Focus Pocus

Wake up! When your therapist is sleeping.

Psychoanalyst Adam Phillips (interview by Paul Holdengräber, Paris Review, Spring 2014):

What interests me most is when people are trying to be on the subject and can’t help but go off it. When somebody is really trying to articulate something, genuinely struggling to articulate something, as if they will know when they’ve done it. And in the process of trying to do that, they say all sorts of other things.

Newspaper columnist David Brooks is, precisely, going to articulate something. He's going to tell us how to be less distracted by email, text messages, and YouTube clips, so that we can focus and get stuff done. He knows all about it because he suffers from this problem himself. Though he earns a fabulous salary from the Times for work that [jump]

Admit impediment!

Antonio Vivarini (studio of), "The Garden of Love" (c.1465-1470), National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, via Australian Research Council Centre for the Study of Emotions.

And in the stupidest analogies ever department we have an extraordinary performance from Mr. David F. Brooks ("How to Repair the National Marriage"), who say that

Listening to people argue about politics these days is like overhearing people in a restaurant who are in a bad marriage. They’re always trying to use disagreements to establish superiority. It’s not merely, “We’re different.” It’s, “I’m better.”

So I thought it might be a good idea to consult some marriage books for lessons on how to repair national politics.

No, you know what? That is not a good idea. In terms Brooks might understand clearly, Jesus said, "Love thy neighbor as thyself." He didn't say, "Love thy neighbor as thy girlfriend." You should not have intimate relations with everybody. You should have respectful relations with everybody. The "national marriage" is a truly grotesque idea.

Not to mention when it's Brooks giving this lecture I keep having really inappropriate thoughts. If my relations with people I have political disagreements are modeled on marriage, should I allow myself to consider dumping them for younger, hotter opponents?

The Self-Confidence Man

David Brooks writes:

There's an astonishing article in the current issue of The Atlantic summarizing a new book by Catty Kay and Claire Shipman, The Confidence Code.* Social science reveals, it turns out, that women suffer from a lack of self-confidence!

Harold Lloyd in Movie Crazy (1932), via The Man on the Flying Trapeze.

No, for reals, with empirical evidence. They consistently underestimate the value of things they've done, like their results on a test, or what they will do in the future, like the size of their paychecks five years from now.** [jump]

Ignosce te ipsum

Malin Broberg, tattoo, γνῶθι σεαυτόν.

Shorter David Brooks, "Introspective or narcissistic?" New York Times, August 8, 2014:

Your self-worth and identity are at stake in every judgment you make about yourself. Therefore you shouldn't make any judgments about yourself, or if you must, do it in the third person, so you can tell yourself it isn't about you. I often use a pseudonym for this purpose, like "C.S. Lewis" or "George Marshall".

I think we can now conjecture

Of the faking of Brooks...

...there is no end.

Another Reynolds portrait of Johnson, wigless and somewhat younger (via Wikimedia).

David Brooks's sudden and startling jump into commentary on literary classics inexorably calls to mind the words of Dr. Samuel Johnson, in Rambler 28, on "The various arts of self-delusion":

There are men who always confound the praise of goodness with the practice, and who believe themselves mild and moderate, charitable and faithful, because they have exerted their eloquence in commendation of mildness, fidelity, and other virtues. This is an error almost universal [jump]