Samantha Bee
wsj.com

It’s the eighth day of 2011, and my New Year’s resolutions are already in tatters. I have written three bad checks due to “not knowing what year I am living in,” and trying to go without white sugar for a day caused me to eat a half pound of artisanal honeycomb candy, hunkered over the bathroom sink, as my children desperately called out to me from the next room.

I have to ask myself, when I come home from work every day and transform, in a tornado of abandoned Spanx, from professional woman into sweatpants-clad, side-ponytailed “hot mess,” is this me “living my best life”? I just found a deer tick on my husband, reminding me that we haven’t actually looked at each other naked with the lights on since last July. Can we really say that my husband is living his “best life,” too? Are we going to find ourselves next December, chubby and disheveled, spending our date night gobbling Hot Pockets while we scrub melted crayons out of our dryer again? Or is this going to be the year that the Bee-Joneses finally get sorted?

To that end, I am curious about the Oprah Winfrey Network, and the transformative power of watching Oprah and her friends learn how to “live in the moment.” I’m capable of living in the moment. And I’m especially capable of living in the moment of sitting on my sofa and watching other people’s moments.

Let me preface this by saying, I love Oprah Winfrey. Love, love, LOVE. If you don’t love her too, that’s OK, that’s your prerogative. Just know that it makes you weird, and kind of withered inside, like Rumpelstiltskin or something. Full disclosure: I was on Oprah’s show once, briefly, years ago. (She probably doesn’t remember me. It’s OK. It was only one of the most heart-stoppingly exciting moments of my life.) In fact, I love her so much that I would not even decline an invitation to her Montecito ranch, even though I am not usually all that turned on by awe-inspiring vistas, or fountains that flow with the freshly squeezed juice of your choice, as is my understanding of her property there.

The word on the street is that OWN is a kind of “no-cynicism zone” with the potential to melt even the hardest of hearts. The other day, my husband and I watched YouTube videos of spectacular figure-skater wipe outs for about 45 minutes straight. What can OWN offer people like us? Have we ever, even for one minute, attempted to live in a “cynicism-free zone”? And what would happen if we did? What would that even look like? I mean, what happens to a person’s body when all of its connective tissue disappears? Do we just lie there? How do we make our eyes look doe-y after years of angry “New York face”? What would we have to talk about? After all, figure skating is stupid. Don’t even get me started on the outfits.

Blessedly, there is nothing of note going on in the sports world to distract my husband (except for something called “Wild Card Weekend,” which sounds uninteresting), and so I have taken the initiative to pledge our entire weekend to watching the Oprah Winfrey Network. It’s not just for the ladies, you know! It’s also for the men of those ladies! [ed. note: blatantly untrue] From the network’s website alone, I have just learned that it may be inappropriate for a grown married couple to sleep on a giant pile of their children’s cast-off McDonald’s Happy Meal toys. Look at me! I’m improving already!

For my weekend experiment, I have arranged a babysitter. I have prepared low-fat snacks. I have purchased matching full-coverage Swedish long johns for my husband and myself, obviously: shapeless (I don’t want any sex getting in the way of our bonding). And the Bee-Joneses are off on their journey of self-discovery.

Perusing the offerings on the OWN lineup, I am struck by how many of the shows seem to have something just for us. Hoarders (“Enough Already!”): check. A guy cut in half by a train who lives to tell the tale (“Mystery Diagnosis”): Ooh, I wanted to see that one! Oozing religious icons (“Miracle Detectives”): perfect. And on Sunday a Meg Ryan four-pack between 9:30 a.m. and 6:30 p.m. to divert our attention from all of that dull playoff football.

As my husband received this delicious news about our weekend plans, he carefully tried to contain his enthusiasm by staring off into the distance and twitching one of his eyelids intermittently. I gently reminded him that television doesn’t always have to be about hair-raising action on the gridiron, or the chance to drop $500 on the Saints with a sure-thing 10-point spread. It can also be about cozying up together to watch “The Color Purple,” one of the four runner-ups to 1985’s actual favorite movie, “Out of Africa.”

I could sense him reverting to his most primal self, preparing for either fight or flight. Whatever. I am fully prepared to become my best self, solo. If I don’t show up for work on Monday, someone please come get me, for I have most likely dissolved into a small puddle of human empathy. Look for me under all the discarded unisex thermal wear on the sofa.

