpretation, or transformed into fanaticism and a hypocritical appearance of holiness, and the church? oh, its life is schism or death. It it not so?”

For what reason then do the realists show themselves so unfriendly toward philosophy? Because they misunderstand their own calling and with all their might want to remain restricted instead of becoming unrestricted! Why do they hate abstractions? Because they themselves are abstract since they abstract from the perfection of themselves, from the elevation to redeeming truth!
Do we want to put pedagogy into the hands of the philosophers? Nothing less than that! They would behave themselves awkwardly enough. It shall be entrusted only to those who are more than philosophers, who in that respect are infinitely more even than humanists or realists. The latter are on the right scent in that even the resurrection will follow their decline: they abstract from philosophy in order to reach their heaven full of purpose without it, they leap over it, and fall in the abyss of their own emptiness; they are, like the eternal Jew, immortal, not eternal.
Only the philosophers can die and find in death their true self; with them the period of reformation, the era of knowledge dies. Yes, so it is that knowledge itself must die in order to blossom forth again in death as will; the freedom of thought, belief, and conscience, these wonderful flowers of three centuries will sink back into the lap of mother earth so that a new freedom, the freedom of will, will be nourished with its most noble juices. Knowledge and its freedom were the ideal of that time which has finally been reached on the heights of philosophy: here the hero will build himself a pyre and will rescue his eternal part in Mount Olympus. With philosophy, our past closes and the philosophers are the Raphaels of the era of thought with which the old principle perfects itself in a bright splendor of colors and through rejuvenation is changed from transient to eternal. Henceforth, whoever wants to preserve knowledge will lose it; he, however, who gives it up will gain it.[Compare with Matt. 10;39 and Luke 17;33] The philosophers alone are called to this giving-up and to this gain: they stand in front of the flaming fire and, like the dying hero, must burn their mortal body if the immortal spirit is to be free.
As much as possible it must be more intelligibly stated. Therein indeed lies the ever recurring mistake of our day, that knowledge is not brought to completion and perspicuity, that it remains a material and formal, a positive thing, without rising to the absolute, that it loads us down like a burden. Like the ancients, one must wish for forgetfulness, must drink from the blessed Lethe: otherwise one does not come to ones senses. Everything great must know how to die and transfigure itself through its death; only the miserable accumulates like the frozen-limbed supreme court,[10] heaps documents upon documents, and plays for the millenia in delicate porcelain figures, like the immortal childishness of the Chinese. Proper knowledge perfects itself when it stops being knowledge and becomes a simple human drive once again, the will. So, for example, he who has deliberated for many years about his “calling as a human being,” will sink all care and pilgrimage of seeking in one moment in the Lethe of a simple feeling, of a drive which from that hour in which he has found the former gradually leads him. The “calling of man” which he was tracking down on a thousand paths and byways of research bursts as soon as it has been recognized into the flame of ethical will and inflames the breast of the person who is not distracted any longer with seeking but has again become fresh and natural.

Up, bathe, pupil unweariedly,
Your earthly breast in the redness of dawn.[11]

That is the end and at the same time the immortality, the eternity of knowledge: knowledge, which has become once again simple and direct, sets and reveals itself anew as will in a new form and in every action. The will is not fundamentally right, as the practical ones would like very much to assure us; one may not pass over the desire for knowledge in order to stand immediately in the will, but knowledge perfects itself to will when it desensualizes itself and creates itself as a spirit “which builds its own body.” Therefore adhere to any education which does not terminate in this death and this ascension of knowledge to heaven, the frailty of this earthly life, formality and materiality, dandyism, and materialism. A knowledge which does not refine and concentrate itself so that it is carried away by will, or, in other words, a knowledge which only burdens me as a belonging and possession, instead of having gone along with me completely so that the free-moving ego, not encumbered by any dragging possessions, passes through the world with a fresh spirit, such a knowledge then, which has not become personal, furnishes a poor preparation for life. One does not want to let it come to the abstraction in which the true consecration of all concrete knowledge is first imparted: for through it, the material will really be killed and transformed into spirit; however, to man is given the actual and last liberation. Only in abstraction is freedom: the free man is only he who has won over the bestowal and has taken together again into the unity of his ego that which has been questioningly enticed from himself.
If it is the drive of our time, after freedom of thought is won, to pursue it to that perfection through which it changes to freedom of the will in order to realize the latter as the principle of a new era, then the final goal of education can no longer be knowledge, but the will born out of knowledge, and the spoken expression of that for which it has to strive is: the personal or free man. Truth itself consists in nothing other than man's revelation of himself, and thereto belongs the discovery of himself, the liberation from all that is alien, the uttermost abstraction or release from all authority, the re-won naturalness. Such thoroughly true men are not supplied by school; if they are nevertheless there, they are there in spite of school. This indeed makes us masters of things at the most, also, masters of our nature; it does not make us into free natures. No knowledge, however thorough and extensive, no brilliance and perspicuity, no dialectic sophistication, will preserve us from the commonness of thought and will. It is truly not the merit of the school if we do not come out selfish. Each sort of corresponding pride and every wind of covetousness, eagerness for office, mechanical and servile officiousness, hypocrisy, etc., is bound as much with extensive knowledge as with elegant, classical education, and since this whole instruction exercises no influence of any sort on our ethical behavior, it thus frequently falls to the fate of being forgotten in the same measure as it is not used: one shakes off the dust of the school.
And all of this because education is sought only in its formal or material aspects, at the most, in both; not in truth, in the education of the true man. The realists do indeed make progress when they demand that the student should find and understand that which be learns: Diesterweg,[12] for example, knows how to talk a great deal about the “Principle of experience”; but the object is not the truth, even here, but rather some sort of positive thing (as which religion must also be considered), to which the student is led to bring into agreement and coherence with the sum of his other positive knowledge without raising it at all above the crude state of experience and contemplation, and without any incentive to work further with the mind which he has gained by contemplation and out of it to produce, that is, to be speculative, which from a practical standpoint implies as much as to be moral and to behave morally. On the contrary, to educate rational people, that should be sufficient; it is not really intended for sensible people; to understand things and conditions, there the matter is ended, to understand oneself does not seem to be everyman's concern. Thus sense is promoted for the positive whether it be according to its formal side or at the same time according to its material side, and teaches: to reconcile oneself to the positive. In the pedagogical as in certain other spheres freedom is not allowed to erupt, the power of the opposition is not allowed to put a word in edgewise: they want submissiveness. Only a formal and material training is being aimed at and only scholars come out of the menageries of the humanists, only “useful citizens” out of those of the realists, both of whom are indeed nothing but subservient people.
Our good background of recalcitrancy gets strongly suppressed and with it the development of knowledge to free will. The result of school life then is philistinism. Just as we found our way into and permeated everything with which we were confronted during our childhood, so we discover and conduct ourselves in later years, resign ourselves to the times, become its servants and so-called good citizens. Where then will a spirit of opposition be strengthened in place of the subservience which has been cultivated until now, where will a creative person be educated instead of a learning one, where does the teacher turn into a fellow worker, where does he recognize knowledge as turning into will, where does the free man count as a goal and not the merely educated one? Unfortunately, only in a few places yet. The insight must become more universal, not so that education, civilization, the highest task of man is decided, but rather self-application. Will education be neglected for that reason? Just as little as we are disposed to suffer loss of freedom of thought while we change it into freedom of will and glorify it. If man puts his honor first in relying upon himself, knowing himself and applying himself, thus in self-reliance, self-assertion, and freedom, he then strives to rid himself of the ignorance which makes out of the strange impenetrable object a barrier and hindrance to his self-knowledge. If one awakens in men the idea of freedom then the free men will incessantly go on to free themselves; if, on the contrary, one only educates them, then they will at all times accommodate themselves to circumstances in the most highly educated and elegant manner and degenerate into subservient cringing souls. What are our gifted and educated subjects for the most part? Scornful, smiling slave-owners and themselves slaves.
The realists may glory in their advantage that they do not simply educate scholars, but rational and useful citizens: indeed, their basic principle: “one teaches everything in relation to practical life,” could even be valid as the motto of our time if they only would not interpret the true practice in a common sense. The true practice is not that of making one's way through life, and knowledge is worth more than that one might use it up and thereby secure one's practical goals. Moreover, the highest practice is that a free man reveal himself, and knowledge that knows to die is the freedom which offers life. “The practical life!” With that, one thinks one has said a great deal, and, still, even the animals lead a thoroughly practical life and as soon as the mother has finished her theoretical weaning period, they either seek their food in field and forest as they please or they are harnessed up with a yoke for service. Scheitlin[13] with his science of animal souls would take the comparison even much further, into religion, as is clear from his Science of Animal Souls, a book which for just that reason is very instructive because it places the animal so close to civilized man and civilized man so close to the animal. That intention “to educate for practical life” only brings forth people of principles who act and think according to maxims, but no principled men; legal minds, not free ones. Quite another thing are people whose totality of thought and action swings in continuous movement and rejuvenation and quite another thing are such people who are true to their convictions: the convictions themselves remain unshaken, do not pulse as continually renewed arterial blood through the heart, but freeze, as it were, as solid bodies and even if won and not hammered into the head are certainly something positive and what is more, count as something holy.
A realistic education, therefore, may well produce strong, diligent and healthy individuals, unshakable men, true hearts; and that is indeed a priceless gain for our fair sex; but the eternal characters in whom constance only consists in the unremitting floods of their hourly self-creation and who are therefore eternal because they form themselves each moment, because they set the temporal concerns of their actual appearance out of the never-withering or aging freshness and creative activity of their eternal spirit they do not result from that education. The so-called sound character is even in the best instance only a rigid one. If it is to be a perfect one then it must become at the same time a suffering one, quivering and trembling in the blessed passion of an unceasing rejuvenation and rebirth.
Thus the radii of all education run together into one center which is called personality. Knowledge, as scholarly and profound or as wide and comprehensible as it may be, remains indeed only a possession and belonging so long as it has not vanished in the invisible point of the ego, from there to break forth all-powerfully as will, as supersensual and incomprehensible spirit. Knowledge experiences this transformation then, when it ceases clinging only to objects, when it has become knowledge itself or, in case this seems clearer, when it has become knowledge of the idea, a self-awareness of the mind. Then it turns itself, so to speak, into the drive, the instinct of the mind, into a subconscious knowledge which everyone can at least imagine if he compares it with how so many and comprehensive experiences of his own self become sublimated into the simple feeling which one calls tact: everything of diffuse knowledge which is pulled out of those experiences is concentrated into immediate knowledge whereby he determines his actions in an instant. Knowledge, however, must penetrate through to this immateriality while it sacrifices its mortal parts and, as immortal becomes will.
The difficulty in our education up till now lies, for the most part, in the fact that knowledge did not refine itself into will, to application of itself, to pure practice. The realists felt the need and supplied it, though in a most miserable way, by cultivating idea-less and fettered “practical men.” Most college students are living examples of this sad turn of events. Trained in the most excellent manner, they go on training; drilled, they continue drilling. Every education, however, must be personal and stemming from knowledge, it must continuously keep the essence of knowledge in mind, namely this, that it must never be a possession, but rather the ego itself. In a word, it is not knowledge that should be taught, rather, the individual should come to self-development; pedagogy should not proceed any further towards civilizing, but toward the development of free men, sovereign characters; and therefore, the will which up to this time has been so strongly suppressed, may no longer be weakened. Do they not indeed weaken the will to knowledge, then why weaken the will to will? After all, we do not hinder man's quest for knowledge; why should we intimidate his free will? If we nurture the former, we should nurture the latter as well.
Childlike obstinacy and intractability have as much right as childlike curiosity. The latter is being stimulated; so one shall also call forth the natural strength of the will, opposition. If a child does not learn self-awareness, then he plainly does not learn that which is most important. They do not suppress his pride or his frankness. My own freedom is safe from his wild spirits. If pride turns into spite, then the child approaches me with violence; I do not have to endure this since I am just as free as the child. Must I however defend myself against him by using the convenient rampart of authority? No, I oppose him with the strength of my own freedom; thus the spite of the child will break up by itself. Whoever is a complete person does not need to be an authority. And if frankness breaks out into insolence, then this loses its vigor in the tender strength of a true wife in her motherliness or in the firmness of the husband; he is very weak who must call to authority for help and he does wrong if he thinks to improve the impudent as soon as he makes him fearful. To promote fear and respect; those are things that belong with the period of the dead rococo.
What do we complain about then when we take a look at the shortcomings of our school education of today? About the fact that our schools still stand on the old principle, that of will-less knowledge. The new principle is that of the will as glorification of knowledge. Therefore no “Concordat between school and life,” but rather school is to be life and there, as outside of it, the self-revelation of the individual is to be the task. The universal education of school is to be an education for freedom, not for subservience: to be free, that is true life. The insight into the lifelessness of humanism should have forced realism to this knowledge. Meanwhile, one became aware in humanistic education only of the lack of any capacity for so-called practical (bourgeois not personal) life and turned in opposition against that simply formal education to a material education, in the belief that by communicating that material which is useful in social intercourse one would not only surpass formalism, but would even satisfy the highest requirement. But even practical education still stands far behind the personal and free, and gives the former the skill to fight through life, thus the latter provides the strength to strike the spark of life out of oneself; if the former prepares to find oneself at home in a given world, so the latter teaches to be at home with oneself. We are not yet everything when we move as useful members of society; we are much more able to perfect this only if we are free people, self-creating (creating ourselves) people.
Now if the idea and impulse of modern times is free will, then pedagogy must hover in front as the beginning and the aim of the education of the free personality. Humanists, like realists, still limit themselves to knowledge, and at most, they look to free thought and make us into free thinkers by theoretical liberation. Through knowledge, however, we become only internally free, (a freedom moreover, that is never again to be given up); outwardly, with all freedom of conscience and freedom of thought, we can remain slaves and remain in subjection. And indeed, external freedom is for knowledge just that which the inner and true, the moral freedom, is for the will.
In this universal education, therefore, because the lowest and highest meet together in it, we come upon the true equality of all for the first time, the equality of free people: only freedom is equality.
One can, if one wants a name, place the moralists above the humanists and realists since their final goal is moral education. Then, to be sure, the protest comes immediately that again they will want to educate us to adhere to positive laws of morality and basically, that this has already taken place up to the present time. Because it has already happened up to now, therefore I am not of that opinion, and that I want the strength of opposition to be awakened and the self-will not to be broken, but rather to be transformed, that could clarify the difference sufficiently. In order still to differentiate the claim which is set forth here from the best efforts of the realists, such a one, for example, as is expressed in the recently published program of Diesterweg on page 36: “In the lack of education for character lies the weakness of our schools, like the weakness of our overall education. We do not inculcate any convictions,” I rather say, we need from now on a personal education (not the impressing of convictions). If one wants to call again those who follow this principle -ists, then, in my opinion, one may call them personalists.
Therefore, to go back to Heinsius once again, the “vigorous desire of the nation, that the school might be more closely allied with life” will only be fulfilled if one finds real life in full personality, independence and freedom, since whoever strives toward this goal relinquishes nothing of the good of humanism nor of realism, but rather raises them both infinitely higher and ennobles them. Even the national point of view which Heinsius takes still cannot be praised as the right one, since that is only the personal one. Only the free and personal man is a good citizen (realist), and even with the lack of particular (scholarly, artistic, etc) culture, a tasteful judge (humanist).
If my conclusion is to express in a few words which goal our time has to steer toward, then the necessary decline of non-voluntary learning and rise of the self-assured will which perfects itself in the glorious sunlight of the free person may be expressed somewhat as follows: knowledge must die and rise again as will and create itself anew each day as a free person.
Footnotes

