Dear Unknown Friends:

Worry—the subject of this TRO—has been large at every time in history, and it is tremendous now. The article by Aesthetic Realism consultant Jeffrey Carduner that you’ll find here, “Worry: Can It Make Us Proud?,” arises from a paper he gave some years ago at a public seminar on the subject. We’re publishing it because it is through the principles of Aesthetic Realism that the huge, intricate, ever so personal, ever so universal subject can be understood.

I’ll mention two central Aesthetic Realism principles that are necessary to study for a beginning understanding of worry, including one’s own. The first is in this statement by Eli Siegel: “The large fight…in every mind…is the fight between respect for reality and contempt for reality” (TRO 151). The way we worry either has livingly in it a desire to respect the world—or it is impelled by, or permeated with, contempt. Contempt, Mr. Siegel explained, is the “disposition in every person to think we will be for ourselves by making less of the outside world,” and it is the most hurtful thing in the human self.

The second principle needed for any understanding of worry is this—in which Eli Siegel not only defines what beauty is but shows what the human self is most deeply after: “All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.”

A Beautiful Instance of Worry

A person in history with enormous worry was Abraham Lincoln. But with all that could be questioned in Lincoln (and that he questioned about himself), he was trying to worry in a way that would be good for America. He was trying to have his worry be the same as the desire to know, to see more and more truly; and that means trying to have his worry be respect.

One of the most powerful historic documents of the world (powerful and quiet) has worry in it. Its immense worry is at one with an immense care for justice. It is the short speech Lincoln gave on November 19, 1863, as he stood where the Battle of Gettysburg had gone on (with its thousands of deaths) from July 1st through 3rd that year. Though Lincoln wrote his Gettysburg Address as prose, it is poetry. It shows that worry can be had with beauty. I will comment here on just the first two sentences:

Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.

(Though things looked more hopeful for the North after the Battle of Gettysburg, and though what I just quoted is so familiar, anyone who doesn’t think that second sentence has a tearing worry in it is not seeing what the words mean.)

Abraham Lincoln wanted so much to see his worry and the facts truly, that his sentences have what art has: the structure of the world, the oneness of opposites. His sentences are a oneness of width and immediacy, calm and stir, sureness and tumult. They are art.

“Fourscore and seven years ago.” Why couldn’t Lincoln just say “Eighty-seven years ago”? Well, that would have had a feeling of rush in it, agitation in it. “Fourscore and seven years ago” has a sense of the largeness of something. The music of it has the feeling of a searching of a wide landscape in time, even as the phrase is mathematical.

“Our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation.” There is the music, in those words, of something emerging—emerging with wonder, and carefulness.

“Conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition…” has a firmness—and “dedicated to the proposition” has even the feeling of swift hammerings, of a certain real work of thought being done. And then, the beautiful phrase, so wide yet firm, “that all men are created equal.” (We know, of course, that such a use of the word men is currently inadvisable; yet with a substitute for that word, the phrase loses its music.)

Lincoln knew that the proposition “all men are created equal” had been much dishonored in those 87 years. But the way he puts it forward in this Address shows that he saw it as standing for the real basis of the Civil War. That is, the southern states were trying to destroy the nation rather than accept any infringement on slavery—an “institution” utterly and hideously antithetical to “all men are created equal.” And so we have Lincoln’s second sentence:

“Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.” This sentence has width and factuality—and turmoil—and a sound of yearning at the end: “can long endure.”

Lincoln was using his worry to have Americans be clearer.

There Are These Poems

We are grateful to include here four short poems by Eli Siegel. There is playfulness in them—and music. And two are overtly about opposites in us. The first, “To Know What You Feel,” uses two activities to stand for the way a person can shuttle between painful intensity and a certain perhaps bland and self-contained quiet.

2. I think “We Must” describes, with humor, what we owe to things: it is to see deeply what they are, and how they are related. This is put in terms of our need to see the meaning of a thistle and convey that to another growing thing, quite different. That is like what an artist does. An artist doesn’t just “present” objects but becomes of them, and feels that there is a hope in things to be seen as related to other things—a hope which oneself, the artist, can help fulfill.

3. “Gilbert” has that doubleness of self which puzzles the self. The music of the poem is a drama on the ert sound, which can have in it something so confined. Here, the drama in short lines using that ert sound makes for humor, and even something like release.

4. In the final poem—a couplet—there is this: opposing qualities, even as they can seem to fight, are the material of beauty. And a battle of energy and softness can make for that peace-with-wonder which is in the phrase “still moonlight.”

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chair of Education

Four Poems, Playful & Serious

By Eli Siegel

Worry: Can It Make Us Proud?

By Jeffrey Carduner

I am very glad to speak about this big subject, worry, and to comment on how the philosophy that Eli Siegel founded, and taught magnificently, is the means of understanding it. As you will see, I’ll include a discussion in which Mr. Siegel spoke to me so kindly and surprisingly on the subject. But I’ll begin with an instance of Aesthetic Realism consultations, which are now taking place via video conference. (I’ve changed the name of the person whose consultation I’ll tell of.)

Stan DiBello came to a recent consultation wanting to talk about worry. “I do too much of it,” he said, “and I feel it’s excessive.” Mr. DiBello is an IT expert, much valued at his job. But he said he worried that he wouldn’t be able to solve the problems that came up: “I have a sense of foreboding, that something bad’s going to happen.”

His consultants asked him, “Do you think there is something in us that might like to see the world as an enemy? We might even make ourselves important that way?” Mr. DiBello was surprised, and thoughtful.