By all means marry. If you get a good wife you will become happy, and If you get a bad one you will become a philosopher.

— Socrates

Why do women still feel so hounded? The ideal body seems now attainable only by plastic surgery. The ideal woman has the earning powers of a chief executive, breasts like an inflatable doll, no hips at all, and the tidy, hairless labia of an unviolated 6-year-old. The world gets harder and harder. There’s no pleasing it. No wonder some girls want out. Anorexia itself seems like mad behaviour, but I don’t think it’s madness. It is a way of shrinking back, of reserving, preserving the self, fighting free of sexual and emotional entanglements. It says, like Christ, noli me tangere. Touch me not and take yourself off. For a year or two, it may be a valid strategy; to be greensick, to be out of the game; to die just a little; to nourish the inner being while starving the outer being; to buy time. Most anorexics do recover, after all. Anorexia can be an accommodation, a strategy for survival.

— Hilary Mantel

Never use the word suddenly just to create tension.
– Writing Fiction

Suddenly, you were planting some yellow petunias
outside in the garden,
and suddenly I was in the study
looking up the word oligarchy for the thirty-seventh time.

When suddenly, without warning,
you planted the last petunia in the flat,
and I suddenly closed the dictionary
now that I was reminded of that vile form of governance.

A moment later, we found ourselves
standing suddenly in the kitchen
where you suddenly opened a can of cat food
and I just as suddenly watched you doing that.

I observed a window of leafy activity
and beyond that, a bird perched on the edge
of the stone birdbath
when suddenly you announced you were leaving

to pick up a few things at the market
and I stunned you by impulsively
pointing out that we were getting low on butter
and another case of wine would not be a bad idea.

Who could tell what the next moment would hold?
another drip from the faucet?
another little spasm of the second hand?
Would the painting of a bowl of pears continue

to hang on the wall from that nail?
Would the heavy anthologies remain on the shelves?
Would the stove hold its position?
Suddenly, it was anyone’s guess.

The sun rose ever higher in the sky.
The state capitals remained motionless on the wall map
when suddenly I found myself lying on a couch
where I closed my eyes and without any warning

began to picture the Andes, of all places,
and a path that led over the mountains to another country
with strange customs and eye-catching hats,
each one suddenly fringed with colorful little tassels.

— Billy Collins

The little car was jammed full of boxes and curled heaps of clothes on hangers. It sat low on its springs, under all these possessions heavy as passengers. Nick stood by it, still thinking, and then drifted unexpectedly down the street. The pavement was dry now in patches, but the sky was threatening and fast-moving. The tall white house fronts had a muted gleam. It came over him that the test result would be positive. The words that were said every day to others would be said to him, in that quiet consulting room whose desk and carpet and square modern armchair would share indissolubly in the moment. There was a large tranquil photograph in a frame, and a view of the hospital chimney from the window. He was young, without much training in stoicism. What would he do once he left the room? He dawdled on, rather breathless, seeing visions in the middle of the day. He tried to rationalize the fear, but its pull was too strong and original. It was inside himself, but the world around him, the parked car, the cruising taxi, the church spire among the trees, had also been changed. They had been revealed. It was like a drug sensation, but without the awareness of play. The motorcyclist who lived over the road clumped out in his leathers and attended to his bike. Nick gazed at him and then looked away in a regret that held him and glazed him and kept him apart. There was nothing this man could do to help him. None of his friends could save him. The time came, and they learned the news in the room they were in, at a certain moment in their planned and continuing day. They woke the next morning, and after a while it came back to them. Nick searched their faces as they explored their feelings. He seemed to fade pretty quickly. He found himself yearning to know of their affairs, their successes, the novels and the new ideas that the few who remembered him might say he never knew, he never lived to find out. It was the morning’s vision of the empty street, but projected far forward, into afternoons like this one decades hence, in the absent hum of their own business. The emotion was startling. It was a sort of terror, made up of emotions from every stage of his short life, weaning, homesickness, envy and self-pity; but he felt that the self-pity belonged to a larger pity. It was a love of the world that was shockingly unconditional. He stared back at the house, and then turned and drifted on. He looked in bewilderment at number 24, the final house with its regalia of stucco swags and bows. It wasn’t just this street corner but the fact of a street corner at all that seemed, in the light of the moment, so beautiful.