[1]^ Otto Friedrich Theodor Heinsius (1770-1849), philologist, professor, and later director of the Couvent-Gris in Berlin, author of several highly regarded grammars and dictionaries, histories of German literature. The book cited by Stirner is Konkordat zwischen Schule und Leben, oder Vermittelung des Humanismus und Realismus, aus nationalistische Standpunkt betrachtet, published by Schultze in Berlin in 1842. Also useful is his Zeitgemäße Pädagogik der Schule: historisch und kritisch aufgefaßt für das gesammte Schulpublikum, published in Berlin in 1844.
[2]^ Wilhelm-Traugott Krug (1770-1842), famous German liberal philosopher and literary figure, successor to Immanuel Kant to the chair of logic and metaphysics at Königsberg In 1805, and from 1809 to 1834 professor of philosophy at Leipzig. Krug suspended his academic career to fight against Napoleon in 1813, and was subsequently president of the Tugendbund. He was author of more than a score of works, several of them in series of two to five volumes.
[3]^ Geschichte des brandenburgisch-preussischen Staates. Ein Buch für Jedermann was published in 1842. The author, A. Zimmermann, is a very elusive figure, and virtually nothing is known of him even today. At one time he was confused erroneously with Wilhelm Zimmermann (1807-1878), a prolific writer of popularly written histories, many of which appeared in the decades of the 1840s and 1850s.
[4]^ Cf. Ger. rücksichtslosen, used in a special sense here, as the opposite of contemplative, not boorish or thoughtless.
[5]^ Cf. Ger. Industrieller. From the context there is no evidence that Stirner's critique is being directed to what we would call industrialists or manufacturers today. Perhaps the closest we can come to his thinking here would be the term of Albert Jay Nock, “economism”, as a description of a life devoted almost exclusively to the production and consumption of goods for the sake of producing and consuming, instead of for their discriminating enjoyment.
[6]^ Karl Ferdinand Becker (1775-1849), famous German grammarian, student of the logic of German speech, innovator in fields of syntax and style. His Deutsche Grammatik was published in 1829, his Organismus der deutschen Sprache was in a second edition in 1841.
[7]^ Friedrich Wilhelm Josef von Schelling (1775-1854), a major figure In German philosophy, but also a philologist of substance.
[8]^ Johann Friedrich Herbart (1776-1841), German philosopher and critic of philosophers and philosophy, a disciple of Wolf and Kant and later a critic of Kant and Hegel. At one time a professor at Jena and later at Königsberg and Göttingen, his books, which included several works on pedagogy and educational theory, were well known in Germany.
[9]^ Karl Christian Friedrich Krause (1781-1832), prolific writer in the field of philosophy, and especially on the subject of theories of learning. He was the author of nearly twenty-five books and many smaller pieces, a number of which were published posthumously.
[10]^ A reference to the old supreme court of the Second German Empire, which by Stirner's time had been, for all practical purposes defunct for more than a century, but which continued its formal existence through lacking any means for enforcing its verdicts.
[11]^From Goethe's Faust, a quotation which has been exceedingly familiar to generations of German students.
[12]^ Friedrich Adolf Wilhelm Diesterweg (1790-1863), formidable German philologist and educational critic, director of the teachers college in Berlin in 1832. He staged a fierce attack on control of education by State and Church, and as a supporter of a program for centering education around the child he was widely referred to as an emulator and continuator of the Swiss educational reformer Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi (1746-1827). Diesterweg, the editor of two educational journals of considerable importance, was forced to retire in 1850 after years of bitter attacks. As in the case of Professor Krug, he was highly regarded in France.
[13]^ Versuch einer vollständigen Thierseelenkunde by Peter Scheitlin was published in Stuttgart and Tübingen in 1840.

**Alchemist** · 12-17-2010, 11:27 AM

WHY WOMEN SMILE

Amy Cunningham

After smiling brilliantly for nearly four decades, I now find myself trying to quit. Or, at the very least, seeking to lower the wattage a bit.
Not everyone I know is keen on this. My smile has gleamed like a cheap plastic night-light so long and so reliably that certain friends and relatives worry that my mood will darken the moment my smile dims. "Gee," one says, "I associate you with your smile. It's the essence of you. I should think you'd want to smile more!" But the people who love me best agree that my smile *which springs forth no matter where I am or how I feel-hasn't been serving me well. Said my husband recently, "Your smiling face and unthreatening demeanor make people like you in a fuzzy way, but that doesn't seen'; to be what you're after these days."
Smiles are not the small and innocuous things they appear to be: Too many of us smile in lieu of showing what's really on our minds. Indeed, the success of the women's movement might be measured by the sincerity-and lack of it-in our smiles. Despite all the work we American women have done to get and maintain full legal control of our bodies, not to mention our destinies, we still don't seem to be fully in charge of a couple of small muscle groups in our faces.
We smile so often and so promiscuously-when we're angry, when we're tense, when we're with children, when we're being photographed, when we're interviewing for a job, when we're meeting candidates to employ-that the Smiling Woman has become a peculiarly American archetype. This isn't entirely a bad thing, of course. A smile lightens the load, diffuses unpleasant*ness, redistributes nervous tension. Women doctors smile more than their male counterparts, studies show, and are better liked by their patients.
Oscar Wilde's old saw that "a woman's face is her work of fiction" is often quoted to remind us that what's on the surface may have little connection to what we're feeling. What is it in our culture that keeps our smiles on auto*matic pilot? The behavior seems to be an equal blend of nature and nurture. Research has demonstrated that since females often mature earlier than males and are less irritable, girls smile more than boys from the very begin*ning. But by adolescence, the differences in the smiling rates of boys and girls are so robust that it's clear the culture has done more than its share of the dirty work. Just think of the mothers who painstakingly embroidered the words ENTER SMILING on little samplers, and then hung their handiwork on doors by golden chains. Translation: "Your real emotions aren't welcome here."
Clearly, our instincts are another factor. Our smiles have their roots in the greetings of monkeys, who pull their lips up and back to show their fear of at*tack, as well as their reluctance to vie for a position of dominance. And like the opossum caught in the light by the clattering garbage cans, we, too, flash toothy grimaces when we make major mistakes. By declaring ourselves non-*threatening, our smiles provide an extremely versatile means of protection.

