Dear Unknown Friends:

Here is the second part in our two-part publication of Mind and Restlessness, by Eli Siegel. He gave this lecture—this definitive, wonderful, immensely kind lecture—in 1948, and what we are publishing is a reconstruction of it from the notes of two people present then: Martha Baird and my mother, Irene Reiss. Early in the talk he said:

Restlessness can be defined as motion with againstness. And there is something compulsory about the motion….It’s motion without symmetry, motion that is undesired….The restlessness that is the deepest is the feeling of not being at home in the world you have been born into….In fact, not being at home in the world is one of the larger definitions of restlessness.

In this talk Mr. Siegel does what no one else has done: he explains restlessness. It is a state of being that distresses people intensely, and which itself is distress. He explains it in its intricacy, subtlety, depth, as well as in its overt manifestations. And he does so in great spoken prose. While what he says is about people of all centuries, I mentioned in the last issue some particular forms of restlessness in America today. I continue doing so, as I speak about a restlessness forced on people by our current economy.

Jobs, Money, Restlessness

In the 1970s, Eli Siegel explained that a way of economics which has gone on for centuries no longer works. This economic way is based on contempt, on seeing human beings in terms of how much profit somebody can squeeze out of them. And it will, he showed, never recover. For the past four decades there has been an intense effort to keep alive that contemptuous economic arrangement. And one result of the effort has been conditions making for a tremendous, widespread restlessness.

There is the so-called “gig economy.” It includes, according to forbes.com, “more than one third (36 percent) of U.S. workers…, 57 million people” (8-31-2018). “Gig economy” is a cute term, and even has something of a chic sound to it. But really, it’s a term for something terrible. “Gig economy” means an economy in which people do not have a steady job: they get a short-term job (a gig), with no benefits of course, and no sense of how long they’ll have to hunt, with no money coming in, until getting the next “gig.” Will they be on the hunt for months—years—longer? And if there is a next “gig,” will it pay them what they need? So people have to worry about whether they’ll have an income at all, be able to feed their family, whether they’ll make their mortgage payments or pay their rent, whether they’ll have a home at all. The “gig economy” forces a constant restlessness on people. In keeping with the description of restlessness I quoted: how can you feel “at home in the world” amid a situation of such day-after-day uncertainty and worry, such “undesired,” “compulsory” motion?

There’s been a big propaganda attempt to make this way of working seem fashionable, “flexible,” and to make what has been called job security seem so outdated. But the “gig economy” exists for only one reason: so that as much of the profit as possible generated by any job can go to the employer rather than to the persons doing the work. If work consists of “gigs,” the employer has little obligation to the people working for him or her—can dispose of them easily, evade paying benefits, and of course evade the possibility of a union with its insistence that those who work be treated with justice, including financial justice.

In the “gig economy,” the person whose labor you, the boss, need has become an “independent contractor” or “freelance” instead of an employee. Therefore federal and state legal protections—which were courageously fought for and became standard—no longer apply. For instance, you can now pay this worker less than minimum wage. And you need not pay for worker’s compensation or unemployment insurance—which means the worker cannot receive either of these.

There are other aspects of our economy which inevitably make people restless. For example: a young person takes out a loan to pay for college tuition; then she graduates with a debt she doesn’t know how she’ll pay, and which 15 years later she is still trying to pay. Then there is the person who has to work two jobs a day. He is in “compulsory” motion because of them; he gets home very late at night and is out again very early in the morning—day after day after day. In both these instances and many others arising from the state of our economy, there is an awful relation of opposites: people feel simultaneously stuck and restless.

Contempt versus Good Will

There has been in many people a desire to annul restlessness through contempt. Eli Siegel defined contempt as “the addition to self through the lessening of something else,” and he identified it as the most hurtful thing in the human self. So a person, perhaps a man in Ohio who lost his job, feels at loose ends, ever so unsure, ill-at-ease under his own skin. Then he feels, without articulating it: “If I can look down on certain people different from me, I’ll be confident, superior, important. If I can despise some people, I’m decisive, sure.” It doesn’t work. Along with being ugly, this contempt makes the person having it more unsure, more restless, than ever.

