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The Myth of Suburbia–Because My Heart is Broken, I Feel Very Cheerful!

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Some things, some things just were not meant to be. There is a balance of nature. You cannot not just turn back the clock just because you wish you can. We are often told that primitive man could not conceive pure spirit; but then neither could they conceive mere matter. A throne and a local habitation are attributed to God only at that stage when it is still impossible to regard the throne, or palace even of an Earthly king as merely physical objects. In Earthly thrones and palace it was the spiritual significance—as we should say, the “atmosphere”—that mattered to the ancient mind. As soon as the contrast of “spiritual” and “material” was before their minds, they knew God to be “spiritual” and realized that their religion had implied this all along. However, at an earlier stage that contrast was not there. To regard that earlier stage as unspiritual because we find there no clear assertion of unembodied spirit, is a real misunderstanding. You might just as well call it spiritual because it contained no clear consciousness of mere matter. As regards to the history of language, word did not start by referring merely to physical objects and then get extended by metaphor to refer to emotions, mental states and the like. On the contrary, what we now call the “literal and metaphorical” meanings have both been disengaged by analysis from an ancient unity of meanings which was neither or both. In the same way it was quite erroneous to think that humans started with a “material” God of “Heaven” and gradually spiritualized them. Humans could not have started with something “material” for the “material,” as we understand it, comes to be realized only by contrast to the “immaterial,” and these two sides of the contrast to the “immaterial,” and the two sides of the contrast grow at the same speed. Humans started with something which was neither and both. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21

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As long as we are trying to read back into that ancient unity either the one or the other of the two opposites which we ourselves still from time-to-time experience. The point is crucial not only for the present discussion but for any sound literary criticism or philosophy. The Christian doctrines, and even the Jewish doctrines which preceded them, have always been statements about spiritual reality, not specimens of primitive physical science. Whatever is beneficial in the conception of the spiritual has always been contained in them; it is only its negative aspect (immateriality) which has had to wait for recognition until abstract thought was fully developed. The material imagery has never been taken literally by anyone who had reached the stage when one could understand what “taking it literally” meant. And now we come to the differences between “explaining” and “explaining away.” It shows itself in two way. First, some people when they say that a thing is meant “metaphorically” conclude from this that it is hardly meant at all. When Christ told us to carry the cross, they rightly think that Chris spoke metaphorically. However, they wrongly conclude that carrying the cross means nothing more than leading a respectable life and subscribing moderately to charities. They reasonably think that hell “fire” is a metaphor—and unwisely conclude that it means nothing more serious than remorse. They say that the story of the Fall in Genesis is not literal; and then go on to say (I have heard them myself) that it was really a fall upwards—which is like saying that because “My heart is broken” contains a metaphor, it therefore means “I feel very cheerful.” #RandolphHarris 2 of 21

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This mode of interpretation I regard, frankly, as nonsense. For me the Christian doctrines which are “metaphorical”—or which have become metaphorical with the increase of abstract thought—mean something which is just as “supernatural” or shocking after we have removed the ancient imagery as it was before. They mean that in addition to the physical or psycho-physical Universe known to the sciences, there exists an uncreated and unconditioned reality which causes the Universe to be; that this reality has a beneficial structure or constitution which is usefully, though doubtless not complete, described in the doctrine of the Trinity; and that this reality, at a definite point in time, entered the Universe we know by becoming one of its own creatures and there produced effects on the historical level which the normal workings of the natural Universe do not produce; and that this has brough about a change in our relations to be unconditioned reality. It will be noticed that our colourless “entered the Universe” is not a white less metaphorical then the more picturesque “came down from Heaven.” We have only substituted a picture of horizontal or unspecified movement for one of vertical movement. And every attempt to improve the ancient language will have the same result. These things not only cannot be asserted—they cannot even be presented for discussion—without metaphor. We can make our speech duller; we cannot make it more literal. Secondly, these statements concern two things—the supernatural, unconditioned reality, and those events on the historical level which its irruption into the natural Universe is held to have produced. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21