Our earliest baby smiles are involuntary reflexes having only the vaguest connection to contentment or comfort. In short, we're genetically wired to pull on our parents' heartstrings. As Desmond Morris explains in Babywatch*ing, this is our way of attaching ourselves to our caretakers, as truly as baby chimps clench their mothers' fur. Even as babies we're capable of projecting onto others (in this case, our parents) the feelings we know we need to get back in return.
Bona fide social smiles occur at two-and-a-half to three months of age, usu*ally a few weeks after we first start gazing with intense interest into the faces of our parents. By the time we are six months old, we are smiling and laugh*ing regularly in reaction to tickling, feedings, blown raspberries, hugs, and peekaboo games. Even babies who are born blind intuitively know how to re*act to pleasurable changes with a smile, though their first smiles start later than those of sighted children.
Psychologists and psychiatrists have noted that babies also smile and laugh with relief when they realize that something they thought might be danger*ous is not dangerous after all. Kids begin to invite their parents to indulge them with "scary" approach-avoidance games; they love to be chased or tossed up into the air. (It's interesting to note that as adults, we go through the same gosh-that' s-shocking-and-dangerous-but -it' s-okay-to-laugh -and-smile cy*cles when we listen to raunchy stand-up comics.)
From the wilds of New Guinea to the sidewalks of New York, smiles are as*sociated with joy, relief, and amusement. But smiles are by no means limited to the expression of positive emotions: People of many different cultures smile when they are frightened, embarrassed, angry, or miserable. In Japan, for instance, a smile is often used to hide pain or sorrow.
Psychologist Paul Ekman, the head of the University of California's Hu*man Interaction Lab in San Francisco, has identified 18 distinct types of smiles, including those that show misery, compliance, fear, and contempt. The smile of true merriment, which Dr. Ekman calls the Duchenne Smile, after the 19th century French doctor who first studied it, is characterized by heightened circulation, a feeling of exhilaration, and the employment of two major facial muscles: the zygomaticus major of the lower face, and the orbic*ularis oculi, which crinkles the skin around the eyes. But since the average American woman's smile often has less to do with her actual state of happi*ness than it does with the social pressure to smile no matter what, her base*line social smile isn't apt to be a felt expression that engages the eyes like this. Ekman insists that if people learned to read smiles, they could see the sad*ness, misery, or pain lurking there, plain as day.

Evidently, a woman's happy, willing deference is something the world wants visibly demonstrated. Woe to the waitress, the personal assistant or re*ceptionist, the flight attendant, or any other woman in the line of public ser*vice whose smile is not offered up to the boss or client as proof that there are no storm clouds-no kids to support, no sleep that's been missed-rolling into the sunny workplace landscape. Women are expected to smile no matter where they line up on the social, cultural, or economic ladder: College pro*fessors are criticized for not smiling, political spouses are pilloried for being too serious, and women's roles in films have historically been smiling ones. It's little wonder that men on the street still call out, "Hey, baby, smile! Life's not that bad, is it?" to women passing by, lost in thought.
A friend remembers being pulled aside by a teacher after class and asked, "What is wrong, dear? You sat there for the whole hour looking so sad!" "All I could figure," my friends says now, "is that I wasn't smiling. And the fact that she felt sorry for me for looking normal made me feel horrible."
Ironically, the social laws that govern our smiles have completely reversed themselves over the last 2,000 years. Women weren't always expected to seem animated and responsive; in fact, immoderate laughter was once considered one of the more conspicuous vices a woman could have, and mirth was downright sinful. Women were kept apart, in some cultures even veiled, so that they couldn't perpetuate Eve's seductive, evil work. The only smile deemed appropriate on a privileged woman's face was the serene, inward smile of the Virgin Mary at Christ's birth, and even that expression was best directed exclusively at young children. Cackling laughter and wicked glee were the kinds of sounds heard only in hell.
What we know of women's facial expressions in other centuries comes mostly from religious writings, codes of etiquette, and portrait paintings. In 15th century Italy, it was customary for artists to paint lovely, blank-faced women in profile. A viewer could stare endlessly at such a woman, but she could not gaze back. By the Renaissance, male artists were taking some plea*sure in depicting women with a semblance of complexity, Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa, with her veiled enigmatic smile, being the most famous example.
The Golden Age of the Dutch Republic marks a fascinating period for studying women's facial expressions. While we might expect the drunken young *****s of Amsterdam to smile devilishly (unbridled sexuality and las*civiousness were supposed to addle the brain), it's the faces of the Dutch women from fine families that surprise us. Considered socially more free, these women demonstrate a fuller range of facial expressions than their Eu*ropean sisters. Frans Hals's 1622 portrait of Stephanus Geraerdt and Isabella Coymans, a married couple, is remarkable not just for the full, friendly smiles on each face, but for the frank and mutual pleasure the couple take in each other.
In the 1800s, sprightly, pretty women began appearing in advertisements for everything from beverages to those newfangled Kodak Land cameras. Women's faces were no longer impassive, and their willingness to bestow status, to offer, proffer, and yield, was most definitely promoted by their smiling images. The culture appeared to have turned the smile, originally a bond shared between intimates, into a socially required display that sold capitalist ideology as well as kitchen appliances. And female viewers soon began to emulate these highly idealized pictures. Many longed to be more like her, that perpetually smiling female. She seemed so beautiful. So content. So whole.

By the middle of the 19th century, the bulk of America's smile burden was falling primarily to women and African-American slaves, providing a very portable means of protection, a way of saying, "I'm harmless. I won't assert myself here." It reassured those in power to see signs of gratitude and con*tentment in the faces of subordinates. As long ago as 1963, adman David Ogilvy declared the image of a woman smiling approvingly at a product clichéd, but we've yet to get the message. Cheerful Americans still appear in ads today, smiling somewhat less disingenuously than they smiled during the middle of the century, but smiling broadly nonetheless.
Other countries have been somewhat reluctant to import our "Don't worry, be happy" American smiles. When McDonald's opened in Moscow not long ago and when EuroDisney debuted in France last year, the Ameri*cans involved in both business ventures complained that they couldn't get the natives they'd employed to smile worth a damn.
Europeans visiting the United States for the first time are often surprised at just how often Americans smile. But when you look at our history, the relent*less good humor (or, at any rate, the pretense of it) falls into perspective. The American wilderness was developed on the assumption that this country had a shortage of people in relation to its possibilities. In countries with a more rigid class structure or caste system, fewer people are as captivated by the idea of quickly winning friends and influencing people. Here in the States, how*ever, every stranger is a potential associate. Our smiles bring new people on board. The American smile is a democratic version of a curtsy or doffed hat, since, in this land of free equals, we're not especially formal about the ways we greet social superiors.
The civil rights movement never addressed the smile burden by name, but activists worked on their own to set new facial norms. African-American males stopped smiling on the streets in the 1960s, happily aware of the unset*tling effect this action had on the white population. The image of the sim*pleminded, smiling, white-toothed black was rejected as blatantly racist, and it gradually retreated into the distance. However, like the women of Sparta and the wives of samurai, who were expected to look happy upon learning their sons or husbands had died in battle, contemporary American women have yet to unilaterally declare their faces their own property.
For instance, imagine a woman at a morning business meeting being asked if she could make a spontaneous and concise summation of a com*plicated project she's been struggling to get under control for months. She might draw the end of her mouth back and clench her teeth - Eek! – in a protective response, a polite, restrained expression of her surprise, not un*like the expression of a conscientious young schoolgirl being told to get out paper and pencil for a pop quiz. At the same time, the woman might be feeling resentful of the supervisor who sprang the request, but she fears tak*ing that person on. So she holds back a comment. The whole performance resolves in a weird grin collapsing into a nervous smile that conveys discom*fort and unpreparedness. A pointed remark by way of explanation or self-*defense might've worked better for her - but her mouth was otherwise engaged.
We'd do well to realize just how much our smiles misrepresent us, and swear off for good the self-deprecating grins and ritual displays of deference. Real smiles have beneficial physiological effects, according to Paul Ekman. False ones do nothing for us at all.

"Smiles are as important as sound bites on television," insists producer and media coach Heidi Berenson, who has worked with many of Washington's most famous faces. "And women have always been better at understanding this than men. But the smile I'm talking about is not a cutesy smile. It's an authoritative smile. A genuine smile. Properly timed, it's tremendously powerful."
To limit a woman to one expression is like editing down an orchestra to one instrument. And the search for more authentic means of expression isn't easy in a culture in which women are still expected to be magnanimous smilers, helpmates in crisis, and curators of everybody else's morale. But change is already floating in the high winds. We see a boon in assertive fe*male comedians who are proving that women can dish out smiles, not just wear them. Actress Demi Moore has stated that she doesn't like to take smil*ing roles. Nike is running ads that show unsmiling women athletes sweating, reaching, pushing themselves. These women aren't overly concerned with is*sues of rapport; they're not being "nice" girls-they're working out.
If a woman's smile were truly her own, to be smiled or not, according to how the woman felt, rather than according to what someone else needed, she would smile more spontaneously, without ulterior, hidden motives. As Rainer Maria Rilke wrote in The Journal of My Other Self, "Her smile was not meant to be seen by anyone and served its whole purpose in being smiled."
That smile is my long-term aim. In the meantime, I hope to stabilize on the smile continuum somewhere between the eliciting grin of Farrah Fawcett and the haughty smirk of Jeane Kirkpatrick.

Cunningham, Amy, “Why Women Smile.” The Norton Reader, Shorter Eleventh Edition. Ed. Linda H. Peterson and John C. Brereton. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2004. 160-165.

