Far From the Tree
This is a book by Andrew Solomon. When I downloaded it from Audible and started listening to it – I knew I had a winner.
A brilliant and utterly original thinker, Andrew Solomon’s journey began from his experience of being the gay child of straight parents. He wondered how other families accommodate children who have a variety of differences: families of people who are deaf, who are dwarfs, who have Down syndrome, who have autism, who have schizophrenia, who have multiple severe disabilities, who are prodigies, who commit crimes, who are transgender. Bookended with Solomon’s experiences as a son, and then later as a father, this book explores the old adage that says the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree; instead some apples fall a couple of orchards away, some on the other side of the world.
I downloaded the Kindle book from Amazon so I could also read it as I listened to it. Immediately, I noticed differences in the two.
The audible version begins by quoting from the poem Poems of our Climate by Wallace Stevens:
The imperfect is our paradise.
Note that, in this bitterness, delight,
Since the imperfect is so hot in us,
Lies in flawed words and stubborn sounds.
This is not in the Kindle version.
I liked this (00:10:32 in the Audible; location 75 in the Kindle):
The exceptional is ubiquitous; to be entirely typical is the rare and lonely state.
In a culture where everyone conforms with a passion (the usual situation in America) few would agree. Most would agree that the author’s homosexuality is no advantage to him, his family of origin, or his own family – now that he has a child of his own. After a long struggle (which he relates here) he is now happy with his identity as a gay man.
I have learned something different from this experience. For a book like this, listening to it is not enough. Too much is going on for me to assimilate it at the narrator’s pace. With writing, I have time to slow down my reading, and ponder what I have just read.
Sexuality is a huge subject – and my sexuality (and my father’s sexuality) – has often been a mystery that I could only understand much later.
I’ve been reading, today, a carefully selected cull of Slavoj Zizek’s shorter essays, called “Interogating the Real”. I say ‘carefully’ for it appears, after reading over 40 pages, the editor’s selections, far from being random, have been astutely selected to throw light on the essential drift of this most challenging thinker of the contemporary.
Zizek concretizes Hegel in terms of the late 20th century post-Freudian psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan; and, vice-versa, radicalizes Lacanian psychoanalysis as expressive of Hegel’s fundamental grasp of the meaning and processes of our lives.
For example, Zizek defines narrowly, “hysteric,” as follows: “the hysterical subject is fundamentally a subject who poses himself a question all the while presupposing that the Other has the key to the answer, that the Other knows the secret.”
However, the Other, itself, is not representable as a definitie uncontroversial object. Specifically, is society an organically functioning totality? Or is society a “relationship between atomized individuals?” Neither representation contains the full story. The hysteric’s very assumption that there is a “secret” to life, to survival, to happiness, is a misunderstanding of the Other. His/her sense of lack of completion drives the hysteric, in hysterical, and “in quiet desperation,” to strive, ceaselessly, to escape. Zizek urges tarrying with, embracing, thinking through the negative, the lack, the emptiness, the void that is unavoidably at the heart of BOTH the self and the Other.