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The first thing is indescribable in “literal” speech, and therefore we rightly interpret all that is said about it metaphorically. However, the second thing is in a wholly different position. Events on the historical level are the sort of things we can talk about literally. If they occurred, they were perceived by the sense of humans. Legitimate “explanation” degenerates into muddled or dishonest “explaining away” as soon as we start applying to these evens the metaphorical interpretation which we rightly apply to the statements about God. The assertion that God has a Son was never intended to mean that He is a being propagating His kind by intercourse involving pleasures of the flesh: and so we do not alter Christianity by rendering explicit the fact that “sonship” is not used of Christ in exactly the same sense in which it is used of men. However, the assertion that Jesus turned water into wine was meant perfectly literally, for this refers to something which, if it happened, was well within the reach of our senses and our language. When I say, “My heart is broken,” you known perfectly well that I do not mean anything you could verify at a postmortem. However, when I say, “My boot-lace is broken,” then, if your own observation shows it to be intact, I am either lying or mistaken. The accounts of the “miracles” in first-century Palestine are either lies, or legends, or history. And if all, of the most important, of them are lies or legends then the claim which Christianity has been making for the last two thousand years is simply false. No doubt it might even so contain noble sentiments and moral truths. So does Greek mythology; so does Norse. However, that is quite a different affair. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21

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Nothing we have discussed helps us to a decision about the probability or improbability of the Christian claim. We have merely removed a misunderstanding in order to secure for that question a fair hearing. Long before the dawn of First Wave civilization, when our most distant ancestors relied on hunting and herding, fishing, or foraging for survival, they kept constantly on the move. Driven by hunger, cold, or ecological mishaps, pursuing weather or game, they were the original “high-mobiles”—traveling light, avoiding the accumulation of cumbersome goods or property, and ranging widely over the landscape. A band of fifty men, women, and children might need a land area six times the size of Manhattan Island to feed them, or they might trace a migratory path over literally hundreds of miles each year as conditions demanded. They led what today’s geographers call a “spatially expensive” existence. First Wave civilization, by contrast, bred a race of “spacemisers.” As nomadism was replaced by agriculture migratory trails gave way to cultivated fields and permanent settlements. Rather than romancing restlessly over an extensive area, the farmer and his family stayed put, intensively working their tiny patch within the larger sea of space—a sea so large as to dwarf the individual. By the period immediately preceding the birth of industrial civilization, vast open fields surrounded each huddle of peasant huts. Apart from a handful of merchants, scholars, and soldiers, most individuals lived their lives at the end of a very short tether. They walked to the fields at sunrise, then back again at nightfall. They traced a path to church. On rare occasions they trekked to the next village six or seven miles away. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21

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Conditions varied with climate and terrain, of course, but according to historian J.R. Hale, “We should probably not be far wrong if we took the average longest journey made by most people in their lifetimes as fifteen miles.” Agriculture produced a “spatially restricted” civilization. The industrial storm that broke over Europe in the eighteenth century created once again a “spatially extended” culture—but now on a nearly planetary scale. Goods, people, and ideas were transported thousands of miles and vast populations migrated in search of jobs. Instead of production being widely dispersed in the fields, it was now concentrated in cities. Huge, teeming populations were compressed into a few tightly packed nodes. Old villages shriveled and died; booming industrial centers sprang up, rimmed with smokestacks and furnace fire. This dramatic reworking of the landscape required much more complex coordination between city and country. Thus food, energy, people, and raw materials had to follow into the urban nodes, while manufactured goods, fashions, ideas, and financial decisions flowed out. The two flows were carefully integrated and coordinated in time and space. Within the cities themselves, moreover, a much wider variety of spatial shapes was needed. In the old agricultural system the basic physical structures were a church, a nobleman’s palace, some wretched huts, an occasional tavern or monastery. Second Wave civilization, because of its much more elaborate division of labour, demanded many more specialized types of space. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21