**Alchemist** · 12-17-2010, 11:30 AM

Originally posted by sheenkay View Post

thats really good idea

thanks for share

ur welcomed

**Alchemist** · 12-18-2010, 12:32 AM

Is Woman A Worker
Harriet Beecher Stowe

"Papa, do you see what the 'Evening Post' says of your New Year's article on Reconstruction?" said Jenny, as we were all sitting in the library after tea.
"I have not seen it."
"Well, then, the charming writer, whoever he is, takes up for us girls and women, and maintains that no work of any sort ought to be expected of us; that our only mission in life is to be beautiful, and to refresh and elevate the spirits of men by being so. If I get a husband, my mission is to be always becomingly dressed, to display most captivating toilettes, and to be always in good spirits,--as, under the circumstances, I always should be,--and thus 'renew his spirits' when he comes in weary with the toils of life. Household cares are to be far from me: they destroy my cheerfulness and injure my beauty.
"He says that the New England standard of excellence as applied to woman has been a mistaken one; and, in consequence, though the girls are beautiful, the matrons are faded, overworked, and uninteresting; and that such a state of society tends to immorality, because, when wives are no longer charming, men are open to the temptation to desert their firesides, and get into mischief generally. He seems particularly to complain of your calling ladies who do nothing the 'fascinating _lazzaroni_ of the parlor and boudoir.'"
"There was too much truth back of that arrow not to wound," said Theophilus Thoro, who was ensconced, as usual, in his dark corner, whence he supervises our discussions.
"Come, Mr. Thoro, we won't have any of your bitter moralities," said Jenny; "they are only to be taken as the invariable bay-leaf which Professor Blot introduces into all his recipes for soups and stews,--a little elegant bitterness, to be kept tastefully in the background. You see now, papa, I should like the vocation of being beautiful. It would just suit me to wear point-lace and jewelry, and to have life revolve round me, as some beautiful star, and feel that I had nothing to do but shine and refresh the spirits of all gazers, and that in this way I was truly useful, and fulfilling the great end of my being; but alas for this doctrine! all women have not beauty. The most of us can only hope not to be called ill-looking, and, when we get ourselves up with care, to look fresh and trim and agreeable; which fact interferes with the theory."
"Well, for my part," said young Rudolph, "I go for the theory of the beautiful. If ever I marry, it is to find an asylum for ideality. I don't want to make a culinary marriage or a business partnership. I want a being whom I can keep in a sphere of poetry and beauty, out of the dust and grime of every-lay life."
"Then," said Mr. Theophilus, "you must either be a rich man in your own right, or your fair ideal must have a handsome fortune of her own."
"I never will marry a rich wife," quoth Rudolph. "My wife must be supported by me, not I by her."
Rudolph is another of the habitues of our chimney-corner, representing the order of young knighthood in America, and his dreams and fancies, if impracticable, are always of a kind to make every one think him a good fellow. He who has no romantic dreams at twenty-one will be a horribly dry peascod at fifty; therefore it is that I gaze reverently at all Rudolph's chateaus in Spain, which want nothing to complete them except solid earth to stand on.
"And pray," said Theophilus, "how long will it take a young lawyer or physician, starting with no heritage but his own brain, to create a sphere of poetry and beauty in which to keep his goddess? How much a year will be necessary, as the English say, to _do_ this garden of Eden, whereinto shall enter only the poetry of life?"
"I don't know. I haven't seen it near enough to consider. It is because I know the difficulty of its attainment that I have no present thoughts of marriage. Marriage is to me in the bluest of all blue distances,--far off, mysterious, and dreamy as the Mountains of the Moon or sources of the Nile. It shall come only when I have secured a fortune that shall place my wife above all necessity of work or care."
"I desire to hear from you," said Theophilus, "when you have found the sum that will keep a woman from care. I know of women now inhabiting palaces, waited on at every turn by servants, with carriages, horses, jewels, laces, Cashmeres, enough for princesses, who are eaten up by care. One lies awake all night on account of a wrinkle in the waist of her dress; another is dying because no silk of a certain inexpressible shade is to be found in New York; a third has had a dress sent home, which has proved such a failure that life seems no longer worth having. If it were not for the consolations of religion, one doesn't know what would become of her. The fact is, that care and labor are as much correlated to human existence as shadow is to light; there is no such thing as excluding them from any mortal lot. You may make a canary-bird or a gold-fish live in absolute contentment without a care or labor, but a human being you cannot. Human beings are restless and active in their very nature, and will do something, and that something will prove a care, a labor, and a fatigue, arrange it how you will. As long as there is anything to be desired and not yet attained, so long its attainment will be attempted; so long as that attainment is doubtful or difficult, so long will there be care and anxiety. When boundless wealth releases woman from every family care, she immediately makes herself a new set of cares in another direction, and has just as many anxieties as the most toilful housekeeper, only they are of a different kind. Talk of labor, and look at the upper classes in London or in New York in the fashionable season. Do any women work harder? To rush from crowd to crowd all night, night after night, seeing what they are tired of, making the agreeable over an abyss of inward yawning, crowded, jostled, breathing hot air, and crushed in halls and stairways, without a moment of leisure for months and months, till brain and nerve and sense reel, and the country is longed for as a period of resuscitation and relief! Such is the release from labor and fatigue brought by wealth. The only thing that makes all this labor at all endurable is, that it is utterly and entirely useless, and does no good to any one in creation; this alone makes it genteel, and distinguishes it from the vulgar toils of a housekeeper. These delicate creatures, who can go to three or four parties a night for three months, would be utterly desolate if they had to watch one night in a sick-room; and though they can exhibit any amount of physical endurance and vigor in crowding into assembly rooms, and breathe tainted air in an opera-house with the most martyr-like constancy, they could not sit one half-hour in the close room where the sister of charity spends hours in consoling the sick or aged poor."
"Mr. Theophilus is quite at home now," said Jenny; "only start him on the track of fashionable life, and he takes the course like a hound. But hear, now, our champion of the 'Evening Post':--
"'The instinct of women to seek a life of repose, their eagerness to attain the life of elegance, does not mean contempt for labor, but it is a confession of unfitness for labor. Women were not intended to work,--not because work is ignoble, but because it is as disastrous to the beauty of a woman as is friction to the bloom and softness of a flower. Woman is to be kept in the garden of life; she is to rest, to receive, to praise; she is to be kept from the workshop world, where innocence is snatched with rude hands, and softness is blistered into unsightliness or hardened into adamant. No social truth is more in need of exposition and illustration than this one; and, above all, the people of New England need to know it, and, better, they need to believe it.
"'It is therefore with regret that we discover Christopher Crowfield applying so harshly, and, as we think so indiscriminatingly, the theory of work to women, and teaching a society made up of women sacrificed in the workshops of the State, or to the dustpans and kitchens of the house, that women must work, ought to work, and are dishonored if they do not work; and that a woman committed to the drudgery of a household is more creditably employed than when she is charming, fascinating, irresistible, in the parlor or boudoir. The consequence of this fatal mistake is manifest throughout New England,--in New England where the girls are all beautiful and the wives and mothers faded, disfigured, and without charm or attractiveness. The moment a girl marries, in New England, she is apt to become a drudge or a lay figure on which to exhibit the latest fashions. She never has beautiful hands, and she would not have a beautiful face if a utilitarian society could "apply" her face to anything but the pleasure of the eye. Her hands lose their shape and softness after childhood, and domestic drudgery destroys her beauty of form and softness and bloom of complexion after marriage. To correct, or rather to break up, this despotism of household cares, or of work, over woman, American society must be taught that women will inevitably fade and deteriorate, unless it insures repose and comfort to them. It must be taught that reverence for beauty is the normal condition, while the theory of work, applied to women, is disastrous alike to beauty and morals. Work, when it is destructive to men or women, is forced and unjust.
"'All the great masculine or creative epochs have been distinguished by spontaneous work on the part of men, and universal reverence and care for beauty. The praise of work, and sacrifice of women to this great heartless devil of work, belong only to, and are the social doctrine of, a mechanical age and a utilitarian epoch. And if the New England idea of social life continues to bear so cruelly on woman, we shall have a reaction somewhat unexpected and shocking.'"
"Well now, say what you will," said Rudolph, "you have expressed my idea of the conditions of the sex. Woman was not made to work; she was made to be taken care of by man. All that is severe and trying, whether in study or in practical life, is and ought to be in its very nature essentially the work of the male sex. The value of woman is precisely the value of those priceless works of art for which we build museums,--which we shelter and guard as the world's choicest heritage; and a lovely, cultivated, refined woman, thus sheltered, and guarded, and developed, has a worth that cannot be estimated by any gross, material standard. So I subscribe to the sentiments of Miss Jenny's friend without scruple."
"The great trouble in settling all these society questions," said I, "lies in the gold-washing--the cradling I think the miners call it. If all the quartz were in one stratum and all the gold in another, it would save us a vast deal of trouble. In the ideas of Jenny's friend of the 'Evening Post' there is a line of truth and a line of falsehood so interwoven and threaded together that it is impossible wholly to assent or dissent. So with your ideas, Rudolph, there is a degree of truth in them, but there is also a fallacy.
"It is a truth, that woman as a sex ought not to do the hard work of the world, either social, intellectual, or moral. These are evidences in her physiology that this was not intended for her, and our friend of the 'Evening Post' is right in saying that any country will advance more rapidly in civilization and refinement where woman is thus sheltered and protected. And I think, furthermore, that there is no country in the world where women _are_ so much considered and cared for and sheltered, in every walk of life, as in America. In England and France,--all over the continent of Europe, in fact,--the other sex are deferential to women only from some presumption of their social standing, or from the fact of acquaintanceship; but among strangers, and under circumstances where no particular rank or position can be inferred, a woman traveling in England or France is jostled and pushed to the wall, and left to take her own chance, precisely as if she were not a woman. Deference to delicacy and weakness, the instinct of protection, does not appear to characterize the masculine population of any other quarter of the world so much as that of America. In France, _les Messieurs_ will form a circle round the fire in the receiving-room of a railroad station, and sit, tranquilly smoking their cigars, while ladies who do not happen to be of their acquaintance are standing shivering at the other side of the room. In England, if a lady is incautiously booked for an outside place on a coach, in hope of seeing the scenery, and the day turns out hopelessly rainy, no gentleman in the coach below ever thinks of offering to change seats with her, though it pour torrents. In America, the roughest backwoods steamboat or canal-boat captain always, as a matter of course, considers himself charged with the protection of the ladies. '_Place aux dames_' is written in the heart of many a shaggy fellow who could not utter a French word any more than could a buffalo. It is just as I have before said,--women are the recognized aristocracy, the only aristocracy, of America; and, so far from regarding this fact as objectionable, it is an unceasing source of pride in my country.
"That kind of knightly feeling towards woman which reverences her delicacy, her frailty, which protects and cares for her, is, I think, the crown of manhood; and without it a man is only a rough animal. But our fair aristocrats and their knightly defenders need to be cautioned lest they lose their position, as many privileged orders have before done, by an arrogant and selfish use of power.
"I have said that the vices of aristocracy are more developed among women in America than among men, and that, while there are no men in the Northern States who are not ashamed of living a merely idle life of pleasure, there are many women who make a boast of helplessness and ignorance in woman's family duties which any man would be ashamed to make with regard to man's duties, as if such helplessness and ignorance were a grace and a charm.
"There are women who contentedly live on, year after year, a life of idleness, while the husband and father is straining every nerve, growing prematurely old and gray, abridged of almost every form of recreation or pleasure,--all that he may keep them in a state of careless ease and festivity. It may be very fine, very generous, very knightly, in the man who thus toils at the oar that his princesses may enjoy their painted voyages; but what is it for the women?