The one thing—both in how an economy is based and in how people think—that will enable us not to be restless, is good will. Good will is the feeling, “I take care of myself, express myself, through trying to be just to what’s not me.” Eli Siegel showed that this aesthetic oneness of care for self and like of the wide world other than oneself, is the one basis on which an economy will now succeed. The restlessness in our beautiful country is a clamoring for it.

—Ellen Reiss, Aesthetic Realism
Chairman of Education

Restlessness—& a Fight in Us

By Eli Siegel

Restlessness is a phase of the feverishness of guilt. We can understand its forms if we have a knowledge of its deepest cause.

For example, there are many married women whose minds go off to other men; a woman can think how well off she is being married—then that she would be better off not married. And she is in a constant state of agitation. Or a husband is interested in other women, then gets fed up and goes back to his wife with relief—and the back and forth keeps going on. Most often, other men or women are used to disparage one’s spouse, and vice versa. There is a playing off.

This sort of feverish infidelity is of many kinds. The poem I shall read next, by Ernest Dowson, seems to have to do with that, but also has in it the feeling that there can be something constant through seeming inconstancies. The full title is the Latin statement “Non Sum Qualis Eram Bonae sub Regno Cynarae,” from a poem of Horace. It means “I Am Not That Which I Was under the Reign of the Good Cynara.”

This can be taken as being about a man, close to a woman, but having to be with other women and do things against her. In a deeper sense, though, it is about being for something and also against it, so that you can’t go for it directly. If while you care for something you are also against it, that does make for restlessness. This can be seen in many dreams: people are looking for a telephone number and can’t find it; they are looking for a light, or for a certain house, and they can’t find it. Dreams can be a dealing with the restlessness that is in one. In restlessness there is the fact that we are for two things and go from one to another, just as a person will go from one side of the room to another when he is vexed.

What We Can’t Get Away From

Restlessness is the dramatic sign of division of mind, and is painful because any division of mind is painful. In this poem of Dowson, we find a presentation of restlessness in social terms, but also the idea that though one is false to one’s true self one can never get away from the desire for it. We can go away from the true thing in ourselves, but we’ll always be homesick for it. We can falsify what we want, and can do that all our lives, but we’ll be longing for what we truly are every moment. And even while we seem to be at our best, and even when we “cr[y] for madder music and for stronger wine,” even then there is that longing, and it’s most confusing.

The reason this poem is so popular is that, put in terms of infidelity to a woman, there is a presentation of being untrue to oneself. The division we make between the two aspects of ourselves is never complete division: the two sides look for each other even as they call each other names.

In terms of marriage: although quarrels can be reconciled, the feeling that the two people can’t be as close as they might has to make for restlessness—unless restlessness changes to resignation, which is worse. But in terms of the self, restlessness expresses the agitation that comes because one part of oneself is separate from another yet both are calling to each other and are trying to become one.

So in Dowson’s “Cynara” we have the restlessness of a man compelled to go after other women while still having a deep attachment; and this is like, and stands for, the self trying to get away from what it is and always looking back, longing and restless.

Samuel Johnson Tells of Restlessness

There is a sketch by Samuel Johnson that appeared in The Idler on August 19, 1758. It’s about a man he calls Jack Whirler, who represents the person always on the move. Johnson says Jack Whirler is someone

whose business keeps him in perpetual motion, and whose motion always eludes his business; who is always to do what he never does, who cannot stand still because he is wanted in another place, and who is wanted in many places because he stays in none….

When you call at his house [i.e., his place of business], his clerk tells you, that Mr. Whirler was just stept out, but will be at home exactly at two; you wait at a coffee-house till two and then find that he has been at home, and is gone out again, but left word that he should be at the Half-moon tavern at seven, where he hopes to meet you. At seven you go to the tavern. At eight in comes Mr. Whirler to tell you, that he is glad to see you, and only begs leave to run for a few minutes to a gentleman that lives near the Exchange….

But overwhelmed as he is with business, his chief desire is to have still more. Every new proposal takes possession of his thoughts; he soon balances probabilities, engages in the project, brings it almost to completion, and then forsakes it for another, which he catches with the same alacrity, urges with the same vehemence, and abandons with the same coldness.

