3 posts tagged “heart”

“Passion is sanity” says Mr. Emerson in E.M. Forster’s A Room With a View. I was reminded of that scene in Star Wars where the spirit of Obi Wan Kenobe tells Luke Skywalker to shut off his X Wing fighter’s instrumentation panel and “trust his feelings” to find the precise moment to launch the missile that will destroy the Death Star and Save the Resistance from annihilation. “I forbid you to consult the Baedeker. You should consult your feelings here” Lucy Honeychurch is advised in A Room With a View, and the advice Lucy is given throughout the novel is consistent with that simple injunction, though with the understanding that “Life is easy to chronicle, but bewildering to practice.”

Forster keeps returning to the use of the word “muddled” as he brings his main character, Lucy, through the stormy sea of late adolescence and early adulthood. She is sent to Italy with a chaperone and the clear instruction to find a perfect Victorian husband with whom to live a perfect Victorian life and yet she discovers that Italy and the people that she meets there muddle everything. Her feelings don’t follow the channels that her society has dug for her to run into. Everyone, it seems, has a different idea about how she gets muddled, but they all know that she is getting so. Here are just a few examples.

“It isn't possible to love and to part. You will ... wish that it was. You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you. I know by experience that the poets are right: love is eternal” (19.42).

“[…] let yourself go. You are inclined to get muddled, ... if I may judge from last night. Let yourself go. Pull out from the depths those thoughts that you do not understand, and spread them out in the sunlight and know the meaning of them” (2.43).

“And she spoke so seriously that the risk became a certainty, and he, lifting his eyes, said: “You are leaving him? You are leaving the man you love?”
I—I had to.
“why, Miss Honeychurch, why?”
Terror came over her, and she lied again. She made the long, convincing speech that she had made to Mr. Beebe, and intended to make to the world when she announced that her engagement was no more. He heard her in silence, and then said: “My dear, I am worried about you. It seems to me” — dreamily; she was not alarmed — “that you are in a muddle.
She shook her head.
“Take an old man's word; there’s nothing worse than a muddle in all the world. lt is easy to face Death and Fate, and the things that sound so dreadful. It is on my muddles that I look back with horror — on the things that I might have avoided. We can help one another but little. I used to think I could teach young people the whole of life, but I know better now, and all my teaching of George has come down to this: beware of muddle.”

What clearly needs to happen before Lucy Honeychurch starts making decisions and promises that affect other people is this. She needs to figure out, in the abstract, what weights she will place on the various influences that affect her decisions. Will her feelings weigh 50%, her familiy’s opinions weigh 30% and her reason weigh 20%? Or will she construct some other recipe more like 30-30-30? “This solitude oppressed her;” the character, Lucy observes. “She was accustomed to have her ... thoughts confirmed by others or, at all events, contradicted; it was too dreadful not to know whether she was thinking right or wrong.”

And there is the rub, Lucy. There is no weighting of influences that will provide you with a right answer every time. So in matters of the heart, where no retreat from the decision is possible, aim to have your head, your heart, and your family all at a 100% agreement. And have a good reason why not if that can’t be the case.

In the end, E.M. Forster speaks through Mr. Emerson (a slightly veiled allusion to Ralph Waldo Emerson who wrote the Bible of the transcendental self making decisions in his essay Self Reliance), the essential thing is to know that you love and are loved:

“When I think what life is, and how seldom love is answered by love; Marry him; it is one of the moments for which the world was made.”

Or as the book of Song of Solomon puts it “I am my beloved’s and he is mine” … It seems like that is the sort of love that even God cannot help but celebrate. And I guess He should weigh more than anyone.

Think, feel, pray, listen … do all these things. Just don’t pretend.

“It did not do to think, nor, for the matter ... of that to feel. She gave up trying to understand herself, and the vast armies of the benighted, who follow neither the heart nor the brain, and march to their destiny by catch-words. The armies are full of pleasant and pious folk. But they have yielded to the only enemy that matters—the enemy within. They have sinned against passion and truth, and vain will be their strife after virtue […] Lucy entered this army when she pretended to George that she did not love him, and pretended to Cecil that she loved no one. The night received her, as it had received Miss Bartlett thirty years before (17.54-5).

One must assume that on the way to truth there will be muddlement. We must bear with it long enough to be allowed to see. To be allowed to grow up. Which is really simply the act of coming to see. Like learning to wait before walking after getting dizzy.

“Lucy cried aloud: “It isn't true. It can't all be true. I want not to be muddled. I want to grow older quickly.”

In response to the advice “beware of muddle” I think I would say “was there ever a different way to finding the truth?” As Oscar Wilde says “Only the shallow know themselves.” Muddled? Welcome to class.

Question for comment: We all get muddled sometimes. Do you tend to remain so longer than most? Why?

Today's movie is entitled Pioneers of Hospice: Changing the Face of Dying. It is a documentary about the changes in the way that we as a society care for dying people. The movie takes us through the stories of four different visionaries who changed the way that Americans see the process of dying and the appropriate social response to those who are dying. For those who have worked with people in their last stages of life or who have family members who have or are in that stage, this is an excellent movie for getting a conversation going. For that reason, instead of telling you what I think, I have created a discussion guide to go with the movie. Enjoy.

Discussion Questions for

Pioneers of Hospice: Changing the Face of Death and Dying

 

1. What are the most significant changes in thinking that resulted from the work done by leaders you see highlighted in this documentary?
   