"A woman is a moral being--an immortal soul--before she is a woman; and as such she is charged by her Maker with some share of the great burden of work which lies on the world.
"Self-denial, the bearing of the cross, are stated by Christ as indispensable conditions to the entrance into his kingdom, and no exception is made for man or woman. Some task, some burden, some cross, each one must carry; and there must be something done in every true and worthy life, not as amusement, but as duty,--not as play, but as earnest work,--and no human being can attain to the Christian standard without this.
"When Jesus Christ took a towel and girded himself, poured water into a basin, and washed his disciples' feet, he performed a significant and sacramental act, which no man or woman should ever forget. If wealth and rank and power absolve from the services of life, then certainly were Jesus Christ absolved, as he says: 'Ye call me Master, and Lord. If I then, your Lord and Master, have washed your feet, ye also ought to wash one another's feet. For I have given you an example, that ye should do as I have done to you.'
"Let a man who seeks to make a terrestrial paradise for the woman of his heart,--to absolve her from all care, from all labor, to teach her to accept and to receive the labor of others without any attempt to offer labor in return,--consider whether he is not thus going directly against the fundamental idea of Christianity; taking the direct way to make his idol selfish and exacting, to rob her of the highest and noblest beauty of womanhood.
"In that chapter of the Bible where the relation between man and woman is stated, it is thus said, with quaint simplicity: 'It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an _help meet_ for him.' Woman the _helper_ of man, not his toy,--not a picture, not a statue, not a work of art, but a HELPER, a doer,--such is the view of the Bible and the Christian religion.
"It is not necessary that women should work physically or morally to an extent which impairs beauty. In France, where woman is harnessed with an ass to the plough which her husband drives,--where she digs, and wields the pick-axe,--she becomes prematurely hideous; but in America, where woman reigns as queen in every household, she may surely be a good and thoughtful housekeeper, she may have physical strength exercised in lighter domestic toils, not only without injuring her beauty, but with manifest advantage to it. Almost every growing young girl would be the better in health, and therefore handsomer, for two hours of active housework daily; and the habit of usefulness thereby gained would be an equal advantage to her moral development. The labors of modern, well-arranged houses are not in any sense severe; they are as gentle as any kind of exercise that can be devised, and they bring into play muscles that ought to be exercised to be healthily developed.
"The great danger to the beauty of American women does not lie, as the writer of the 'Post' contends, in an overworking of the physical system which shall stunt and deform; on the contrary, American women of the comfortable classes are in danger of a loss of physical beauty from the entire deterioration of the muscular system for want of exercise. Take the life of any American girl in one of our large towns, and see what it is. We have an educational system of public schools which for intellectual culture is a just matter of pride to any country. From the time that the girl is seven years old, her first thought, when she rises in the morning, is to eat her breakfast and be off to her school. There really is no more time than enough to allow her to make that complete toilet which every well-bred female ought to make, and to take her morning meal before her school begins. She returns at noon with just time to eat her dinner, and the afternoon session begins. She comes home at night with books, slate, and lessons enough to occupy her evening. What time is there for teaching her any household work, for teaching her to cut or fit or sew, or to inspire her with any taste for domestic duties? Her arms have no exercise; her chest and lungs, and all the complex system of muscles which are to be perfected by quick and active movement, are compressed while she bends over book and slate and drawing-board; while the ever active brain is kept all the while going at the top of its speed. She grows up spare, thin, and delicate; and while the Irish girl, who sweeps the parlors, rubs the silver, and irons the muslins, is developing a finely rounded arm and bust, the American girl has a pair of bones at her sides, and a bust composed of cotton padding, the work of a skillful dressmaker. Nature, who is no respecter of persons, gives to Colleen Bawn, who uses her arms and chest, a beauty which perishes in the gentle, languid Edith, who does nothing but study and read."
"But is it not a fact," said Rudolph, "as stated by our friend of the 'Post,' that American matrons are perishing, and their beauty and grace all withered, from overwork?"
"It is," said my wife; "but why? It is because they are brought up without vigor or muscular strength, without the least practical experience of household labor, or those means of saving it which come by daily practice; and then, after marriage, when physically weakened by maternity, embarrassed by the care of young children, they are often suddenly deserted by every efficient servant, and the whole machinery of a complicated household left in their weak, inexperienced hands. In the country, you see a household perhaps made void some fine morning by Biddy's sudden departure, and nobody to make the bread, or cook the steak, or sweep the parlors, or do one of the complicated offices of a family, and no bakery, cook-shop, or laundry to turn to for alleviation. A lovely, refined home becomes in a few hours a howling desolation; and then ensues a long season of breakage, waste, distraction, as one wild Irish immigrant after another introduces the style of Irish cottage life into an elegant dwelling.
"Now suppose I grant to the 'Evening Post' that woman ought to rest, to be kept in the garden of life, and all that, how is this to be done in a country where a state of things like this is the commonest of occurrences? And is it any kindness or reverence to woman, to educate her for such an inevitable destiny by a life of complete physical delicacy and incapacity? Many a woman who has been brought into these cruel circumstances would willingly exchange all her knowledge of German and Italian, and all her graceful accomplishments, for a good physical development, and some respectable _savoir faire_ in ordinary life.
"Moreover, American matrons are overworked because some unaccountable glamour leads them to continue to bring up their girls in the same inefficient physical habits which resulted in so much misery to themselves. Housework as they are obliged to do it, untrained, untaught, exhausted, and in company with rude, dirty, unkempt foreigners, seems to them a degradation which they will spare to their daughters. The daughter goes on with her schools and accomplishments, and leads in the family the life of an elegant little visitor during all those years when a young girl might be gradually developing and strengthening her muscles in healthy household work. It never occurs to her that she can or ought to fill any of the domestic gaps into which her mother always steps; and she comforts herself with the thought, 'I don't know how; I can't; I haven't the strength. I can't sweep; it blisters my hands. If I should stand at the ironing-table an hour, I should be ill for a week. As to cooking, I don't know anything about it.' And so, when the cook, or the chambermaid, or nurse, or all together, vacate the premises, it is the mamma who is successively cook, and chambermaid, and nurse; and this is the reason why matrons fade and are overworked.
"Now, Mr. Rudolph, do you think a woman any less beautiful or interesting because she is a fully developed physical being,--because her muscles have been rounded and matured into strength, so that she can meet the inevitable emergencies of life without feeling them to be distressing hardships? If there be a competent, well-trained servant to sweep and dust the parlor, and keep all the machinery of the house in motion, she may very properly select her work out of the family, in some form of benevolent helpfulness; but when the inevitable evil hour comes, which is likely to come first or last in every American household, is a woman any less an elegant woman because her love of neatness, order, and beauty leads her to make vigorous personal exertions to keep her own home undefiled? For my part, I think a disorderly, ill-kept home, a sordid, uninviting table, has driven more husbands from domestic life than the unattractiveness of any overworked woman. So long as a woman makes her home harmonious and orderly, so long as the hour of assembling around the family table is something to be looked forward to as a comfort and a refreshment, a man cannot see that the good house fairy, who by some magic keeps everything so delightfully, has either a wrinkle or a gray hair."
"Besides," said I, "I must tell you, Rudolph, what you fellows of twenty-one are slow to believe; and that is, that the kind of ideal paradise you propose in marriage is, in the very nature of things, an impossibility,--that the familiarities of every-day life between two people who keep house together must and will destroy it. Suppose you are married to Cytherea herself, and the next week attacked with a rheumatic fever. If the tie between you is that of true and honest love, Cytherea will put on a gingham wrapper, and with her own sculptured hands wring out the flannels which shall relieve your pains; and she will be no true woman if she do not prefer to do this to employing any nurse that could be hired. True love ennobles and dignifies the material labors of life; and homely services rendered for love's sake have in them a poetry that is immortal.
"No true-hearted woman can find herself, in real, actual life, unskilled and unfit to minister to the wants and sorrows of those dearest to her, without a secret sense of degradation. The feeling of uselessness is an extremely unpleasant one. Tom Hood, in a very humorous paper, describes a most accomplished schoolmistress, a teacher of all the arts and crafts which are supposed to make up fine gentlewomen, who is stranded in a rude German inn, with her father writhing in the anguish of a severe attack of gastric inflammation. The helpless lady gazes on her suffering parent, longing to help him, and thinking over all her various little store of accomplishments, not one of which bears the remotest relation to the case. She could knit him a bead purse, or make him a guard-chain, or work him a footstool, or festoon him with cut tissue-paper, or sketch his likeness, or crust him over with alum crystals, or stick him over with little rosettes of red and white wafers; but none of these being applicable to his present case, she sits gazing in resigned imbecility, till finally she desperately resolves to improvise him some gruel, and, after a laborious turn in the kitchen,--after burning her dress and blacking her fingers,--succeeds only in bringing him a bowl of paste!
"Not unlike this might be the feeling of many an elegant and accomplished woman, whose education has taught and practiced her in everything that woman ought to know, except those identical ones which fit her for the care of a home, for the comfort of a sick-room; and so I say again that, whatever a woman may be in the way of beauty and elegance, she must have the strength and skill of a practical worker, or she is nothing. She is not simply to be the beautiful,--she is to make the beautiful, and preserve it; and she who makes and she who keeps the beautiful must be able to work, and know how to work. Whatever offices of life are performed by women of culture and refinement are thenceforth elevated; they cease to be mere servile toils, and become expressions of the ideas of superior beings. If a true lady makes even a plate of toast, in arranging a _petit souper_ for her invalid friend, she does it as a lady should. She does not cut blundering and uneven slices; she does not burn the edges; she does not deluge it with bad butter, and serve it cold; but she arranges and serves all with an artistic care, with a nicety and delicacy, which make it worth one's while to have a lady friend in sickness.
"And I am glad to hear that Monsieur Blot is teaching classes of New York ladies that cooking is not a vulgar kitchen toil, to be left to blundering servants, but an elegant feminine accomplishment, better worth a woman's learning than crochet or embroidery; and that a well-kept culinary apartment may be so inviting and orderly that no lady need feel her ladyhood compromised by participating in its pleasant toils. I am glad to know that his cooking-academy is thronged with more scholars than he can accommodate, and from ladies in the best classes of society.
"Moreover, I am glad to see that in New Bedford, recently, a public course of instruction in the art of bread-making has been commenced by a lady, and that classes of the most respectable young and married ladies in the place are attending them. These are steps in the right direction, and show that our fair countrywomen, with the grand good sense which is their leading characteristic, are resolved to supply whatever in our national life is wanting.
"I do not fear that women of such sense and energy will listen to the sophistries which would persuade them that elegant imbecility and inefficiency are charms of cultivated womanhood or ingredients in the poetry of life. She alone can keep the poetry and beauty of married life who has this poetry in her soul; who with energy and discretion can throw back and out of sight the sordid and disagreeable details which beset all human living, and can keep in the foreground that which is agreeable; who has enough knowledge of practical household matters to make unskilled and rude hands minister to her cultivated and refined tastes, and constitute her skilled brain the guide of unskilled hands. From such a home, with such a mistress, no sirens will seduce a man, even though the hair grow gray, and the merely physical charms of early days gradually pass away. The enchantment that was about her person alone in the days of courtship seems in the course of years to have interfused and penetrated the home which she has created, and which in every detail is only an expression of her personality. Her thoughts, her plans, her provident care, are everywhere; and the home attracts and holds by a thousand ties the heart which before marriage was held by the woman alone."

