Winter Of Our Discontents.

So I finally finished Wonderful Town, a collection of short stories from the past 80 years or so of The New Yorker, which somehow scores a 4.04 out of 4 stars on LibraryThnig. I do have to agree with the 4.04 though; it really is fantastic.

So last night I picked up a book that I bought from a used book guy on Beaver Street where Broadway turns into Cortlandt Street in Manhattan's Financial District. There are two really good used book guys who set up shop there on weekdays and a legendary lunch wagon vendor known around the area as "The Chicken Man." Oh and in the winter there's a soup stand with great split pea and ham soup. And of course within the aforementioned 100 feet of pavement also sits Yips, the granddaddy of all Chinese buffets, in its surreal basement setting at 18 Beaver.

Oh right, the book. It's called Civilization And Its Discontents, written by Sigmund Freud and published in 1930. My copy, scanned above, was printed in 1960. I think I paid $3.00.

Anyway, I started this book when I still lived in the city. Well, Brooklyn actually. I'm trying but I can't imagine a more boring, desolate book cover (click on it for a super-intense close-up). I have no idea why I bought it, but I'm really enjoying it. It's about the futility of man's search for happiness, the absurdity of religion, and, as Huey Lewis once said, The Power of Love.

Several passages, I thought, were not only breathtakingly honest but also seemed, eerily, to transcend the 75 or so years since being written. I found the following dose of realism particularly salient:

During the last few generations mankind has made an extraordinary advance in the natural sciences and in their technical application and has established his control over nature in a way never before imagined. The single steps of this advance are common knowledge and it is unnecessary to enumerate them. Men are proud of those achievements, and have a right to be. But they seem to have observed that this newly-won power over space and time, this subjugation of the forces of nature, which is the fulfillment of a longing that goes back thousands of years, has not increased the amount of pleasurable satisfaction which they may expect from life and has not made them feel happier. From the recognition of this fact we ought to be content to conclude that power over nature is not the only precondition of human happiness, just as it is not the only goal of cultural endeavor; we ought not to infer from it that technical progress is without value for the economics of our happiness. One would like to ask: is there, then, no positive gain in pleasure, no unequivocal increase in my feeling of happiness, if I can, as often as I please, hear the voice of a child of mine who is living hundreds of miles away or if I can learn in the shortest possible time after a friend has reached his destination that he has come through the long and difficult voyage unharmed? Does it mean nothing that medicine has succeeded in enormously reducing infant mortality and the danger of infection for women in childbirth, and, indeed, in considerably lengthening the average life of a civilized man? And there is a long list that might be added to benefits of this kind which we owe to the much-despised era of scientific and technical advances. But here the voice of pessimistic criticism makes itself heard and warns us that most of these satisfactions follow the model of the 'cheap enjoyment' extolled in the anecdote-the enjoyment obtained by putting a bare leg from under the bedclothes on a cold winter night and drawing it in again. If there had been no railway to conquer distances, my child would never have left his native town and I should need no telephone to hear his voice; if traveling across the ocean by ship had not been introduced, my friend would not have embarked on his sea-voyage and I should not need a cable to relieve my anxiety about him. What is the use of reducing infantile mortality when it is precisely that reduction which imposes the greatest restraint on us in the begetting of children, so that, taken all round, we nevertheless rear no more children than in the days before the reign of hygiene, while at the same time we have created difficult conditions for our sexual life in marriage, and have probably worked against the beneficial effects of natural selection? And, finally, what good to us is a long life if it is difficult and barren of joys, and if it is so full of misery that we can only welcome death as a deliverer?

That was all one paragraph. Actually only part of a paragraph. Freud is one bad motherfucker. I never knew he was so judgmental and poetic. It's really very beautiful.