In an Aesthetic Realism Explanation of Poetry class titled “What Poetry Tells Us about Worry,” Ellen Reiss asked: “Is there a more beautiful worry and a less beautiful worry?” And she explained: “One of the awful things about worry when it’s bad [is], there can be a narrowness, a zeroing in on the thing worried about, and nothing else exists with any fullness.” And she asked, “Can worry, like poetry, be judged on how well it puts opposites together?”

I will be talking in particular about central opposites Ms. Reiss showed are in the subject of worry: self and world, wide and narrow, personal and impersonal. She asked: “How do you see the world as you’re worried about something? Are you worried in behalf of the whole world, or for yourself alone?”

I have seen that, to be proud, two questions we need to ask are: Does my worry make me a kinder or meaner person? Do I use my worries to justify a hate for the outside world?

Some Early Worrying

From as early as I can remember, as I worried about things, I would “zero in,” see narrowly: Will I be popular? Will I get the right English Racer bike? Will I make the team and be a starter? Will I be chosen to be captain of the team?

While my family was financially fortunate, money was a worry. I vividly remember being nervous as my father lost money on various business ventures. Even so, at 13, I was given money to invest in stocks. Then I worried at night how they were doing. The whole world revolved around my stocks, and even as I worried, I felt very important. Ms. Reiss explained in the class: “Worry can often be contempt; people can prefer to think that the world is going to hurt them in some way rather than seeing what value there is in things.” That, she explained, is because when we worry inaccurately we have made ourselves the center of the universe, and nothing else is worthy of our real attention and respect.

I also had another kind of worry, one that was far wider. After graduating from college, I taught third grade for a year in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn. This was so different from where I’d grown up on Long Island and where I then lived, on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. But I threw myself into teaching these young people, and I found myself worrying about them. What was to become of Michael, who couldn’t read, and came to school hungry and looking like he hadn’t slept? And there was Dean, very poor, who loved to listen to the story of the tugboat Little Toot. As I drove back to Manhattan, I sometimes found myself tearful—what would become of these children? This was a worry I could have been proud of, because it wasn’t just about my selfish self. It was utterly different from my worry about what figure I’d cut as I started my ski run down Killington Mountain. And, I’m ashamed to say, my concern about those children did not continue with any vividness as time passed. As I worked in another field, the young people I’d taught became dimmer to me.

Worry, Women, Anger

Meanwhile, by the time I was 24, I was worried about myself for some important reasons. My disgust and anger had gotten so out of control that I did reckless things. And I was using drugs.

I wanted to find love, and I would work hard to get a woman to like me—which, as I saw it, meant her agreeing to have sex with me. But after I got what I thought I wanted, I would lose interest and become cold and sarcastic. When a woman couldn’t make up her mind about what movie to see, or what she wanted to order at a restaurant, I’d growl something like, “C’mon already, order!” I could act hail-fellow-well-met, but I felt like a heel. My friends worried, not knowing what would come out of me: would my sense of “fun” veer into cruelty, which took the form of a nasty wit? I hurt people.

Then I learned of Aesthetic Realism, and began to study it. And my life changed.

A True Worry Is Understood

In an Aesthetic Realism lesson—which took place when I was 24—Eli Siegel spoke to me about a document I’d written to him. He asked, “Do you believe your chief personal worry is that you can get into a kind of rage where you don’t consider the other person?” I had never put that worry into words, but as soon as Mr. Siegel described it I recognized it.

Jeffrey Carduner. I feel that is my chief personal worry.

ES. Do you think that sex has encouraged kindness or cruelty?

JC. I think it’s encouraged cruelty in me, Mr. Siegel.

ES. And are you afraid of the cruelty?

JC. Yes, I am.

I felt Mr. Siegel understood me; I felt known. He explained, “Aesthetic Realism says: The only way you can like yourself, Jeff Carduner, is if you look at the world and you say, ‘I like the way I see it.’ You want to stand for justice to people: that’s the only way you’ll ever like yourself.”

I saw that I needed to be worried about the contempt I had, which often took the form of unjust anger. If I worried about whether or not I was fair to a woman, and to other people, I could be proud of myself. I began to ask: Am I having a good effect on a person, or a bad effect? As my study continued, I began to ask for the first time, What do all people deserve, in terms of jobs, healthcare, education?

And because of our study of Aesthetic Realism, I have a marriage to Devorah Tarrow in which we want both our conversations and our physical closeness “to stand for justice.”

He Is Re-seeing How to Worry

People are worried in this unfair economic system. They’re truly frightened they may be without a job, without enough money, even without a place to live and without sufficient food. Then, however, there is the kind of worry Stan DiBello was speaking about. I remember a class in which Mr. Siegel composed this limerick-like poem:

We asked Mr. DiBello, “When do you think you’re more important, when you’re worried or when you’re not worried?”

SDiB. I’m not sure. When I worry, I am more concentrated on myself.

Consultants. So you may get something—a self-importance—from having the worry?

SDiB. Yes. And I just thought I felt bad!

We asked, “When we worry, the facts often go out the window, don’t they? ‘Who cares that it’s a beautiful morning, that my wife kindly made me breakfast? Who cares that my daughter is growing up and learning new things in school? Who cares! I have my worries.’”

SDiB. Yes, I do put all that aside.

Consultants. A person can ask at any moment, “What am I going after? Is my purpose to value accurately the outside world, or might I worry in order not to be grateful?” Do you think a sensible worry should have you care more for the outside world, including by having feeling about other people?

Stan DiBello answered very thoughtfully, and with pleasure: “Yes, I’m seeing that. We got to some deep territory. I’m so happy for this.”

In his relief and gratitude for what Aesthetic Realism can explain, I see him as standing for people everywhere.