Steve Weiner, computer specialist and Aesthetic Realism associate, writes:
What can we learn about our own worries from one of the most important documents in American history? What would it mean to worry in a way that makes us stronger, kinder, prouder? That’s what the latest issue of TRO is about. For instance: there’s a thrilling article in which an Aesthetic Realism consultant tells what he learned about his own life—and describes that great thing in education, Aesthetic Realism consultations. And there are four short, deeply illuminating poems by Eli Siegel. “Looking at Worry–& Abraham Lincoln” is the up-to-the-moment new issue of The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known!
The commentary by Ellen Reiss begins:
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…. Read more