— Alan Hollinghurst, The Line of Beauty

He couldn’t unwind the line of beauty for Catherine, because it explained almost everything, and to her it would seem a trivial delusion, it would seem mad, as she said.

The double curve was Hogarth’s “line of beauty,” the snakelike flicker of an instinct, of two compulsions held in one unfolding movement. He ran his hand down Wani’s back. He didn’t think Hogarth had illustrated this best example of it, the dip and swell — he had chosen harps and branches, bones rather than flesh. Really it was time for a new Analysis of Beauty.

— Alan Hollinghurst, The Line of Beauty

Who are you?
Here on a high shelf
In webbed flask I
Hook up my folded self
Bat-leather dry.

Who were you?
The gold god goaded me
Sang shrieking sang high
His heat corroded me
Not mine his cry.

What do you see?
I saw the firmament
Steady the sky
I saw the cerement
Close Caesar’s eye.

What do you hope?
Desire is a dowsed fire
True love a lie
To a dusty shelf we aspire
I crave to die.

— Christabel LaMotte
(A. S. Byatt, Possession)

“It rests me to be among beautiful women.
Why should one always lie about such matters?
I repeat:
It rests me to converse with beautiful women
Even though we talk nothing but nonsense.

The purring of the invisible antennae
Is both stimulating and delightful.”

— Ezra Pound

Fig tree, for how long now have I found meaning
in the way you almost forget to bloom
and drive without drama your pure mystery
into the young determined fruit.
Like a fountain’s channel your curving branches
force the sap downward and up again; look, it springs
straight from sleep into its sweetest achievement —
like the god entering the swan. . . .

— Rilke, From the Sixth Duino Elegy

We work in the dark — we do what we can — we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task.

— Henry James, “The Middle Years”

She took refuge on the firm ground of fiction, through which indeed there curled the blue river of truth.

— Henry James, What Maisie Knew

By John McPhee
wsj.com

You’re wading around in your notes, getting nowhere. You don’t see a structure for the piece you’re trying to write. You don’t know what to do. So you stop everything and hunt through your mind for a good beginning, a good way to scissor in. Then do it; write it; get a lead on paper.

If the whole piece of writing is not a long one, you may plunge right on and out the other side and have a finished draft before you know it. But if the piece is to have some combination of substance, complexity and structural juxtaposition, you might begin with that workable lead and then be able to sit back and think about where you are going and how you plan to get there.

Writing a successful lead, in other words, can illuminate the problem for you and cause you to see the piece whole, to see it conceptually, in various parts, to which you then assign your materials. You find your lead, you build your structure, you are now free to write.

What is a lead? For one thing, it is the hardest part of a story to write. Here is an egregiously bad one from an article on chronic sleeplessness: “Insomnia is the triumph of mind over mattress.” Why is that bad? It’s not bad at all if you want to be a slapstick comedian. But if you are serious about the subject, you are indicating at the outset that you don’t have confidence in your material, so you are trying to make up for it by waxing cute.

I have often heard writers say that if you have written your lead, you have in a sense written half of your story. Finding a good lead can require that much time, through trial and error. You can start almost anywhere. Several possibilities will occur to you. Which one are you going to choose? It is easier to say what not to choose. A lead should not be cheap, flashy, meretricious, blaring: After a tremendous fanfare of verbal trumpets, a mouse comes out of a hole, blinking.

Blind leads—wherein you withhold the name of the person or subject you are writing about and reveal it after a paragraph or two—range from slightly cheap to very cheap. There’s nothing inherently wrong with them, but you should ration such indulgences. A blind lead is like a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat, but the ears were sticking up from the get-go. Be conscious of the risk—of what is often wrong with such things—and then go ahead and try them. In this or that piece of mine, I have felt that a blind lead was by far the best choice. But not very often.

All leads, of every variety, should be sound. They should never promise what does not follow. You read an exciting action lead about a car chase up a narrow street. Then the article turns out to be a financial analysis of debt structures in private universities. You’ve been had. The lead, like the title, should be a flashlight that shines down into the story.