[The end]
Harriet Beecher Stowe's essay: Is Woman A Worker

**Alchemist** · 12-18-2010, 12:42 AM

Originally posted by Roshina

Lovely Idea, Alchemist!

Can I share an essay here as well? It's a short story by the Venerable Kate Chopin. If not, I totally understand; it won't be a problem to put it in a new thread, but it sorta relates to the above essays, which I'm loving!

go for it

I'm lookin forward to it

**Toramana** · 12-18-2010, 01:38 AM

Thanks, Al-Chemist.

**Alchemist** · 12-19-2010, 04:25 PM

You are most welcomed Toromana.

Rioshina, I thought we were clear on this --> "...Essays"
Not Stories.

Essay's are persuasive and stories are descriptive.

Although some essays may be descriptive...

The Outsides Of Books
William Davenport Adams

This may fairly be claimed as a popular subject. It is one in which nearly everybody--perhaps everybody--is interested. There can surely be few, if any, who do not care about the outside of a book. Even if a man never opens a volume, he likes its exterior to be pleasing. Nay, there are books which may be said to be produced and utilized only for their outward garb. How often does one find a volume described as a charming one 'for the table'! It is for the table that certain publications are destined. Enter a drawing-room, and you will find a few books scattered here and there 'with artful care.' I do not say they are intended never to be opened, but their primary function is to look nice--to 'set off' the table-cloth, and, generally, to give a bright appearance to the room. And their adaptability for this purpose is so widely recognised that you can scarcely go anywhere without coming across books of this complexion. You find them exposed to view in your doctor's or your dentist's ante-chamber; you find them placed before you, usually very much the worse for wear, in hotel waiting-rooms. And the instinct which prompts all this display is genuine enough. It is perfectly true--there is no furniture so agreeable to the eye as books. Nothing makes a room look at once so picturesque and home-like, if the volumes be but sufficiently varied in size and hue.
And that brings us in presence of a point of controversy. Ought there to be so much variety in the exteriors of books? Ought they to be 'got up' in so many different styles? Some people would answer these questions with a decided negative. These are the persons who like uniformity in their libraries, who would have one shelf look for all the world like the facsimile of the other. These are the persons who, almost as soon as they buy a book, are desirous to have it rebound after some fantastic notion of their own. There is a class of purchaser which revels in long lines of volumes in 'full calf gilt.' You see that sort of thing in most old-fashioned collections. And the effect is not bad in some respects. The rows look handsome enough. They have solidity and richness. Nor do I say that for a certain species of publication 'full calf gilt' is not a very judicious form of binding. One likes to see the quarterlies and higher-class monthlies done up in that style. It befits the seriousness of their contents. But do not let everything be put into 'full calf gilt,' solid and rich though it appears. Let us give full play to the element of variety. Let every book have an individuality, a character, of its own. Let us be able to identify it easily. Let it retain its original garb, so that we may always be able to distinguish it. Surely it is one of the greatest charms of a row of volumes that each has its special features, and can readily be found when wanted.
It may be laid down as a general rule that the binding of a book should have a distinct reference to the nature of its contents. It should be appropriate to the author and to the subject. One sympathizes with Posthumus in the play, when, apostrophizing the volume in his prison, he says:
'O rare one!
Be not, as is our fangled world, a garment
Nobler than that it covers: let thy effects
So follow, to be most unlike our courtiers,
As good as promise.'
Juliet, when she hears that Romeo has slain Tybalt, asks:
'Was ever book containing such vile matter
So fairly bound?'

And in a like spirit Charles Lamb, in his well-known essay, complains of the 'things in books' clothing' which, by reason of their inappropriate exteriors, afford so much disappointment to the reader. 'To reach down a well-bound semblance of a volume, and hope it is some kind-hearted play-book, then, opening what "seem its leaves," to come bolt upon a withering population essay'--'to expect a Steele or a Farquhar, and find--Adam Smith'--those, indeed, are doleful and dispiriting experiences, to which the unsuspecting student ought not in enlightened times to be subjected. If Mr. Gilbert's Mikado be right in the view that the punishment ought to 'fit the crime,' so assuredly ought a book's binding to fit the matter that is contained within it. It should be the outward sign of the inward grace.
I am ready to admit that, as a rule, this is so. In general, it is quite easy to tell the nature of a volume from its cover. And for this the publishers are greatly to be thanked. An amateur, publishing for himself, may every now and then insist upon dressing up the product of his brains incongruously; but, for the most part, the booksellers of to-day have a very excellent sense of what is fitting. The result is that those who care about books can differentiate them at a glance. They know what is the approved style and line for biography and history, for poetry and fiction, for sermons, for gift-books, and so ad infinitum. The 'Life' of So-and-so, and the 'Annals' of Such-and-such, are unmistakeable; they have respectability written on every corner and angle of them. The dull brown or the dull green is sufficiently obvious to everyone. And so with poetry. You know minor verse directly you see it. It has a cachet concerning which there can be no possible error. Happily, a Tennyson, a Browning, or a Swinburne is equally recognisable. A novel, of course, bears its character on its face. The three-volume form is notorious. But it scarcely matters what shape fiction may take. It can be identified by instinct, whether it be in yellow boards or in some more quiet habit. Sermons cannot be misapprehended; there is no fear of their being taken on a railway journey instead of the latest book of memoirs. As for gift-books, whether for boy or girl, adult or juvenile, they have their destination marked upon them in all the colours of the rainbow. Some complain of this, and call it vulgar. No doubt it often is so. But a gift-book is produced for a definite purpose, and the public would be surprised, and probably annoyed, if it were not as gorgeous in gold and colours as it was expected to be. Gold and colours are what are wanted, and the publishers do well to supply them.
One thing, perhaps, is too little considered--that a book is, in most cases, intended to be read and to be preserved. Certain books are not issued for that purpose, but are deliberately manufactured to be thrown away when read. The shilling novel, one may presume, is not designed for a permanent existence. If it is, why is it so frequently brought out in a paper cover, which either comes off altogether, or else curls up at the edges in the most irritating fashion? It must be confessed that a paper cover is an infliction, demanding the eventual destruction of the book or its prompt rebinding in more durable style. But it is not sufficient only that a volume should be bound. It should be bound so that it can be opened and perused with comfort. It should not be in too stiff a cover, or it will be awkward to hold. And the cover should not be in white or in too delicate a colour, or one will not care to handle it. Nor should a book be bound too limply, for the cover will soon begin to look shapeless. A parchment binding is charming to gaze at for a time, but how quickly its glory fades! I should say to the ordinary bookbuyer, in metaphoric language, Avoid the kickshaws and stick to the solids! In other words, leave the delicacies to the connoisseur, and give your attention to the books so clothed that you can read and keep them as you will.

