To Anthante -- concerning mental hygiene

Dear Anthanante:

I am very sorry, of course, to hear that your visit with me was so very unpleasant to you.

But I must confess to having the impression that your current memories of that visit, and the facts of the visit do not quite coincide. You see, you seemed fine to me at parting, which was on good terms. I even asked you whether you thought that I had taken good care of you and you said yes. Now your write to tell me that your visit was an unending chain of relentless awfulness and you could not wait to leave. This would strike most people as possibly paradoxical.

The only explanation for this sudden change of perception is that something has happened between the time you left and now, and that that something has colored your memories. It is perhaps unkind to speculate on what that something was, but I suspect that returning to the indifferent misery which is your every day life -- consider the nasty architecture and the awful climate as just two depressing elements which obviously are much worse there than they are here -- I suspect, I repeat, that returning there from her would have been perfectly sufficient to throw anyone into a fit of depression.

For this I may seem to you to bear some responsibility: the real problem with your visit, I suppose, was that I did not invite you to prolong it and thereby, indirectly, obliged you to return home. I can see how my decision could be perceived as an act of cruelty; how it would be hated, and resented; and how it would seem to call for revenge. Which is perhaps what your words really are.

I am saddened to see this mental process take place in you, but am not really surprised by it. I have seen it work often. It offers an important benefit: it certainly helps you adjust yourself to your former life if you are able to say to yourself that the place where you had just holidayed (and were not invited to stay longer) was really too awful to live and that, bottom line, it is far better to be home, whatever its obvious shortcomings.

The problem with this technique is, of course, the resentment that you manage to produce in yourself for your supposedly terrible experiences and my mistreatment of you while here. To be perfectly honest, I suppose that most people would consider what I have given you a pretty generous gift, and would therefore consider your resentment a gross injustice. But I neither wish to dwell on my virtues, nor make an argument which I know is not going to work.

What I wish to do is help you with your current emotional turmoil because I empathize with your suffering. So perhaps you will not mind if I share with you some mental hygiene techniques which I have developed over the years, in the hope that you find them useful in your current predicament.

First, I find that it is essential to keep a good journal. By which I do not mean to say the sort of place where one writes "sunny, dry, lunch with johnsons, walked the dog in the afternoon", but a place where one notes important observations about life's events and one's resolutions about them. This is important because memory is a pliable medium and we can convince ourselves to remember anything (psychology is familiar with such amazing things as planted false memories, etc.); and not merely often, but usually do; as you do now.

But since memory is also the data-base which we use to evaluate our present-day and future choices, false memories lead us to false choices. They are therefore an important cause of suffering. Thus, it is important to note to ourselves our mental states as they happen so that we have a record of them for the future. And, secondly, and as importantly, it is important for us to reread that journal on regular basis to force ourselves to reevaluate the current state of our memories and compare them to the written record.

Writing down one's resolutions is also important: things resolved but not written down are not really resolved; they lack a sense of finality. Writing them down, seems to do the trick. (Carving them in stone would be even better, but not practical). Also, things unwritten are readily and frequently forgotten. So I actually write to myself notes like: never again... and hence forth, always... and because I frequently reread my journal, I tend to remember my resolutions.

Second, it is important to exercise thought control: one must constantly and consciously choose to dwell on the good memories of people and places over bad ones; and, if there should be people and places about which no good memories are possible, then one should suppress all reflection on them altogether. Note that I am not recommending forgetting about the bad aspects of things: that would amount to memory manipulation which I was just advising that we do our utmost to prevent. Indeed, it is important to be very clear-minded about all the things that were bad in our life so that we can avoid them in the future.

No, what I mean is: we must not dwell on bad things; we must learn a way to compartmentalize unpleasant thoughts -- set them aside, put them in a drawer and close the drawer, so to speak -- in order to prevent riling ourselves with feelings of regret, anger, vengefulness, etc.

Many people find this impossible on ideological grounds, reasoning, with the romantics, that our feelings is what is authentically us, and that, therefore we must honor them, by which they mean that we must slavishly submit to their dictates. I disagree. To my mind, our emotions are only a part of us; and ought to play no more than subservient function, just as our thumbs do: we must learn to manipulate them for our purposes so that we can achieve our ends.

(The ideal is well expressed in a Sienkiewicz short story in which Zeus signals Thanatos, the brother of death, to come and let him sleep. What we should strive at is a mastery of our emotions which would allow us to signal contentment, for example, so that we may be content. I am not there, yet, but that is the central idea of my pursuit).

Which all amounts to a recommendation that you try to perform a very difficult trick: dwell on the good aspects of your visit with me without simultaneously regretting that that visit is over and that you have had to return home. The trick amounts to learning not to grieve that something has ended; but to be glad that it happened at all. It requires great intelligence to see it; and a great strength of will to execute it. You are a smart girl and you can be pretty determined: there is no reason why you should not succeed.

It would be too bloody American to say "I wish you all success in this endeavor", and ergo, I do not. But I do wish it all the same.