Living with a Wild God: A Nonbeliever's Search for the Truth about Everything by Barbara Ehrenreich
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Road to Damascus on US hwy. 395 in Central California

Barbara Ehrenreich lives in her head. So do I. I, and I think she, can’t imagine any other mode of living. We share, if that’s not too oxymoronic an idea, a solipsistic attitude toward the world in general - that it really is dependent upon my thinking it into existence. We both know that this is irrational and a social handicap. But the attitude is not a matter of choice. Through some combination of nature and nurture, it is our fate to live on a sort of cosmic stage-set on which we are the only motivating force, constantly questioning why the props are where they are, and who wrote the script.

The disadvantages of the solipsistic tendency are obvious: we appear enigmatic, aloof, self-possessed if not acutely self-absorbed. Inexplicably we also appear this way to ourselves which promotes a permanent state of doubt crossing frequently into cynicism. This mystically tinged otherness is perhaps our most annoying character trait as attested by parents, siblings, colleagues and ex-spouses. To find another who is similarly disordered is, paradoxically, a comfort; not because misery loves company but because Schadenfreude is a real thing: There is someone, thank goodness, who may be worse off, metaphysically speaking, than me.

Nonetheless there is a reason for our solipsistic existence. We can’t explain it, but we can describe it. This is a public service. Having just finished How Proust Can Change Your Life, Ehrenreich’s Living With a Wild God is the perfect example of de Botton’s thesis: an appreciation of one’s life cannot be rushed and demands a developed vocabulary. For Ehrenreich it was Conrad rather than Proust who provided an initial motivation, but her point is the same: writing about one’s life, particularly its most incomprehensible moments, eases the stress of living it.

And if one gives it enough time the result just might be a therapeutic document, therapeutic certainly for the author and, with any luck, for others who don’t have her linguistic talent, as inspiration as well as example. It is also very helpful as a means of constraining oneself from giving constant stage directions. Ehrenreich says, “The reason I eventually became a writer is that writing makes thinking easier, and even as a verbally underdeveloped fourteen-year-old I knew that if I wanted to understand ‘the situation,’ thinking was what I had to do.” ‘The situation’ of course is how things are connected in one’s head, which one comes to realize is only remotely connected to the stage-set.

This disconnection, what the cognitive psychiatric types condemn as dissociation, is a positive adaptation. It doesn’t make us any less annoying, but it does allow us to be functional in society. It also allows us to have our visions, aberrant perceptions, and various intellectual conceits without having to constantly explain the unexplainable. This is sufficient cause for those of us traveling in Ehrenreich’s psychic boat to read her memoir. She might even make subjective introversion respectable. Then again I wouldn’t count on any widespread support in an America grounded in belief and faith. “Belief is intellectual surrender;” she says, “‘faith’ is a state of willed self-delusion.” I think I’m in love.

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