This is classic. It’s stylized, but it represents people deeply: they can’t do anything with all of themselves. There is a lot of calling for concentration, for sticking to the point, for efficiency; but we can’t concentrate or be efficient without love for what is to be concentrated on. And we cannot love what we are concentrating on unless we can love in general. We cannot really do things thoroughly without love. Where there is no love, there can be no real efficiency.

Jack Whirler, that comic creation of Samuel Johnson, is somewhat like Sammy in What Makes Sammy Run?, a giddy bluefly on a windowpane. That novel shows how restlessness can make for some overt bad things.

Excessive Speed Is Restlessness

There are persons who look on speed and lack of obstruction as the greatest thing in life. I’ll close these selections with an important story from the New York Times of yesterday, “Judge Blames Ego for Auto Hazards”:

Ruthless egoism manifest[ed] by motorists and pedestrians was emphasized today as the cause of 70 per cent of the traffic accidents in this country….Judge Truman H. Preston of the Traffic Court in Syracuse, N.Y., …cited accident surveys which proved, he said, “that an overweening spirit of self conceit is on the upswing and there are no traffic laws that seem able to curb it. Thousands of self-satisfied drivers speed on with no thought to the perils created for themselves or others, nor do they care.”…

More than 40 per cent of pedestrians were put in the same category by Judge Preston, who asserted that millions of them ignored and scorned traffic signals installed for their protection….

[He said] there was no way of measuring ego. “Often times a mild-mannered man will get behind the wheel of a high-powered car and immediately develop characteristics of a ruthless despot of the highway.”

“Ego,” of course, is our old neighbor, our constant neighbor: that in us which wants to have contempt. Ego here is the part in us that is against what we meet. And one of the things we meet in this world is space—and streets. A person who is antagonistic to the world will try to swallow space. When you’re against things, you can show your againstness by capturing them, because one way of being against something is to try to have it in a hurry.

Judge Preston uses the phrase “self conceit.” But “self conceit” is next door to confidence. The distinction is only a distinction as to truth. A person is confident if he likes himself with the truth also liked. Conceit is with the truth not liked. Egoism is a disproportionate sense of self, making for a lessening of what is not oneself.

The excessive desire to speed, to be in motion, is a desire to show that one is doing things, is busy. It is restlessness. It comes from a wish to acquire what seems to be the outside world. Going through space can be a way of saying, What I conquered! While one does that, one is irritated: there is irritation because there is also opposition in oneself to it.

Agitation, Carelessness, Accidents

Thoughts that agitate you will make for a flurry and carelessness, and something can happen that makes for accidents.

Also, people can get their words mixed up. Bad speaking and bad pronunciation can come from agitation in self; they can be a way of solving an unknown agitation.

What Judge Preston says is true, but he doesn’t go into the causes deeply. Wherever there is “self conceit,” there is also something in the self that says, I don’t like the way I like myself.

Ego, when it decides to please itself, doesn’t care for anything. Whenever a person is bent on pleasing himself and sees an obstruction, he gets very irritated. A good deal of ill-temper comes from this: something is brought up which doesn’t merge or coalesce with our pleasure—and then we bark.

When people are angry and confused, they are likely to grow careless. Any person who is in a world he’s not at home in is that much dangerous: he can want to hurt others and himself. That can take a specific form, from rudeness to homicide, though most often it takes such a slight form we’re not aware of it. Anger with the obstructions of the world makes simultaneously for restlessness and carelessness.

Driving has very much to do with restlessness. Walking, eating, reading, and all communication can have to do with restlessness. When a person doesn’t know what to do and has to keep in motion, it’s unpleasant.

Accidents, then, often come from restlessness. People do all kinds of things because there is a battle in them that they have to think about yet don’t want to think about deeply, and they don’t know how to settle it. Restlessness is likely in everyone, because everybody has two aspects of self that are asking to be friends. If they are not friends, the person having two enemies is going to be restless.

The Opposites Are There

Restlessness is a constant desire to put rest and motion together. It’s not the motion alone; it’s when there is motion with anger. You can sit on a chair and be in bad motion within. Aesthetic Realism says that in all beauty and in reality itself, rest is the same as motion. The only solution is in that fact. Otherwise there has to be rest against motion, and that means restlessness.