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Architects, for this reason, soon found themselves creating offices, banks, police stations, factories, railroad terminals, department store, prisons, fire houses, asylums, and theaters. These many different types of space had to be fitted together in logically functional ways. The locations of factories, the pathways that led from home to shop, the relationships of railroad sidings to docks or truck yards, the placement of schools and hospitals, of water pipes, power stations, conduits, gas lines, telephone exchanges—all had to be spatially coordinated. Space had to be as carefully organized as a Bach fugue. This remarkable coordination of specialized spaces—necessary to get the right people to the right places at the right moment—was the exact spatial analogue of temporal synchronization. It was, in effect, synchronization in pace. For, if industrial societies were to function, both time and space had to be more carefully structured. Just as people had to be provided with more exact and standardized units of space. Prior to the industrial revolution, when time was still being sliced up into crude units like pater noster wyles, spatial measures, too, were a mishmash. In medieval England, for example, a “rood” might be as little as sixteen and a half feet or as much as twenty-four feet. In the sixteenth century the best advice on how to arrive at a measured rood was to select sixteen men at random as they walked out of church, to stand them in a line “their left feet one behind the other,” and to measure off the resulting distance. Even vaguer terms were used, such as “a day’s ride,” “an hour’s walk,” or “half and hour’s canter.” #RandolphHarris 7 of 21

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Such looseness could no longer be tolerated once the Second Wave began to change work patterns, and the invisible wedge created an ever-expanding marketplace. Precise navigation, for example, became more and more important as trade increased, and governments offered huge prizes to anyone who could devise better methods of keeping merchant ships on course. On land, too, more and more refined measurements and more precise units were introduced. The confusing, contradictory, chaotic variety of local customs, laws, and trade practices that prevailed during First Wave civilization had to be cleaned up, rationalized. Lack of precision and standard measurement were a daily aggravation to manufacturers and the rising merchant class. This explains the enthusiasm with which the French revolutionaries, at the dawn of the industrial era, applied themselves to the standardization of distance through the metric system as well as time through a new calendar. So important did they deem these problems that they were among the very first items taken up when the National Convention first me to declare a republic. The Second Wave of changes also brought with it a multiplication and sharpening of spatial boundaries. Until the eighteenth century the boundaries of empires were often imprecise. Because vast areas were unpopulated, precision was unnecessary. As population rose, trade increased, and the first factories began to spring up around Europe, many governments began systematically to map their frontiers. Customs zones were more clearly delineated. Local and even private properties came to be more carefully defined, marked, fenced, and recorded. Maps became more detailed, inclusive, and standardized. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21

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A new image of space arouse that corresponded exactly to the new image of time. As punctuality and scheduling set more limits and deadlines in time, more and more boundaries cropped up to set limits in space. Even the linearization of time had its spatial counterpart. In preindustrial societies straight-line travel, whether by land or sea, was an anomaly. The peasant’s path, the cowpath or Indian trail, all meandered according to the lay of the land. Many walls curved, bulged, or went off at irregular angles. The streets of medieval cities folded in on one another, curved, twisted, convoluted. Second Wave societies not only put ships on exact straight-line courses, they also built railroads whose shining tracks stretched in parallel straight lines as far as the eye could see. As the American planning official Grady Clay has noted, these rail lines (the term itself is a giveaway) became the axis off which new cities, built on grid patterns, took shape. The grid or gridiron pattern, combining straight lines with ninety-degree angles, lent a characteristic machine regularity and linearity to the landscape. Even now in looking at a city one can see a jumbled of streets, squares, circles, and complicated intersections in the older districts. These frequently give way to neat gridirons in those parts of the city built in later, more industrialized periods. The same is true for whole regions and countries. Even farm land began, with mechanization, to show linear patterns. Preindustrial farmers, plowing behind oxen, created curvy, irregular furrows. Once the Ox had started, the farmer did not want to stop him and the beast curved wide at the end of the furrow, forming a kind of S-curve. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21

