Three short notes:
One: My therapist, Danielle, wants to help me parse out the reasons I'm choosing celibacy. We discussed it yesterday, and she reflected back what she was hearing.
"I hear some real desire to work on yourself outside of a relationship," she says, "and that's good. I also hear you saying that you are tired of the way you disappear in your relationships."
I nod. "Exactly," I say.
"But," she continues, "I also hear you saying that you are not interested in dating because you do not feel attractive. And I sense that you define 'attractive' narrowly. If you do not look like you did 25 years ago, and you do not appeal to the same kind of women you did 25 years ago, then you wish to opt out altogether rather than reconsider how you assess your own desirability. You are taking your toys and going home because you don't wish to play by different rules than the ones you've known all your life."
She smiles at me and sips from her coffee mug. Danielle's known me a long time. She knows that I am very fond of cutting off my nose to spite my face.
I laugh the way I always do when I'm caught out. We will continue the discussion, but as my evangelical friends say, I feel convicted.
Two: I have taken down my previous Substack, which was a tribute to my daddy’s older sister who died last month in Vienna. Certain relatives in Austria were upset that I mentioned our family’s Jewish heritage. I suspect it is likely that some of the younger generation aren’t even aware that their late grandmother fled Vienna just one step ahead of the Nazis. They may not know the names that I know, names of less fortunate ancestors who perished in Auschwitz and Theresienstadt.
I was asked to take down the Substack, so I did. I am not using any family names here because I do not wish them to appear in an Internet search result.
I am also deeply dismayed that this internalized anti-Semitism survives in my kith and kin. I find it not only dismaying, but deeply immoral. And yet I am willing to hide the truth, at least for now, out of respect for the great grief that my cousins are experiencing as they mourn their mother and grandmother. When it comes to an obituary online, the facts known by a nephew must defer to a fiction perpetuated by a son.
The whole episode reminds me of why I’m glad to live in California, and not Austria. I take for granted what it means to live in a place where the horrors of the past seem remote. It is much, much easier to be a descendant of Holocaust survivors in Los Angeles than in the capital city of Hitler’s homeland. I live in the global capital of reinvention and possibilities, a young city with fewer ghosts in the air. Perhaps it’s not just a nephew deferring to a son, it’s an American deferring to a European. (Sounds like a bad Henry James novel).
Howbeit,
fasting or feasting, we both know this: without
the Spirit we die, but life
without the Letter is in the worst of taste,
and always, though truth and love
can never really differ, when they seem to,
the subaltern should be truth.
Those are Auden’s words, referring in particular to the necessary compromises of marriage (or its close approximation.) It applies to extended families, too. Truth must be the subaltern to love in this case, even if that means permitting the erasure of an entire heritage. I will certainly tell the truth to my children, and I will name the names of the murdered for their ears to hear. For now, with a heavy heart, but out of respect for human frailty, the post is unpublished.
Three: On a lighter note, I will share my New Year’s resolution, now that I’ve had a chance to keep it in a sustained and regular way. I come to a complete stop at every stop sign. I stop at yellow lights. I do not jaywalk, but wait for the crossing signal.
Stop signs and traffic lights are physical representations of the social contract. If you are like me, you have noticed that people are driving more aggressively and distractedly since the pandemic. Entitlement, grievance, impatience and a general anger at the state of the world are understandable feelings, but combine them with a ton or two of moving metal, and folks die. Kids die. Pedestrians die or are maimed.
(My driver’s education teacher, Mr. Lawitzke of blessed memory, always said that how one drove was the best “reveal” of one’s true character. He advised us all to pay special attention to how our dates operated motor vehicles. “Whatever they yell at other drivers, they will yell at you someday. Someone whose personality changes when they get behind the wheel? They will make your life hell if you marry them.”)
I cannot solve the intractable problems of our time. I am not sure that my prayers are efficacious. I am sure that if nothing else, patience and politeness and care on the roadways do not make these intractable problems worse. I wave at other drivers. I mouth “thank you” when cars allow me to safely move through a crosswalk. I do these things not because I am scrupulous about the law but because I am trying very, very hard to act as if the social contract is still valid, still binding us together, still keeping us safe. It may be a fiction, but it is a necessary fiction, and in a small way, it reduces the likelihood of heartbreak.
"I am also deeply dismayed that this internalized anti-Semitism survives in my kith and kin. I find it not only dismaying, but deeply immoral." I couldn't agree with you more! Incomprehensible that the Austrian branch of the family felt that they had to keep the Jewish ancestry secret. Or perhaps it is all too comprehensible when one remembers that throughout the centuries "conversos" and "Marranos" were treated with distrust and hatred, revealing that in most cases racism was probably the deeper issue than religion.
"It reduces the likelihood of heartbreak" - that's the essence of the law and the prophets right there, my friend.