Psychology and Other Stories (39 page)

This is the best piece of advice I have ever read.

109
  “
The will, as Nietzsche would be the first to admit … ‘self-referential subroutines
' …” Barton Q. Barnard, from the introduction to
The Will and The Won't: Nietzsche and the Myth of Decision
, by James R. Bird. (Clapham University Press, 1993.) p. xxi.

110
  
“The sum of the inner movements … one calls his soul.” Daybreak
, §311.

110
  …
the great writer could be recognized: The Wanderer and His Shadow
, §97.

Nietzsche also said that to improve one's style is to improve one's thoughts, and nothing else. In other words, you cannot say exactly what you mean until you figure out exactly what you think, and most of our thoughts cannot even be thought clearly unless they are clutched with words: “I caught a notion on the way, and hastily took the readiest, poor words to hold it fast, so that it might not again fly away. But it has died in these dry words, and hangs and flaps about in them—and now I hardly know how I could have had such happiness when I caught this bird.”

As someone who put a high value on saying exactly what you mean, Nietzsche deplored verbosity and pleonasm: “The half-blind are the mortal foes of authors who let themselves go. They would like to vent on them the wrath they feel when they slam shut a book whose author has taken fifty pages to communicate five ideas—their wrath, that is, at having endangered what is left of their eyesight for so little recompense.” He even formulated a “draconian law” against such authors, which stated that a writer should be treated as a criminal “who deserves acquittal or pardon only in the rarest of cases: that would be one remedy against the increase of books.” This may not be practical, but one must admire the sentiment.

“In the mountains,” he wrote, “the shortest route is from peak to peak, but for that you must have long legs. Aphorisms should be peaks, and those to whom they are spoken should be big and tall of stature.”

See
The Wanderer and His Shadow
, §131;
Joyful Wisdom
, §298;
The Wanderer and His Shadow
, §143;
Human, All Too Human
, §193; and
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
, p. 67 (of 343).

111
  “
If you don't give in to your true self, your true self will give in to you
.” Jim Bird,
Letting Go: How To Stop Striving and Start Living
! (Chapman Loebb, 1998.) p. 215 (of 325).

111
“Smiling is not a panacea—but it is a good cure for a frown
.” Ibid., p. 20 (of 325).

111
  
“I know, I know, you're thinking … It applies to
everyone.” This sample of Bird's catechistic style is actually taken from his third book,
The Power of Powerlessness: Letting It Happen To Make It Happen.
(Chapman Loebb, 2000.) p. 48 (of 309).

111-112
The two “striving index” self-quiz questions are from
Letting Go
, pp. 191 and 194 (of 325).

112
  The beautifully absurd diagram is from p. 117 (of 325) of
Letting Go.
Adapted slightly.

114
  
You are a piece of fate … Why would you want to be
? Ibid., pp. 174, 15, 205, and 302 (of 325).

118
  “
101 ways to score points with a woman
.” John Gray,
Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus.
(HarperCollins, 1992.) pp. 180-185 (of 286).

118-119
Gaddis,
The Recognitions.
(Harcourt Brace, 1955.) p. 505 (of 956).

123
  
“The drive towards self-improvement … divided we fall.
Bird,
Self-Help? Self-Harm
! p. 105.

127-129
This long quotation is from
The Power of Powerlessness
, pp. 176-179 (of 341).

The reference to “Your golf game” here is peculiarly reminiscent of a passage from W. Timothy Gallwey,
The Inner Game of Tennis
(Bantam, 1974): “A ‘hot streak' usually continues until the player starts thinking about it and tries to maintain it; as soon as he attempts to exercise control, he loses it. To test this theory is a simple matter, if you don't mind a little underhanded gamesmanship. The next time your opponent is having a hot streak, simply ask him as you switch courts, ‘Say, George, what are you doing so differently that's making your forehand so good today?' If he takes the bait and begins to think about how he's swinging, telling you how he's really meeting the ball out in front, keeping his wrist firm, and following through better, his streak invariably will end. He will lose his timing and fluidity as he tries to repeat what he has just told you he was doing so well.” p. 8 (of 178).

129
  “
Using the power
… in an instant!” Anthony Robbins,
Awaken the Giant Within.
(Simon & Schuster, 1992.) p. 35 (of 538). (Italics and exclamation mark mine.)

129
  …
even bad music and bad reasons sound fine when one marches off to fight an enemy: Daybreak
, §557.

137
  
… knack of being themselves.
Cf. Nietzsche,
Assorted Opinions and Maxims
, §387: “We always stand a few paces too close to ourselves, and always a few paces too distant from our neighbor. So it happens that we judge him too much wholesale and ourselves too much by individual, occasional, insignificant traits and occurrences.”

140
  
I would only believe in a God who knew how to dance. Thus Spoke Zarathustra
, p. 68 (of 343).

140
  
She liked herself, and wanted to change.
Cf. Nietzsche,
Assorted Opinions and Maxims
, §339: “As soon as it reposes in the sunlight of joy, our soul involuntarily promises itself to be good, to become perfect, and is seized as though by a blissful shudder with a presentiment of perfection …”

140-141
The great physicist Schrödinger … a true continued self-conquering.
Many of the words in this section are Schrödinger's. But here, as elsewhere, I have not hesitated to condense, expand, change words, reorder sentences, and otherwise distort the original text. To have been rigorous about enclosing in quotation marks all those words and only those words that Schrödinger actually wrote would have left the passage looking like a bristling hedgehog. The other option, to completely paraphrase his ideas, was even less appealing, for Schrödinger's prose is often unsurpassable. See
Mind and Matter
, in
What is Life? With Mind and Matter and Autobiographical Sketches.
(Cambridge University Press, 1992.) pp. 99-101.