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Today anyone looking out the window of an airplane sees squared off fields with ruler-straight plow marks. The combination of straight lines and ninety-degree angles was reflected not merely on the land and in the streets but in the intimate spaces experienced by most men and women—the rooms they lived in. Curved walls and non-right angles are seldom found in industrial age architecture. Neat rectangular cubicles came to replace irregularly shaped rooms and high-rise buildings carried the straight line vertically toward the sky as well, with windows forming linear or grid patterns on the great walls facing the now straight streets. Thus our conception of an experience of space went through a process of linearization that paralleled the linearization of time. In all industrial societies, capitalist or socialist, Eastern or Western, the specialization of architectural spaces, the detailed map, the use of uniform, precise units of measurement and, above all, the line, became a cultural constant—basic to the new indust-reality. The Model 1866 Winchester rifle came to because although only about 13,000 Henrys were made, the name became so popular that for a year the firm was called the Henry Repeating Rifle Company. However, in 1866-67, since O.F. Winchester had majority control, the name was changed to the Winchester Repeating Arms Company, and the company absorbed all the assets of previous firms in which Winchester had invested substantial sums. And with the Henry’s successor, the Model 1866, his investments began to pay off handsomely. Knows popularly as the “Yellow Boy” in reference to its bright brass frame, the 1866 was the first of hundreds of models to bear the name Winchester. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21

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One of the most popular of all Winchester arms, the 1866 was widely used in opening the West and, in company with the Model 1873, is the most deserving of Winchesters to claim the legend “The Gun That Won the West.” It was also with this model that the factory engravers first created elaborate and exquisite masterpieces, some for exhibitions and a few for special presentations. The engraving dynasty of the Ulrich family, active primarily at Winchester for over eighty years, was effectively launched with the Model 1866. Model 1866 production would reach a total in excess of 170,000, with its serial numbering continuing that of the Henry rifle. The run continued until 1898, despite the appearance of several newer, more modern lever-actions with its production span. All 1866s were in .44 rimfire caliber, and all frames were brass. Most steel parts were blued, though some barrels were browned, and the levers and hammers were standard case-hardened. Despite the model designation of 1866, production quantities did not reach the market until 1866. The board had voted to authorize 5,000 rifles and carbines in a resolution of early March 1867, and another 10,000 were voted in mid-February 1868. The first Model 1866s were commonly known in the arms trade as “improved Henrys.” References to the 1866 in newspapers and in journals were generous and not infrequent. The Scientific American of October 14, 1868, noted: “We have lately examined the Winchester repeating rifle…which was submitted to a series of trials by the Federal Military Commission of Switzerland…The riled is elegant in appearance, compact, strong, and of excellent workmanship. On examination we find its working parts very simple, and not apparently liable to derangement.” #RandolphHarris 11 of 21

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Discoveries of surviving guns by collectors and dealers, and the Model 1866s in museums around the World, testify to this model’s being the first Winchester to spread the name internationally. The Army Museum in Constantinople displays some of the most exquisite of engraved Model 1866w, and Turkey was also a major client. The deluxe arms likely served as presentations to whet the appetite of Turkish generals and colonels. If so, the results were well worth the expense on Winchester’s part: 5,000 carbines and 45,000 muskets were ordered by the Turks in 1870 and 1871. The fortunes of Oliver Winchester and his rapidly growing firearms company surged during the banner years of 1873 and 1876. People are so fascinated with the story of the Winchester, it was The Golden Age of Gun making and the Winchester 1 of 1000. That means some of these guns were labeled like paintings because they are works of art and collectors’ items. People are looking for them because they are rare and valuable. These special rifles helped capture for Winchester an image of prestige, quality, and performance, an image he brand name has kept into modern times. However, only 133 Model of 1873 One of One Thousand were made, and only eight One of One Hundred. Of the Model 1868, only fifty-one One of One Thousand were built, and seven One of One Hundred. It was the One of One Thousand which inspired the only Hollywood Western movie ever named for a specific model of Winchester: Winchester 73, starring James Stewart. As a part of the nationwide promotion of the film (which was released in 1950 and still shown on television), Universal Pictures and Winchester launched a nation search for One of One Thousand rifles. Owners of the first twenty guns discovered were given a Model 94 carbine. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21