**Alchemist** · 12-19-2010, 06:04 PM

^ Thanks

The American Sychophant (1900s)
Ambrose Bierce

AN AMERICAN newspaper holds this opinion: "If republican government had done nothing else than give independence to American character and preserve it from the servility inseparable from the allegiance to kings, it would have accomplished a great work."
I do not doubt that the writer of that sentence believes that republican government has actually wrought the change in human nature which challenges his admiration. He is very sure that his countrymen are not sycophants; that before rank and power and wealth they stand covered, maintaining "the godlike attitude of freedom and a man" and exulting in it. It is not true; it is an immeasurable distance from the truth. We are as abject toadies as any people on earth--more so than any European people of similar civilization. When a foreign emperor, king, prince or nobleman comes among us the rites of servility that we execute in his honor are baser than any that he ever saw in his own land. When a foreign nobleman's prow puts into shore the American shin is pickled in brine to welcome him; and if he come not in adequate quantity those of us who can afford the expense go swarming over sea to struggle for front places in his attention. In this blind and brutal scramble for social recognition in Europe the traveling American toady and impostor has many chances of success: he is commonly unknown even to ministers and consuls of his own country, and these complaisant gentlemen, rather than incur the risk of erring on the wrong side, take him at his own valuation and push him in where his obscurity being again in his favor, he is treated with kindly toleration, and sometimes a genuine hospitality, to which he has no shadow of right nor title, and which, if he were a gentleman, he would not accept if it were voluntarily proffered. It should be said in mitigation that all this delirious abasement in no degree tempers his rancor against the system of which the foreign notable is the flower and fruit. He keeps his servility sweet by preserving it in the salt of vilification. In the character of a blatant blackguard the American snob is so happily disguised that he does not know himself.
An American newspaper once printed a portrait of her whom the irreverent Briton had a reprehensible habit of designating colloquially as "The Old Lady," But the editor in question did not so designate her--his simple American manhood and republican spirit would not admit that she was a lady. So he contented himself with labeling the portrait "Her Most Gracious Majesty, Queen Victoria" This incident raises an important question.
Important Question Raised by This Incident: Is it better to be a subject and a man, or a citizen and a flunkey--to own the sway of a "gory tyrant" and retain one's self-respect, or dwell, a "sovereign elector," in the land of liberty and disgrace it?
However it may be customary for English newspapers to designate the English sovereign, they are at least not addicted to sycophancy in designating the rulers of other countries than their own. They would not say "His Abracadabral Humpti-dumptiness Emperor William," nor "His Pestilency the Speaker of the American House of Representatives." They would not think of calling even the most ornately self-bemedaled American sovereign elector "His Badgesty." Of a foreign nobleman they do not say "His Lordship;" they will not admit that he is a lord; nor when speaking of their own noblemen do they spell "lord" with a capital L, as we do. In brief, when mentioning foreign dignitaries, of whatever rank in their own countries, the English press is simply and serviceably descriptive: the king is a king, the queen a queen, the jack a jack. We use "another kind of common sense." At the very foundation of our political system lies the denial of hereditary and artificial rank. Our fathers created this government as a protest against all that, and all that it implies. They virtually declared that kings and noblemen could not breathe here, and no American loyal to the principles of the Revolution which made him one will ever say in his own country "Your Majesty" or "Your Lordship"--the words would choke him and they ought.
There are a few of us who keep the faith, who do not bow the knee to Baal, who hold fast to what is high and good in the doctrine of political equality; in whose hearts the altar-fires of rational liberty are kept aglow, beaconing the darkness of that illimitable inane where their countrymen, inaccessible to the light, wander witless in the bogs of political unreason, alternately adoring and damning the man-made gods of their own stature. Of that bright band fueling the bale-fires of political consistency I can not profess myself a member in good standing. In view of this general recreancy and treason to the principles that our fathers established by the sword--having in constant observation this almost universal hospitality to the solemn nonsense of hereditary rank and unearned distinction, my faith in practical realization of republican ideals is small, and I falter in the work of their maintenance in the interest of a people for whom they are too good. Seeing that we are immune to none of the evils besetting monarchies, excepting those for which we secretly yearn; that inequality of fortune and unjust allotment of honors are as conspicuous among us as elsewhere; that the tyranny of individuals is as intolerable, and that of the public more so; that the law's majesty is a dream and its failure a fact--hearing everywhere the footfalls of disorder and the watchwords of anarchy, I despair of the republic and catch in every breeze that blows "a cry prophetic of its fall."
I have seen a vast crowd of Americans change color like a field of waving grain, as it uncovered to do such base homage to a petty foreign princess as in her own country she had never received. I have seen full-grown, self-respecting American citizens tremble and go speechless when spoken to by the Emperor of Brazil. I have seen a half-dozen American gentlemen in evening clothes trying to outdo one another in the profundity of their bows in the presence of the ****** King of Hawaii. I have not seen a Chinese "Earl" borne in a chair by four Americans officially detailed for the disgraceful service, but it was done, and did not evoke a hiss of disapproval. And I did not--thank Heaven!--observe the mob of American "simple republicans" that dogged the heels of a disreputable little Frenchman who is a count by courtesy only, and those of an English duke quietly attending to his business of making a living by being a married man. The republican New World is no less impested with servility than the monarchial Old. One form of government may be better than another for this purpose or for that; all are alike in the futility of their influence upon human character. None can affect man's instinctive abasement in the contemplation of power and rank.
Not only are we no less sycophantic than the people of monarchial countries; we are more so. We grovel before their exalted personages, and perform in addition a special prostration at the clay feet of our own idols--which _they_ do not revere. The typical "subject," hat-in-hand to his sovereign and his nobleman, is a less shameful figure than the "citizen" executing his genuflexion before the public of which he is himself a part. No European court journal, no European courtier, was ever more abject in subservience to the sovereign than are the American newspaper and the American politician in flattery of the people. Between the courtier and the demagogue I see nothing to choose. They are moved by the same sentiment and fired by the same hope. Their method is flattery, and their purpose profit. Their adulation is not a testimony to character, but a tribute to power, or the shadow of power. If this country were governed by its criminal idiots we should have the same attestations of their goodness and wisdom, the same competition for their favor, the same solemn doctrine that their voice is the voice of God. Our children would be brought up to believe that an Idiotocracy is the only natural and rational form of government And for my part I'm not at all sure that it would not be a pretty good political system, as political systems go. I have always, however, cherished a secret faith in Smithocracy, which seems to combine the advantages of both the monarchial and the republican idea. If all the offices were held for life by Smiths--the senior John being President--we should have a settled and orderly succession to allay all fears of anarchy and a sufficiently wide eligibility to feed the fires of patriotic ambition. All could not be Smiths, but many could marry into the family.
The Harrison "progress" left its heritage of shame, whereof each abaser would gladly have washed the hands of him in his neighbor's basin. All this was in due order of Nature, and was to have been expected. It was a phenomenon of the same character as, in the loves of the low, the squabbling consequent upon satiety and shame. We could not slink out of sight; we could deny our sycophancy, albeit we might give it another name; but we could somewhat medicine our damaged self-esteem by dealing damnation 'round on one another. The blush of shame turned easily to the glow of indignation, and many a hot hatred was kindled at the rosy flame of self-contempt. Persons conscious of having dishonored themselves are doubly sensitive to any indignity put upon them by others. The vices and follies of human nature are interdependent; they do not move alone, nor are they singly aroused to activity. In my judgment, this entire incident of the President's "tour" was infinitely discreditable to President and people. I do not go into the question of his motive in making it. Be that what it may, the manner of it seems to me an outrage upon all the principles and sentiments underlying republican institutions. In all but the name it was a "royal progress"--the same costly ostentation, the same civic and military pomp, the same solemn and senseless adulation, the same abasement of spirit of the Many before the One. And according to republican traditions, ten thousand times a year affirmed, in every way in which affirmation is possible, we fondly persuade ourselves, as a true faith in the hearts of our hearts, that the One is the inferior of the Many! And it is no mere political catch-phrase: he _is_ their servant; he _is_ their creature; all that in him to which they grovel (dignifying and justifying their instinctive and inherited servility by names as false as anything in ceremonial imposture) they themselves have made, as truly as the heathen has made the wooden god before which he performs his unmanly rite. It is precisely this thing--the superiority of the people to their servants--that constitutes, and was by our fathers understood to constitute, the essential, fundamental difference between the monarchial system which they uprooted and the democratic one which they planted in its stead. Deluded men! how little they guessed the length and strength and vitality of the roots left in the soil of the centuries when their noxious harvestage of mischievous institutions had been cast as rubbish to the void!
I am no contestant for forms of government--no believer in either the practical value or the permanence of any that has yet been devised. That all men are created equal, in the best and highest sense of the phrase, I hold; not as I observe it held by others, but as a living faith. That an officeholder is a servant of the people; that I am his political superior, owing him no deference, and entitled to such deference from him as may be serviceable to keep him in mind of his subordination--these are propositions which command my assent, which I _feel_ to be true and which determine the character of my personal relations with those whom they concern. That I should give my hand, or bend my neck, or uncover my head to any man in homage to or recognition of his office, great or small, is to me simply inconceivable. These tricks of servility with the softened names are the vestiges of an involuntary allegiance to power extraneous to the performer. They represent in our American life obedience and propitiation in their most primitive and odious forms. The man who speaks of them as manifestations of a proper respect for "the President's great office" is either a rogue, a dupe or a journalist They come to us out of a fascinating but terrible past as survivals of servitude. They speak a various language of oppression, and the superstition of man-worship; they cany forward the traditions of the sceptre and the lash. Through the plaudits of the people may be heard always the faint, far cry of the beaten slave.
Respect? Respect the good. Respect the wise. Respect the dead. Let the President look to it that he belongs to one of these classes. His going about the country in gorgeous state and barbaric splendor as the guest of a thieving corporation, but at our expense--shining and dining and swining--unsouling himself of clotted nonsense in pickled platitudes calculated for the meridian of Coon Hollow, Indiana, but ingeniously adapted to each water tank on the line of his absurd "progress," does not prove it, and the presumption of his "great office" is against him.
Can you not see, poor misguided "fellow citizens," how you permit your political taskmasters to forge leg-chains of your follies and load you down with them? Will nothing teach you that all this fuss-and-feathers, all this ceremony, all this official gorgeousness and brass-banding, this "manifestation of a proper respect for the nation's head" has no decent place in American life and American politics? Will no experience open your stupid eyes to the fact that these shows are but absurd imitations of royalty, to hold you silly while you are plundered by the managers of the performance?--that while you toss your greasy caps in air and sustain them by the ascending current of your senseless hurrahs the programmers are going through your blessed pockets and exploiting your holy dollars? No; you feel secure; "power is of the People," and you can effect a change of robbers every four years. Inestimable privilege--to pull off the glutted leech and attach the lean one! And you can not even choose among the lean leeches, but must accept those designated by the programmers and showmen who have the reptiles on tap! But then you are not "subjects;" you are "citizens"--there is much in that Your tyrant is not a "King;" he is a "President." He does not occupy a "throne," but a "chair." He does not succeed to it by inheritance; he is pitchforked into it by the boss. Altogether, you are distinctly better off than the Russian mujik who wears his shirt outside his trousers and has never shaken hands with the Czar in all his life.
I hold that kings and noblemen can not breathe in America. When they set foot upon our soil their kingship and their nobility fall away from them like the chains of a slave in England. Whatever a man may be in his own country, here he is but a man. My countrymen may do as they please, lickspittling the high and mighty of other nations even to the filling of their spiritual bellies, but I make a stand for simple American manhood. I will meet no man on this soil who expects from me a greater deference than I could properly accord to the President of my own country. My allegiance to republican institutions is slack through lack of faith in them as a practical system of governing men as men are. All the same, I will call no man "Your Majesty," nor "Your Lordship." For me to meet in my own country a king or a nobleman would require as much preliminary negotiation as an official interview between the Mufti of Moosh and the Ahkoond of Swat. The form of salutation and the style and tide of address would have to be settled definitively and with precision. With some of my most esteemed and patriotic friends the matter is more simple; their generosity in concession fills me with admiration and their forbearance in exaction challenges my astonishment as one of the seven wonders of American hospitality. In fancy I see the ceremony of their "presentation" and as examples of simple republican dignity I commend their posture to the youth of this fair New World, inviting particular attention to the grand, bold curves of character shown in the outlines of the Human Ham.

**Admin Khan** · 12-19-2010, 08:33 PM

December 2005

The most impressive people I know are all terrible procrastinators. So could it be that procrastination isn't always bad?

Most people who write about procrastination write about how to cure it. But this is, strictly speaking, impossible. There are an infinite number of things you could be doing. No matter what you work on, you're not working on everything else. So the question is not how to avoid procrastination, but how to procrastinate well.

There are three variants of procrastination, depending on what you do instead of working on something: you could work on (a) nothing, (b) something less important, or (c) something more important. That last type, I'd argue, is good procrastination.

That's the "absent-minded professor," who forgets to shave, or eat, or even perhaps look where he's going while he's thinking about some interesting question. His mind is absent from the everyday world because it's hard at work in another.

That's the sense in which the most impressive people I know are all procrastinators. They're type-C procrastinators: they put off working on small stuff to work on big stuff.

What's "small stuff?" Roughly, work that has zero chance of being mentioned in your obituary. It's hard to say at the time what will turn out to be your best work (will it be your magnum opus on Sumerian temple architecture, or the detective thriller you wrote under a pseudonym?), but there's a whole class of tasks you can safely rule out: shaving, doing your laundry, cleaning the house, writing thank-you notes—anything that might be called an errand.

Good procrastination is avoiding errands to do real work.

Good in a sense, at least. The people who want you to do the errands won't think it's good. But you probably have to annoy them if you want to get anything done. The mildest seeming people, if they want to do real work, all have a certain degree of ruthlessness when it comes to avoiding errands.

Some errands, like replying to letters, go away if you ignore them (perhaps taking friends with them). Others, like mowing the lawn, or filing tax returns, only get worse if you put them off. In principle it shouldn't work to put off the second kind of errand. You're going to have to do whatever it is eventually. Why not (as past-due notices are always saying) do it now?

The reason it pays to put off even those errands is that real work needs two things errands don't: big chunks of time, and the right mood. If you get inspired by some project, it can be a net win to blow off everything you were supposed to do for the next few days to work on it. Yes, those errands may cost you more time when you finally get around to them. But if you get a lot done during those few days, you will be net more productive.

In fact, it may not be a difference in degree, but a difference in kind. There may be types of work that can only be done in long, uninterrupted stretches, when inspiration hits, rather than dutifully in scheduled little slices. Empirically it seems to be so. When I think of the people I know who've done great things, I don't imagine them dutifully crossing items off to-do lists. I imagine them sneaking off to work on some new idea.

