Slate's Bizbox
the breakfast table: An e-mail conversation about the news of the day.

Peter D. Kramer and Andrew Solomon

the breakfast table
entries
123456789101112131415161718
from: Andrew Solomon

The Advantages of Difficult Pleasures

Posted Wednesday, July 11, 2001, at 12:22 PM ET

Dear Peter,

Weirdly enough, you've hit on the subject (in part) of my next book, the one I'm supposed to be writing a coherent proposal for when I'm not writing Slate e-mails. I won't tell you the whole story here as I haven't finished the coherent proposal (or even the coherent thought), but one of my subjects is deafness, about which I wrote a long piece for the New York Times Magazine a while ago. One is depression. One is gayness. There are a bunch of others. My view about depression is that I've managed to extract a lot of richness from it and that I don't really regret it because it's made me who I am and I basically like who I am, but that if I had it all to do over again, I certainly wouldn't choose to be depressed. I think I'd say the same thing about being gay--it's got its wonderful side, but it was hard when I was growing up, and it offers constant challenges. I have good friends who I know would say the same thing about being deaf. I would want my child to have an easy life. One wants to protect the vulnerable. So I'd wish for that child to be hearing, happy, and straight. On the other hand, I'd want that child to live in a world that has a broad range of people in it, and I'd be sorry for that child (or for myself) to live in a world in which people weren't made more profound by a variety of challenges. I mean, many of my best friends are gay or depressed or deaf or something else; vanilla bean people tend not to interest me much, and I am not sure that they are really the ones who live life to the fullest. I wouldn't wish for hearing for most of my deaf friends, and I wouldn't wish for heterosexuality for most of my gay friends. I wouldn't wish further depressive episodes on anyone, but I wouldn't really wish away the depression experiences many of my friends have had. Does that answer the question?

Schopenhauer said, "Imagine this race transported to a Utopia where everything grows of its own accord and turkeys fly around ready-roasted, where lovers find one another without any delay and keep one another without any difficulty: in such a place some men would die of boredom or hang themselves; some would fight and kill one another; and thus they would create for themselves more suffering than nature inflicts on them as it is ... the polar opposite of suffering is boredom." I tend to agree. I tend to think that suffering gives richness and texture to life and that we should learn the value of difficulty. Lucretius said (sorry to get all quotation-ridden here) that the sublime is the exchange of easier for more difficult pleasures. Deafness, gayness, depression--these are difficult pleasures indeed. I wouldn't insist that anyone take them on. Learning ancient Greek might be enough of a difficult pleasure. But having said I'd protect my child from depression, I would insist that my child be immersed in difficult pleasures. I wouldn't want to have a child so coddled as to have only the immediate joys of life, a child who grew up softened by flowers and free from all the troubling obligations of love and loss and hope. ...

I meanwhile hope for some progress on stem cells, and the IDEA that research that might save the lives of many actual viable people may be terminated because some crowd of ninnies thinks it's more important to save the "lives" of the unborn seems so lunatic to me that it makes me want to throw up.

Ever,
A

the breakfast table
entries
123456789101112131415161718
from: Andrew Solomon

The Advantages of Difficult Pleasures

Posted Wednesday, July 11, 2001, at 12:22 PM ET
Print This ArticlePRINTDiscuss this in The FrayDISCUSSEmail to a FriendE-MAIL
Share on FacebookPost to MySpace!Share with MixxDigg ThisShare with RedditShare with del.icio.usShare with FurlShare with Ma.gnolia.comShare with SphereShare with Stumble Upon
Peter D. Kramer is a professor of psychiatry at Brown University and author of Listening to Prozac and the new novel Spectacular Happiness. Andrew Solomon is the author of The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression (read a "Book Club" discussion of it here) and also of the recently reissued novel A Stone Boat.
Join the Fray: our reader discussion forum
What did you think of this article?
POST A MESSAGE | READ MESSAGES

Reader Comments From The Fray

:


[Notes from the Fray Editor... or perhaps we should call them footnotes. There was a recommendation for David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest here, and a splendid line from Tim Button here: "Footnotes are justifiable in philosophy, but philosophy as a whole is very hard to justify." KC is expecting footnotes to these exchanges. The Fray team would like to recommend Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire as having the best footnotes ever. We were glad to see that the poster Shark agreed with us: he is looking like the new star of the "Breakfast Table" (eat your hearts out Neill Hamilton and Amber) with his cutting-edge offer of a Kaus-like Star Poster skipping service. Find it here, on the WillV post below, and here.]


You wrote about anarchists who capture the popular imagination? Obviously, you didn't know about the merry band here in the Fray, a group that perfected popular anarchy long ago. Come join us as those from the left, center, and right are terrorized for intellectual pretensions, grammar and punctuation, and bourgeois status symbols. Your sequel could write itself.

--WillV

(To reply, click here.)


It has been suggested that liberals backing down on their opposition to nuclear power is equivalent to conservatives backing down on the rights of children who cannot yet defend themselves against abortions. I'm not going to bother with the actual debates, but I would like to say that liberals and conservatives alike view the nuclear power question as a balance of risk vs savings. Nuclear power is cheap, plentiful, and the electricity is the same either way. The only questions are these: can the plants be run safely, can the waste be disposed of safely. These are practical concerns, and as the need for power increases, the risks seem less ominous. If we were to suddenly find unlimited sources of sulfer free oil, or a way to cheaply produce reliable solar energy, conservatives would find the risk of nuclear power unpalatable. Nobody opposes nuclear power on moral grounds, everybody has practical concerns.

Abortion, infanticide, pornography, etc: These are moral issues, not practical issues. No conservative would say that he opposes abortion because there are too few babies being produced. Moral issues are fundamentally different from practical concerns.

In any case, conservatives and liberals frequently change their positions on practical issues, as things become palatable or circumstances change. When they start giving up moral positions, there had better have been a revelation, because abandonment of a moral position out of expediency is ... immoral

--Ben Kirkup

(To reply, click here.)

 (7/9)

Washington Post
The Washington Post
OPINIONS
The Great Debate
Marcus | Forget Biden. I'd like to see McCain face off against Palin.
Toles: Another McCain SurpriseStumped: Where's Palin's Baby?