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To locate the riled, 150,000 “Wanted” posters were printed and sent to Winchester dealers (there were then some 50,000 of them) and to “20,000 chiefs of police, daily and weekly newspapers, radio stations…and rifle club[s]…and…approximately 7,000 motion picture theaters.” The campaign was instrumental in adding to the ranks of firearms collectors, as well as locating over two dozen One of One Thousand 1873s. The Winchester Repeating Arms Company, in 1876, did approximately $1,812,500 ($45,599,620.33 in 2021 dollars) in net sales, made a profit of approximately $444,500 ($11,182,913.97 in 2021 dollars), and paid dividends to stockholders of $50,000 ($1,257,920.56 in 2021 dollars). The company had about 690 workmen. With guns being a necessity to keep one and one’s home safe, one can see why beautiful suburban neighbourhoods would become attractive. Not only did people like their looks, but the safety they provided. While the studies done about suburbs and suburbanization do no always fall into neat categories, it is possible, with a bit of shoving, to see suburbs and suburbanization since World War II as falling into four social and chronological eras. Each of these eras or phases has had a somewhat different emphasis. The first place of study of suburbs was simply the discovery of suburbia as an area and a topic worthy of scholarly and popular attention. By the early 1950s suburbia had been discovered by the popular press and magazines, but there was a dearth of actual research. Magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post began to focus on the homogeneity of suburbs’ physical appearance and how this was reflected in the social similarity of new suburbanites. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21

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While popular portrayals of the ranch houses, neat lawns, station wagons, and car pools had an element of humour, many of the novels, such as The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit, The Crack in the Picture Window, Bullet Park, and No Down Payment, painted a darker picture. While outwardly benign, suburbia’s underside was portrayed as one of alcoholism, adultery, and quiet despair. (By contrast, if blander, the new medium of television painted a far bright picture. Shows such as “Ozzie and Harriet” in the 1950s, “Leave it to Beaver” in the 1960, “Happy Days” in the 1970s, and “The Wonder Years” in the late 1980s, and early 1990s presented an essentially warm and benign image of suburban life.) During the late 1940s and the 1950, scholars also discovered the suburbs, and what they found was that living in the suburbs produced a unique way of life. This came to be called “the myth of suburbia.” The myth of suburbia may also be the American Dream many people are seeking, and some have found. Starting the process, although the book really was not about suburbs per se, was David Riseman’s 1950 book, The Lonely Crowd, which, with its emphasis on the “other directed” personality type, emphasizing social conformity, set the stage for what was to follow (David Riseman, The Lonely Crowd, Yale University Press, New Haven Connecticut, 1950). As portrayed by Mr. Riseman, postwar suburban housing developments were conformist and coercive. The indictment was that such areas produced look-alike, other directed personality types who were governed by group norms rather than an inner moral compass. Commonly acknowledged as the best sociological analysis of the new suburbs was William H. Whyte’s best-selling book, The Organization Man (William H. Whyte, The Organization Man, Doubleday Anchor, Garden City, N.Y., 1956). Mr. Whyte, not a sociologist but the editor of Fortune, was impressed by the demographic composition of the postwar suburbs burgeoning on the urban periphery. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21

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Not only was the housing relentlessly similar, but the young corporate businessmen and their wives living in these suburbs seemed to be developing a way of life or “social ethic” strongly emphasizing group interaction. To test these ideas, Mr. Whyte studied a “typical” suburb, Park Forest, Illinois, some thirty miles south of Chicago on the train line. Park Forest was not just a subdivision, but a fully planned community having its own shopping center and community facilities. Mr. Whyte suggested that Park Forest, and other like suburbs, the corporate ethic, with its emphasis on teamwork and on the downplaying of the solo individualist, was creating a new social way of life. The new suburbs, with their interchangeable houses and families having shallow community root, were simply reflections of the corporation ethic. Both corporations and suburbs were being populated by bland managers stressing the importance of getting along. In the suburbs, belongingness and frenetic socialization took place of the individuality of an earlier age. Group conformity and not rocking the boat were supposedly the suburban goals. Mr. Whyte’s The Organization Man, in its portrayal of the burgeoning post-World War II suburbs as centers of conformity and “togetherness,” set the suburban stereotype. Supposedly, the ethic of the organization, with its emphasis on mass-produced uniformity, produced newly constructed suburbs of considerable compulsive sociability and group activity but little originality. For example, in this era before most middle-class women worked, the wives living in Park Forest were expected to leave doors open to neighbour’s and engage in daily coffee klatching while their husbands were at work. Those who did not participate were ostracized; belongingness was a way of life. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21

