Reprinted from…..
We Can Feel More Alive at Any Age
By Irene Reiss
In 1947, when I began my study of Aesthetic Realism, I was so fortunate to learn that the only way we can feel really alive at any age is to do all we can to know and like the world.
Aesthetic Realism is the education founded in 1941 by the philosopher and historian Eli Siegel. He explained that the deepest desire of every person is to like the world. And he also explained what interferes—contempt: “a false importance or glory from the lessening of things not oneself.”
I have learned contempt can be ordinary: a woman not listening when her husband speaks, or making fun of how another person dresses; and on a larger scale, Siegel taught, contempt is the cause of cruelty and war. Aesthetic Realism teaches that loneliness and boredom—the feeling “I’ve seen it all”—so common among older people and young people, and the false importance from feeling that nothing is worth learning or remembering, are actually contempt. Contempt is the greatest life-sapper, making people of any age feel old and worn out.
The Desire to Like the World Doesn’t Stop
In his kind essay, “Declaration about Old Age,” Eli Siegel writes, “The desire of a person of 80 to like himself and the world is as keen as it was when that person was eight, or 18, or 28.” He continues:
Reality is always new; and the greatest misfortune of any person, whoever he may be or however old he may be, is not to see reality as tremendously new, subtly surprising, and dazzlingly novel. It is easy to be bored at any age; and being bored is one of the subtler forms of conceit.
Aesthetic Realism teaches, too, that wanting to see beauty in the world, new meaning in a book, a tree, a kitten, a chair, even a person who bumps into us on the street, is necessary if we are to fight our drive for contempt, which often shows itself as weariness, bitterness, and resignation. Learning about this crucial fight between contempt and respect has enabled me at 82 to have a zest for life far more than I had at the age of 32. My husband, Dan, and I are so fortunate to continue learning in Aesthetic Realism classes and seminars about ourselves, all people, literature, music, economics, current events.
As people get older, there are usually concerns about health: eyesight is not as good as once, often we don’t hear as well, and people sometimes use their difficulties and worries to go “into themselves” and give up on the world. People need to know that every moment we make a choice, either to know and see meaning in things or to make less of them. I have seen that the difference between these choices is the difference between more life or less life.
The reason world can honestly be liked is that it has an aesthetic structure—the oneness of opposites. Stated Eli Siegel, “The world, art, and self explain each other: each is the aesthetic oneness of opposites.”
An older person can be tormented by the opposites of rigidity and flexibility, about rest and motion. Aesthetic Realism so kindly shows we can learn from everything about these opposites in ourselves—for instance, how a tree with its rigid trunk has flexible, leafy branches that yield to the wind. As we get older and can’t move as easily or swiftly as we once did, can our thoughts still be in lively motion, wanting to know? Can we see new meaning in things and people that can make us proud? And can we be both assertive and yielding at once, like a tree? Yes!
I am so grateful that because of our education, every day my husband and I can encourage each other to like the way we think and talk about the world, including some of our difficulties.
Knowing Our Purpose, We Can Make the Right Choice
For instance, if stormy weather keeps us confined at home, when once it did not, instead of feeling as people commonly do—that it’s all downhill from now on—and contemptuously seeing the world as an enemy, we can spend our time reading and discussing what is going on in the world and have conversations which encourage our understanding and care for people.
Mr. Siegel saw that the biggest interference to liking the world is our desire for contempt: the lessening of something else in order to build ourselves up, which often shows itself in boredom and loneliness.
We make a choice every moment between wanting to know and respect people and things, and wanting to have contempt for them—and contempt is the “greatest life-sapper.” The one alternative to contempt is honestly wanting to know and like the world.
It is a crucial fact that when you know your purpose is to respect and like the world, you go after it, and you are strengthened.
In 1947, my mother, then in her 70’s, had the great good fortune to have an Aesthetic Realism lesson with Eli Siegel—one of thousands he gave to men, women and children, who were seen with dignity and depth in relation to all history, literature, and world culture. Aesthetic Realism consultations given today at the Aesthetic Realism Foundation and by telephone nation-wide and overseas are based on lessons given by Mr. Siegel.
When my mother told Mr. Siegel that she was “lived-out” and afraid of sickness, he so kindly said to her:
When you were born, you were born into everything. When people get along with the world they meet, they are fighting sickness….If there is a good thing in the world and we don’t see it as good, we’re unfair to it. If there is a bad thing, if we can understand it we can be proud….Every person should be like a flower—going towards the sun. I want you to begin life and not think it’s over.
As Mr. Siegel spoke to my mother about her children, ex-husband, and more, she met the understanding every person longs for. I love him for encouraging her to like the way she saw everything. And now this lesson means even more to me because I see the importance for my own life of what he taught her. All people deserve to know what my mother heard.
In “Declaration about Old Age,” he writes:
Aesthetic Realism would like to have every person feel that it was a glorious, splendid obligation to put down as clearly as possible: ‘I liked the following today’ with description….It will do something against the quite clear and usually victorious terrors of age.
I have seen firsthand that writing a sentence each day about something in the world I liked, with exactitude and joy, makes one feel proud. For instance, one day I wrote, “I liked seeing the Bartlett pears on the fruit stand which are rounded at the bottom, becoming narrower just before being topped off with their pert, perpendicular stems.” I recommend that you, dear reader, get a notebook and in it write every day a full sentence about one thing you liked that day.
As an Aesthetic Realism consultant I have the privilege to teach other women what I have been learning, and to see the tremendous good effect of Aesthetic Realism on persons’ lives.
Printed in two parts in the October and November, 1997, Idaho Senior News.
Irene Reiss (1915—2009) was an Aesthetic Realism consultant, wife and mother, and lived in New York City. Papers she gave in public seminars at the Aesthetic Realism Foundation include “Possession vs. Perception in the Family,” “How Can We Look Good in Our Own Eyes?” “The Fight in Women Between Energy and Weariness,” “Honest Criticism—Are Women Looking for It?”