A lead is a promise. It promises that the piece of writing is going to be like this. If it is not going to be so, don’t use the lead. A lead is good not because it dances, fires cannons or whistles like a train, but because it is absolute to what follows.

By Alain de Botton
wsj.com

Hard-working, pragmatic types, who abound in the United States, have always been suspicious of university education in the humanities. What good does it do to study the works of Milton or Rousseau, let alone the enigmatic pronouncements of Buddha or the Zen poet Basho? The unemployment rate hovers near 10%, and the Chinese are feeding their undergraduates a strict diet of engineering and accountancy. How can we pampered, decadent sorts possibly still be indulging our youth with lectures on Roman poetry and Renaissance painting?

Unfortunately, university professors in the humanities tend to get unproductively upset when asked to explain the importance of what they do. They know that their opposite numbers in the technical and scientific departments can justify their work in utilitarian terms to impatient government officials and donors. But fearing that they cannot compete effectively, the denizens of the humanities prefer to take refuge in ambiguity and silence, having carefully calculated that they retain just enough prestige to get away with leaving the reasons for their existence somewhat murky.

My own answer to what the humanities are for is simple: They should help us to live. We should look to culture as a storehouse of useful ideas about how to face our most pressing personal and professional issues. Novels and historical narratives can impart moral instruction and edification. Great paintings can suggest the requirements for happiness. Philosophy can probe our anxieties and offer consolation. It should be the job of a university education to tease out the therapeutic and illuminative aspects of culture, so that we emerge from a period of study as slightly less disturbed, selfish and blinkered human beings. Such a transformation benefits not only the economy but also our friends, children and spouses.

I’m hardly the first to express these hopes of education. In mid-19th-century Victorian Britain, we find men like John Stuart Mill saying that “the object of universities is not to make skilful lawyers, physicians or engineers” but “to make capable and cultivated human beings.” His contemporary Matthew Arnold sounded similar notes, arguing that liberal education should help to inspire in us “a love of our neighbour, a desire for clearing human confusion and for diminishing human misery.” At its most ambitious, it should even engender the “noble aspiration to leave the world better and happier than we found it.”

These well-meaning mid-Victorians wanted universities to become our new churches, places that would teach us how to live, but without dogma or superstition. Given the dramatic decline in religious belief in the 19th century in Europe, anguished questions were raised about how, in the absence of a Christian framework, people would manage to find meaning, understand themselves, behave in a moral fashion, forgive their fellow humans and confront their own mortality. It was hoped that cultural works might henceforth be consulted in place of the biblical texts.

The claim that culture can stand in for scripture—that “Middlemarch” or the essays of Schopenhauer can take up the responsibilities previously handled by the Psalms—still has a way of sounding eccentric or insane. But the ambition is not misplaced: Culture can and should change and save our lives. The problem is the way that culture is taught at our universities, which have a knack for killing its higher possibilities.

The modern university has achieved unparalleled expertise in imparting factual information about culture, but it remains wholly uninterested in training students to use culture as a repertoire of wisdom—that is, a kind of knowledge concerned with things that are not only true but also inwardly beneficial, providing comfort in the face of life’s infinite challenges, from a tyrannical employer to a fatal diagnosis. Our universities have never offered what churches invariably focus on: guidance.

It is a basic tenet of contemporary scholarship that no academic should connect works of culture to individual sorrows. It remains shocking to ask what “Tess of the d’Urbervilles” might usefully teach us about love or to read the novels of Henry James as if they might contain instructive parables. When confronted by those who demand that a university education should be relevant and useful, that it should offer advice on how to choose a career or survive the end of a marriage, how to contain sexual impulses or cope with the news of a medical death sentence, the guardians of culture become disdainful. They prefer students who are mature, independent, temperamentally able to live with questions rather than answers, and ready to put aside their own needs for the sake of years of disinterested study.

Whatever the rhetoric of promotional prospectuses and graduation ceremonies, the modern university has precious little interest in teaching us any emotional or ethical life skills: how to love our neighbors, clear human confusion, diminish human misery and “leave the world better and happier than we found it.” To judge by what they do rather than what they airily declaim, universities are in the business of turning out tightly focused professionals and a minority of culturally well-informed but ethically confused arts graduates, who have limited prospects for employment. We have charged our higher-education system with a dual and possibly contradictory mission: to teach us both how to make a living and how to live. But we have left the second of these aims recklessly vague and unattended.