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Moving to the suburbs also was portrayed as more or less automatically producing a number of personality and behavioural changes. These ranged from turning city introverts into suburban joiners to the converting of urban Democrats into suburban Republicans. According to a 1957 Newsweek article, “When a city dweller packs up and moves his family to the suburbs, he usually acquires a mortgage, a power lawn mower, and a backward grill. Often although a lifelong Democrat, he also starts voting Republican” (Newsweek, April 1, 1957, p.42). The stereotype was that new suburbanites who previously were Democrats automatically abandoned their long-standing voting patterns to become instant Republicans. The suburban Eisenhower landslides of 1952 and 1956 were interpreted as being a sign of a permanent voter shift. Such analysis often downplayed the degree to which the vote was for the immensely popular Eisenhower rather than for the party. Such statements as that in Newsweek also did not give sufficient attention to the fact that similar Eisenhower landslides also occurred in many supposedly Democratic city wars. The real voting pattern was more complex. In 1960 the old, established WASP suburbs voted solidly for Richard Nixon, while newer suburbs, particularly those with substantial Catholic populations, voted for John Kennedy. There also are rare cases of suburbs voting overwhelmingly Democratic. Barry Goldwater’s 1964 campaign witnessed Goldwater losing every single suburban county in the northeast from Baltimore to Boston, illustrating that the suburbs were far from being bastions of Republicanism. However, the political myth persists, and it is commonly believed that Democrats cannot win in middle-class suburbs. As the myth was expressed in a 1992 Atlantic article, “Presidential politics these days is a race between Democratic cities and Republican suburbs to see who can producer bigger margins. The suburbs are winning. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21

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It is true that Republicans seeking a middle-class constituency are generally more comfortable in suburbs than those Democrats still trying to revive the inner-city, ethnic-racial-economic coalition of New Deal. It is also true that politically suburbia tends to be more conservative than the central cities. Between 1960 and 1988 city voters became more Democratic and suburban voters more Republican. The suburban proportion of the electorate grew from 33 percent in 1960 to 48 percent in 1988, while the urban proportion shrank from 33 to 29 percent. However, the suburban vote is not monolithic. Bill Clinton ran well in the suburbs in 1992. Congressional Democratic party candidates ran even better. Ideologically, most suburbanites generally see themselves as being in the center rather than to the right or life. The supposed right-wing proclivities of Orange County, south of Los Angeles, may be fascinating to journalists, but such right-wing voting is not typical of suburbia nationally. Nonetheless, the myth that the growth of suburbs sounds the death knell of the Democratic party is a half-century-old myth that keep being revived every national election. The problem about being dependent on others is that people need others whether these are adequate or not. For many reasons, realistic and unrealistic, many individuals (in us all) may construct a concept of being trapped in a relationship with a bad disobliging other, the witch of many fairy tales. The basic neurotic conflict is between dependence and independence; when the person one turn to is the person one must get away from. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21

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How are we to rely on others without feeling cut off? Again we are reminded of Balint’s philobats and ocnophils, who represent the fear of being committed versus the fear of belonging nowhere and having no attachment-figure. The origins of schizoid traits lay in some failure of the early environment to provide combinations of support and freedom in an acceptable form, a form which would foster both relationship and individuality, and which would make it possible to feel comfortable both with “I + You = Us’ and with ‘You and I disagree.’ When we are weak, we are vulnerable and need protection and so we are necessarily dependent on whoever will protect us and look after our needs. Suppose now that the people on whom we are dependent resent our dependence. Then we will feel we are rejected because of our dependence, about which we are helpless to do anything. Our very situation makes us contemptible. Some people are constantly afraid for this reason. Their experience of vulnerability and dependence has made them so: afraid of being dependent on people who dislike their dependence on them, afraid of appearing weak, afraid of looking a fool in other people’s eyes. People committed to this internalized object-relation are in the more dire a plight because they regard themselves with the same hostile gaze which they experience from others. They feel shamed and disgraced by their own dependence and weakness and terror, believing that other people despise them for it. When people make the slightest mistake, and start yelling things at themselves like, “You stupid thing! Why don’t you think! You ought to have known better!” and so on, are using words that their parents typically use against the in their daily nagging. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21