141
  
Deciding what to be, becoming what we are, is a true continued self-conquering.
Or, as Bergson put it: “To be conscious is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly. We are the sculptors of the moments of our life; each of them is a kind of creation. And just as the talent of the sculptor is formed under the very influence of the works he produces, so each of our moments modifies our personality. It is therefore correct to say that what we do depends on what we are; but it is necessary to add also that we are, to a certain extent, what we do, and that we are creating ourselves continually.”
Creative Evolution.
(Translated by Arthur Mitchell. Macmillan, 1919.) pp. 7-8 (of 425).

A third reason to cite one's sources just occurred to me: the joy of sharing good writing. After all, it's so much easier to quote well than to write well.

142
  
The living being is only a species of dead being. Joyful Wisdom
, §109.

143
  
The patience of the bricklayer is assumed in the dream of the architect.
Gael Turnbull, “An Irish Monk.”

143
  
“doomed by determinacy”:
A catchphrase of Barton Q. Barnard's that crops up in several of his works; but see, for example, his overweeningly titled
The Brain Code Broken: What Science Reveals About Dreams, Personality, Sex, and Free Will.
(Chestermeare University Press, 1991.)
passim.

145-146
Deceived by the apparent smallness … from our proper course.
Jim Bird,
Self-Improv-ment: The Art of Getting Everything You Really Want By Giving Up Wanting Everything.
(Chapman Loebb, 2002.) p. 258 (of 399).

147
  “
Everything good is on the highway
.” Emerson, “Experience.”

Signal to Noise

149
  Epigraph: F. Scott Fitzgerald,
Tender Is the Night.
p. 126 (of 274)

171
  …
she manufactures her own unhappiness
.” This witticism is found in Peale's
The Power of Positive Thinking
, p. 73 (of 276).

180
  “
There's only one God in heaven
.” Carlton Brown,
Brainstorm.
(Farrar and Rinehart, 1944.) p. 233. Though this line is not quite plagiarizable, I mention the book here, not so much because it inspired certain minor details of my story, but because it is the best memoir about mental illness I ever expect to read. Highly recommended.

The Inner Life

185
  Epigraph: Joseph Collins, in the introduction to Jane Hillyer,
Reluctantly Told.
(Macmillan, 1935.) p. ix.

187
  
The psychic effect … which it belongs.
Sigmund Freud,
The Cocaine Papers.
(Edited by Robert Byck. Stonehill, 1974.) p. 60.

188
  “
increase the reduced functioning of the nerve centers
.” Ibid., p. 64.

188
  
“the third scourge of humanity”:
Quoted in Ernest Jones,
The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud.
(Hogarth, 1953.) vol. 1, p. 104 (of 454).

188
  
by mouth cocaine was harmless, under the skin sometimes dangerous.
Ibid., vol. 1, p. 105 (of 454).

188-189
“unjustified fears” … increasing the dose.” Cocaine Papers
, pp. 109 and 117.

189
  “
advisable to abandon … nervous disorders
.” Ibid., p. 175.

189
  
“These injections … himself cocaine
injections.” Freud,
Standard Edition
, vol. 4, p. 115.

179
  
“song of praise to this magical substance”:
Jones, vol. 1, p. 93 (of 454).

190
  What I saw in her throat …
date of the dream.
Freud,
Standard Edition
, vol. 4, p. 111.

191
  Injections of that sort
… given by injection.
Ibid., p. 117.

192-195
I am toying now with a project
… This and several quotations that follow come from
Letters of Sigmund Freud.
(Edited by Ernst L. Freud. Basic Books, 1960.) April 21, 1884, pp. 107-108; June 29, 1884, p. 115; May 17, 1885, p. 145; January 18, 1886, p. 193; January 20, 1886, p. 195; and February 2, 1886, pp. 201, 202, and 203.

195
  
The effect … ward off fatigue.
Freud,
Cocaine Papers
, p. 61.

198
  
I had begun to suspect … was a masturbator.
Freud,
Standard Edition
, vol. 7, pp. 78-79. In fact, this reference does not appear under “cocaine” in the index volume of
The Standard Edition.

199
  “
in the nose … in other organs
.” Quoted in Freud,
The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess.
p. 71, footnote.

199-200
Swellings of the nasal mucosa
… This long sentence and the one that follows it are close enough to direct quotations to need a citation: Max Schur,
Freud Living and Dying.
(Hogarth, 1972.) p. 66, footnote. Frank J. Sulloway,
Freud, Biologist of the Mind.
(Basic, 1979.) p. 140.

200
  
“The number of symptoms … in the nose.
Quoted in Freud,
The Origins of Psychoanalysis.
(Edited by Marie Bonaparte, Anna Freud, and Ernst Kris, translated by Eric Mosbacher and James Strachey. Basic Books, 1954.) p. 5.

200-201
Both Freud and Fliess … also constantly prescribed.
Jones, vol. 1, p. 339 (of 454).

201-210
“
I am now making this diagnosis … what to do then
.” This, and all but one of the quotations that follow, are from
The Complete Letters to Wilhelm Fliess:
May 30, 1893, p. 49; January 24, 1895, p. 106; April 20, 1895, p. 126; June 12, 1895, p. 132; October 26, 1896, p. 201; June 18, 1897, pp. 252-253; November 16, 1898, p. 334; March 8, 1895, p. 117; May 21, 1894, p. 74; December 3, 1897, p. 284; and September 27, 1898, p. 329.