Because this situation cries out for a remedy, a few years ago I joined with a group of similarly disaffected academics, artists and writers and helped to start a new kind of university. We call it, plainly, the School of Life, and it operates from a modest space in central London. On the menu of our school, you won’t find subjects like philosophy, French and history. You’ll find courses in marriage, child-rearing, choosing a career, changing the world and death. Along the way, our students encounter many of the books and ideas that traditional universities serve up, but they seldom get bored—and often come away with a different take on the world.

The School of Life draws upon the same rich catalog of culture treated by its traditional counterparts; we study novels, histories, plays and paintings. But we teach this material with a view to illuminating students’ lives rather than merely prodding them toward academic goals. “Anna Karenina” and “Madame Bovary” are assigned in a course on understanding the tensions of marriage instead of in one focused on narrative trends in 19th-century fiction. Epicurus and Plato appear in the syllabus for a course about wisdom rather than in a survey of Hellenistic philosophy.

We are currently teaching a class on anger using the works of Seneca, the Stoic philosopher who proposed that anger results not from an uncontrollable eruption of the passions but from a basic (and correctible) error of reasoning. In his view, what makes us angry is having dangerously optimistic ideas about what the world and other people are like. How badly we react to frustration is critically determined by what we consider to be normal. We may be frustrated by a rain storm, but we are unlikely to respond to one with anger. So Seneca’s answer to anger is to disappoint ourselves fully before life has a chance to do it for us. Students who thought they had enrolled merely to read some old books have come away with tools to live in a better way. There’s a waiting list for almost every course we run.

A university might follow this model by identifying the problematic areas in people’s lives and designing courses that address them head on. There should be classes devoted to, among other things: being alone, reconsidering work, improving relationships with children, reconnecting with nature and facing illness. A university alive to its true responsibilities in a secular age would establish a Department for Relationships, an Institute of Dying and a Center for Self-Knowledge. This is less a matter of finding new books to teach than of asking the right questions of the ones we already have.

Our most celebrated intellectual institutions rarely consent to ask, let alone to answer, the most serious questions of the soul. Oprah Winfrey may not provide the deepest possible analysis of the human condition, but her questions are often more probing and meaningful than those posed by Ivy League professors in the humanities. It is time for humanistic education to outgrow its fears of irrelevance and to engage directly with our most pressing personal and spiritual needs.

Classes Taught at ‘The School of Life” in London

How to Make Love Last:

Is love something we’re destined to fall in and out of, or can it be sustained over time? Is sexual desire the essential lubricant…or a pale companion compared with friendship and trust?

Readings include:
‘Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy
‘The Iris Triology’ by John Bayley
‘The Art of Loving’ by Erich Fromm

How to Face Death:

Is there such a good thing as a good death? How might we best mourn the loss of those we cared about?

Readings include:
‘Consolation in the Face of Death’ by Samuel Johnson
‘My Last Sigh’ by Luis Bunuel;
‘The Year of Magical Thinking’ by Joan Didion

How to Fill the God-Shaped Hole:

In what ways might people who are disinclined to follow a particular religion nurture their spiritual side?

Readings include:
‘Confessions’ by Augustine
‘Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion’ by David Hume
‘Selected Poems’ by Emily Dickinson

How to Find a Job You Love:

What would a meaningful working life really look like?

Readings include:
‘Walden’ by Henry David Thoreau
‘The Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism’ by Max Weber
‘The Conditions of the Working Class in England’ by Frederich Engels

Only as a child am I awake
and able to trust
that in every fear and every night
I will behold you again.

However often I get lost,
however far my thinking strays,
I know you will be here, right here,
untouched by time.

To me it is as if I were at once
infant, boy, man and more.
I feel that only as it circles
is abundance found.

I thank you, deep power
that works me ever more lightly
in ways I can’t make out.
The day’s labor grows simple now,
and like a holy face
held in my dark hands.

— Rilke, The Book of Hours I, 62