   
2. Do you think people die better when they die better informed? Why or why not? And why do you suppose people in the past decided that those who were dieing were better off not knowing what was happening?
   
   
3. The documentary mentions that the civil rights movement in America had precipitated a patient’s rights movement as well. What is the status of that patient’s rights movement today and is there still work to be done?
   
   
4. “It is no good beating your breast and saying ‘we ought to do something about this’. It’s the people who come up and say ‘well this is what you should do’ that makes a difference. Cicely brought us hope in the form of a method of caring which seemed to work.” Can you give an example of how you have seen this work in your own life and work? Or conversely, can you think of something you would like to see changed that you would like to develop a system for change? Explain.
   
   
5. “The private life became public in the 1960’s.” What social forces brought about this change in your opinion and do you think it ever will (or should) go back to the way it was before.
   
   
6. “There aren’t too many original ideas in the world, so what you do is to keep the antennae up and the ideas come from all around. It is like putting them into a kaleidoscope and you give a shake and they come into a new pattern.” Have you ever had an experience where you were both exposed to new ideas and encouraged to shake them up? What resulted?
   
   
7.  “Someone needs to say it first and that is the spark that gets everybody going.” Ralph Waldo Emerson once suggested that we all have some spark of genius but that we squelch it simply because no one else has said what we were thinking. And then someone else says it. Have you ever had the experience of hearing your own original thoughts declared to you by someone else? When? What keeps you from expressing yourself?
   
   
8.  “One can’t make changes unless society wants them to come about and we were very fortunate in that we were developing those ideas in that time of protest and change.” Do you think the modern world is perpetually stuck in a time of protest and change? Or do we live in era where new ideas are more than likely to die out without impact? Why do you think this is? How does your opinion affect you personally?
   
   
9.   “I was shaving one morning …” Balfour Mount says while describing his idea for a hospital wing dedicated to palliative care. Where were you when you had your last brilliant idea?
   
   
10.    “Bal Mount has been able to integrate the heart into the science of medicine.” Have you been able to do the same in your line of work? Why or why not? Were those that trained you in your work open to intimacy in the pursuit of professionalism? Are you?
    
    
11.  “Not to push patients also means that if someone needs denial never tear the denial down” Elizabeth Kübler Ross says. Do you agree or disagree with her regarding this? Why or why not? What personal experiences relate to answering the question as you have?  
    
    
12.  “When I hear of spiritual, I think of that domain of my existence that needs to identify with something larger and more enduring than the self.” Dr. Balfour Mount asserts that spirituality is universal … like having a pancreas. Would you agree? And if so, how does this perception affect the way that you do your work?
    
    
13. “I think there is a shift that is happening from a singular focus on the biomedical to a broader horizon that is not just investigating, diagnosing, and curing.” Have you ever had the experience of being a patient or even a client of some sort that relates to this assertion? What was it like to be treated as a human (or conversely, as a machine or a number)? Would you agree that there is a shift?
    
    
14. “Dying in good health means …” How would you finish that sentence? Why?
    
    
15.  What objective do you think the producers of this documentary had in mind when they set out to make this movie? Do you think they succeeded? Why or why not?
    
    
16. What specifically can you take from this documentary and use in your own personal or professional life this week?
    
    
17. What are different ways that you can see this documentary being used in furthering some social change or learning objective that you care about?
    
    
18. Do you have any other comments or insights to make about the movie?

I personally would also highly recommend the movie WIT in conjunction with this one as it illustrates exactly how heart can be removed from the process.

 

Sense and Sensibility (Penguin Classics)

Jane Austen

"Mr. Collins to be sure was neither sensible nor agreeable; his society was irksome, and his attachment to her must be imaginary.  But still he would be her husband.  – without thinking highly either of men or of matrimony, marriage had always been her object; it was the only honorable provision for well educated young women of small fortune, and however uncertain of giving happiness, must be their pleasantest preservative from want.  This preservative she had now obtained; and at the age of 27, without having ever been handsome, she felt all the good luck of it."

Throughout Austen's novels, one gets this sense that women were significantly at a disadvantage in courting. Men could afford to be more selective I suppose you could say because their very financial existence was not entirely dependent upon their choices.

"Darcy had never been so bewitched by any woman as he was by her.  He really believed, that were it not for the inferiority of her connections he should be in some danger. . .  . He began to feel the danger of paying Elizabeth too much attention.

Elizabeth had been at Nethersfield long enough.  She attracted him more than he liked -- . . .   He wisely resolved to be particularly careful that no sign of admiration should now escape him, nothing that could elevate her with hope of influencing his felicity, sensible that if such an idea had been suggested, his behavior during the last day must have material weight in confirming or crushing it. Steady to his purpose, he scarcely spoke ten words to her through the whole of Saturday, and though they were at one time left by themselves for half an hour, he adhered most conscientiously to his books, and would not even look at her."

Darcy simply has to make sure that he DOESN'T marry someone who's family will become a drain on his resources. Elizabeth's sisters have to find someone who can sustain them. I feel sorry for these people. They are not free to find the people that love them and that they love. Their economic gender inequalities are constantly interfering with their heart-judgments. As one character puts it,

"Our habits of expense make us too dependent, and there are not too many in my rank of life who can afford to marry without some attention to money."

And thus the warning!

        "O Lizzy!  Do anything rather than marry without affection."

... and her father's consolation:

        ". . . my dear child, let me not have the grief of seeing you unable to respect your partner in life."

Question for Comment: What has interfered with good relational sense in your life?