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We see in these individuals in an unmistakable way the anti-libidinal ego as an identification with the angry parent in a vicious attack on the libidinal ego which is denied comfort, understanding and support, treated as a bad selfish child, and even more deeply feared and hated as a weak child. In this frame of mind, people feel that the whole World is against them and waiting to humiliate them, yet they feel too weak to do without these hostile people. They are trapped. “I need them but they do not want me; even my being here with them annoys them.” They may then make an effort not to feel those needs which make them dependent on the people who resent their dependence. In these circumstances, a person’s sense of inadequacy does not come from doing this or that imperfectly; it is an “unremitting state” of feeling in the wrong and in the way. To keep anxiety at bay, some people then develop a marked interest in competence and self-sufficiency, rather as the spacebats do. They may try to run their life so that their need for others is minimized. This is how the premature ego-functions of “doing” rather than “being” develop, with emphasis on adequacy and skills. However, in the depths there is still terror, and the memory of being unable to cope, of being unable to keep “them” friendly and concerned, and of the passionate overwhelming need for the forbidden dependence. However, if you have enough confidence to trust in the teaching, and to move in the direction toward which it guides you, sooner or later the future will be lighted by small fugitive glimpses. What, it has been asked, if I get no glimpses? What can I do to break this barren, monotonous, dreary, and sterile spiritual desert of my existence? #RandolphHarris 19 of 21

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If you cannot pray successfully, go to nature, where she is quiet or beautiful; go to art where it is majestic, exalting; go to hear some great soul speak, whether in private talk or public aggress; go to literature, find a great inspired book written by someone who has had glimpses. The fact that we know our bodies is a guarantee that we can know our souls. For the knowing principle in us is derived from the soul itself. We have only to search our own minds deeply enough and ardently enough to discover it. When you begin to seek the Knower, who is within you, and to sever yourself from the seen, which is both without and within you, you begin to pass from illusion to reality. The mind’s chief distinguishing power is to know—whether the object known is the World around or the ideas within. When this is turned in still deeper upon itself, subject and object are one, the thought-making activity comes to rest, and the “I” mystery is solved. Humans discover their real self, or being—one’s soul. They have lost it, lost it, and their children will never even wish for it—and I am afraid that the whole tribe is in trouble, the whole tribe is lost—because the Sun keeps rising and these days nobody sings. The high, he low, all of creation, God gives to humankind to use. If this privilege is misused, God’s Justice permits creation to punish humanity. Because of the voices of the Spirit of the imperishable in humans, because it refuses to acknowledge death as triumphant, because it permits the withered blossom, fallen from the tree of humankind, to follower and develop again in the human heart, it possesses sanctifying power. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21

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To know that when you die there will remain those who, wherever they may be on this wide Earth, whether they be poor or rich, will send this prayer after you, to know hat they will cherish your memory as their dearest inheritance—what more satisfying or sanctifying knowledge can you ever hope for? And such is the knowledge bequeathed to us all by God. God is just, through we do not always comprehend His ways. When death seems to overwhelm us, negating life the Holy Ghost renews our faith in the worthwhileness of life. Through the Holy Ghost, we publicly manifest our desire and intention to assume the relation to the American community which our parents had in their life-time. Continuing the chain of tradition that binds generation to generation, we express our undying faith in God’s love and justice, and pray that He will speed the day when His Kingdom shall finally be established and His peace pervade the World. O Lord and King Who are full of compassion, in whose hand is the soul of every living thing and the breath of all flesh, to Thine all-wise care do we commit the souls of our dear ones who have departed from this Earth. Teach all who mourn to accept the judgment of Thine inscrutable will and cause them to know the sweetness of Thy consolation. Quicken by Thy holy word those bowed in sorrow, that like all the faithful in American who have gone before, they too may be faithful to Thy Word and thus advance the reign of Thy Kingdom upon Earth. In solemn testimony to that unbroken faith which links the generations one to another, please let those who mourn now rise to magnify and sanctify Thy holy name. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21

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