Conversely, forcing someone to perform errands synchronously is bound to limit their productivity. The cost of an interruption is not just the time it takes, but that it breaks the time on either side in half. You probably only have to interrupt someone a couple times a day before they're unable to work on hard problems at all.

I've wondered a lot about why startups are most productive at the very beginning, when they're just a couple guys in an apartment. The main reason may be that there's no one to interrupt them yet. In theory it's good when the founders finally get enough money to hire people to do some of the work for them. But it may be better to be overworked than interrupted. Once you dilute a startup with ordinary office workers—with type-B procrastinators—the whole company starts to resonate at their frequency. They're interrupt-driven, and soon you are too.

Errands are so effective at killing great projects that a lot of people use them for that purpose. Someone who has decided to write a novel, for example, will suddenly find that the house needs cleaning. People who fail to write novels don't do it by sitting in front of a blank page for days without writing anything. They do it by feeding the cat, going out to buy something they need for their apartment, meeting a friend for coffee, checking email. "I don't have time to work," they say. And they don't; they've made sure of that.

(There's also a variant where one has no place to work. The cure is to visit the places where famous people worked, and see how unsuitable they were.)

I've used both these excuses at one time or another. I've learned a lot of tricks for making myself work over the last 20 years, but even now I don't win consistently. Some days I get real work done. Other days are eaten up by errands. And I know it's usually my fault: I let errands eat up the day, to avoid facing some hard problem.

The most dangerous form of procrastination is unacknowledged type-B procrastination, because it doesn't feel like procrastination. You're "getting things done." Just the wrong things.

Any advice about procrastination that concentrates on crossing things off your to-do list is not only incomplete, but positively misleading, if it doesn't consider the possibility that the to-do list is itself a form of type-B procrastination. In fact, possibility is too weak a word. Nearly everyone's is. Unless you're working on the biggest things you could be working on, you're type-B procrastinating, no matter how much you're getting done.

In his famous essay You and Your Research (which I recommend to anyone ambitious, no matter what they're working on), Richard Hamming suggests that you ask yourself three questions:

What are the most important problems in your field?
Are you working on one of them?
Why not?

Hamming was at Bell Labs when he started asking such questions. In principle anyone there ought to have been able to work on the most important problems in their field. Perhaps not everyone can make an equally dramatic mark on the world; I don't know; but whatever your capacities, there are projects that stretch them. So Hamming's exercise can be generalized to:

What's the best thing you could be working on, and why aren't you?

Most people will shy away from this question. I shy away from it myself; I see it there on the page and quickly move on to the next sentence. Hamming used to go around actually asking people this, and it didn't make him popular. But it's a question anyone ambitious should face.

The trouble is, you may end up hooking a very big fish with this bait. To do good work, you need to do more than find good projects. Once you've found them, you have to get yourself to work on them, and that can be hard. The bigger the problem, the harder it is to get yourself to work on it.

Of course, the main reason people find it difficult to work on a particular problem is that they don't enjoy it. When you're young, especially, you often find yourself working on stuff you don't really like-- because it seems impressive, for example, or because you've been assigned to work on it. Most grad students are stuck working on big problems they don't really like, and grad school is thus synonymous with procrastination.

But even when you like what you're working on, it's easier to get yourself to work on small problems than big ones. Why? Why is it so hard to work on big problems? One reason is that you may not get any reward in the forseeable future. If you work on something you can finish in a day or two, you can expect to have a nice feeling of accomplishment fairly soon. If the reward is indefinitely far in the future, it seems less real.

Another reason people don't work on big projects is, ironically, fear of wasting time. What if they fail? Then all the time they spent on it will be wasted. (In fact it probably won't be, because work on hard projects almost always leads somewhere.)

But the trouble with big problems can't be just that they promise no immediate reward and might cause you to waste a lot of time. If that were all, they'd be no worse than going to visit your in-laws. There's more to it than that. Big problems are terrifying. There's an almost physical pain in facing them. It's like having a vacuum cleaner hooked up to your imagination. All your initial ideas get sucked out immediately, and you don't have any more, and yet the vacuum cleaner is still sucking.

You can't look a big problem too directly in the eye. You have to approach it somewhat obliquely. But you have to adjust the angle just right: you have to be facing the big problem directly enough that you catch some of the excitement radiating from it, but not so much that it paralyzes you. You can tighten the angle once you get going, just as a sailboat can sail closer to the wind once it gets underway.

If you want to work on big things, you seem to have to trick yourself into doing it. You have to work on small things that could grow into big things, or work on successively larger things, or split the moral load with collaborators. It's not a sign of weakness to depend on such tricks. The very best work has been done this way.

When I talk to people who've managed to make themselves work on big things, I find that all blow off errands, and all feel guilty about it. I don't think they should feel guilty. There's more to do than anyone could. So someone doing the best work they can is inevitably going to leave a lot of errands undone. It seems a mistake to feel bad about that.

I think the way to "solve" the problem of procrastination is to let delight pull you instead of making a to-do list push you. Work on an ambitious project you really enjoy, and sail as close to the wind as you can, and you'll leave the right things undone.

Good and Bad Procrastination

http://www.paulgraham.com/procrastination.html

**Alchemist** · 12-19-2010, 08:54 PM

^ That was good advice

I think this is especially true:

But it may be better to be overworked than interrupted. Once you dilute a startup with ordinary office workers—with type-B procrastinators—the whole company starts to resonate at their frequency. They're interrupt-driven, and soon you are too.

**Alchemist** · 12-19-2010, 09:07 PM

HOW TO SPEAK AND WRITE POSTMODERN

by Stephen Katz, Associate Professor, Sociology, Trent University, Peterborough, Ontario, Canada

Postmodernism has been the buzzword in academia for the last decade. Books, journal articles, conference themes and university courses have resounded to the debates about postmodernism that focus on the uniqueness of our times, where computerization, the global economy and the media have irrevocably transformed all forms of social engagement. As a professor of sociology who teaches about culture, I include myself in this environment. Indeed, I have a great interest in postmodernism both as an intellectual movement and as a practical problem. In my experience there seems to be a gulf between those who see the postmodern turn as a neo-conservative reupholstering of the same old corporate trappings, and those who see it as a long overdue break with modernist doctrines in education, aesthetics and politics. Of course there are all kinds of positions in between, depending upon how one sorts out the optimum route into the next millennium.

However, I think the real gulf is not so much positional as linguistic. Posture can be as important as politics when it comes to the intelligentsia. In other words, it may be less important whether or not you like postmodernism than whether or not you can speak and write postmodernism. Perhaps you would like to join in conversation with your local mandarins of cultural theory and all-purpose deep thinking, but you don't know what to say. Or, when you do contribute something you consider relevant, even insightful, you get ignored or looked at with pity. Here is a quick guide, then, to speaking and writing postmodern.

First, you need to remember that plainly expressed language is out of the question. It is too realist, modernist and obvious. Postmodern language requires that one uses play, parody and indeterminacy as critical techniques to point this out. Often this is quite a difficult requirement, so obscurity is a well-acknowledged substitute. For example, let's imagine you want to say something like, ``We should listen to the views of people outside of Western society in order to learn about the cultural biases that affect us''. This is honest but dull. Take the word ``views''. Postmodernspeak would change that to ``voices'', or better, ``vocalities'', or even better, ``multivocalities''. Add an adjective like ``intertextual'', and you're covered. ``People outside'' is also too plain. How about ``postcolonial others''? To speak postmodern properly one must master a bevy of biases besides the familiar racism, sexism, ageism, etc. For example, phallogocentricism (male-centredness combined with rationalistic forms of binary logic). Finally ``affect us'' sounds like plaid pajamas. Use more obscure verbs and phrases, like ``mediate our identities''. So, the final statement should say, ``We should listen to the intertextual, multivocalities of postcolonial others outside of Western culture in order to learn about the phallogocentric biases that mediate our identities''. Now you're talking postmodern!

Sometimes you might be in a hurry and won't have the time to muster even the minimum number of postmodern synonyms and neologisms needed to avoid public disgrace. Remember, saying the wrong thing is acceptable if you say it the right way. This brings me to a second important strategy in speaking postmodern, which is to use as many suffixes, prefixes, hyphens, slashes, underlinings and anything else your computer (an absolute must to write postmodern) can dish out. You can make a quick reference chart to avoid time delays. Make three columns. In column A put your prefixes; post-, hyper-, pre-, de-, dis-, re-, ex-, and counter-. In column B go your suffixes and related endings; -ism, -itis, -iality, -ation, -itivity, and -tricity. In column C add a series of well-respected names that make for impressive adjectives or schools of thought, for example, Barthes (Barthesian), Foucault (Foucauldian, Foucauldianism), Derrida (Derridean, Derrideanism).
Now for the test. You want to say or write something like, ``Contemporary buildings are alienating''. This is a good thought, but, of course, a non-starter. You wouldn't even get offered a second round of crackers and cheese at a conference reception with such a line. In fact, after saying this, you might get asked to stay and clean up the crackers and cheese after the reception. Go to your three columns. First, the prefix. Pre- is useful, as is post-, or several prefixes at once is terrific. Rather than ``contemporary building''", be creative. ``The Pre/post/spatialities of counter-architectural hyper-contemporaneity'' is promising. You would have to drop the weak and dated term ``alienating'' with some well suffixed words from column B. How about ``antisociality'', or be more postmodern and introduce ambiguity with the linked phrase, ``antisociality/seductivity''. Now, go to column C and grab a few names whose work everyone will agree is important and hardly anyone has had the time or the inclination to read. Continental European theorists are best when in doubt. I recommend the sociologist Jean Baudrillard since he has written a great deal of difficult material about postmodern space. Don't forget to make some mention of gender. Finally, add a few smoothing out words to tie the whole garbled mess together and don't forget to pack in the hyphens, slashes and parentheses. What do you get? ``Pre/post/spacialities of counter-architectural hyper-contemporaneity (re)commits us to an ambivalent recurrentiality of antisociality/seductivity, one enunciated in a de/gendered-Baudrillardian discourse of granulated subjectivity''. You should be able to hear a postindustrial pin drop on the retrocultural floor.

At some point someone may actually ask you what you're talking about. This risk faces all those who would speak postmodern and must be carefully avoided. You must always give the questioner the impression that they have missed the point, and so send another verbose salvo of postmodernspeak in their direction as a ``simplification'' or ``clarification'' of your original statement. If that doesn't work, you might be left with the terribly modernist thought of, ``I don't know''. Don't worry, just say, ``The instability of your question leaves me with several contradictorily layered responses whose interconnectivity cannot express the logocentric coherency you seek. I can only say that reality is more uneven and its (mis)representations more untrustworthy than we have time here to explore''. Any more questions? No, then pass the cheese and crackers.

**Alchemist** · 12-21-2010, 10:51 PM

^ you wrote this essay yourself?

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