Slouching towards Self-Understanding

Slouching towards Self-Understanding

Do you know any man, coming from a big and poor family, saved and skimped money all his life and then decided to throw away 1.2 million dollars? I know such a man. When I told people the story of that man, not a single person believed me, except Danny who cried with me at the conclusion of my narration. That story was a basis for me to get to know people, especially women. The man is still alive. From the depths of his depression, he has staged an improbable comeback. He's now healthy, back to his fighting weight of 160 lbs, still handsome, and still popular with women. One loves him dearly. She bought him a car and jewelry and takes him out to eat at nice restaurants on a regular basis. She basks in his quiet, confident presence. Everybody says he looks much younger than he used to. She encourages him daily and comforts him so he can concentrate on making money and on writing, the two activities he loves to do. He now has some money (high six figures) back and is no longer suicidal. He's well on a financial and spiritual recovery. He is making money everyday. Not much as he used to, but he's not throwing his money away either, like those insane days of yore. 

For many years before he met her, he had lived a life without brakes, bent on destroying himself. His former life---the way he told us, hopefully it was true and not a tale of fantasy--- reads like a transcript of a bad movie and a journey in turns exhausting and fascinating, self-pitying and candid, even uplifting and lyrical, bringing tears to my eyes. His marathon rumination has a rank, strange odor of both self-exhortations and self-flagellations. By far the most absorbing parts of his tale, written in immediate, visceral prose, are about his hard-knock childhood and crushing poverty, his stupid and silly infatuations and loves for women who didn't deserve his affection. He is given to philosophical musings and flights of fancy, but there are flashes of a pungent, biting humor and fondness for literary and philosophical references. He claims he's familiar with Camus, Sartre, Garcia Márquez, Neruda, Nietzsche and Wittgenstein. He's intimating that he's writing a study of Wittgenstein, besides occasional sojourns into writing romantic poems. He is adopting a persona of swaggering aggressiveness to hide the image of an insecure,frightened boy. He has haunting desires of homicide. 

He's into a lot of self-mythologizing, but clearly we can discern that there is a genuine effort by a troubled soul to gain some self-understanding from the long, strange journey that has been his life. In fact, there is a hallucinogenic feel to the tale he's spinning: the older, more introspective and sensitive self looking back, with a combination of revulsion and regret, at his younger self, trying to come to terms with his contradictory, often self-destructive impulses. On display are his grandiosity and self-loathing; his arrogance and vulnerability; his narcissism and empathy: his need for self-validation and penchant for isolation and estrangement; his capacity for disciplined training of his body and mind (he reads and goes to the gym daily); and his susceptibility to self-destruction. There are plenty of boasts and lots of self-debasement. He is a man capable of tender, lyrical descriptions and vulgar, obscenity-filled rants. 

During a recent book tour interview on CNN,  he confessed that he had not had a drink or an encounter with drugs in almost three years. He said, "Now I have found what true love is, I want to have control over my bad impulses. I want to live, for myself and for her. I don't want to disappoint her. I once hit her so hard she fell on the floor, unconscious. When she came to, instead of calling the cops to put me away, she embraced me, saying, 'Don't hurt yourself no more, okay?---You heard that? She said, stop hurting yourself, instead of saying, you motherfucker, why did you hit me? why did you hurt me? she said, don't hurt yourself no more. I immediately bawled like a freaking baby when I heard that. Here I was hitting her and she told me to stop hurting myself---I love you. Now, stop crying. I am okay. Really, I am. I asked for it. I provoked you. I said cruel things that I should have not said. I am sorry.' Let me tell you this. There's nobody like her out there. Nobody. She's my protective angel in flesh and blood. She shows me what love is. I am blessed. Together we're going to live until 100 and beyond. Our best years are ahead of us. Viva la vida! Baby, where are you? You heard of what I just said?"