Divided I Stand

Divided I Stand, Part I

          I often feel I must be some variation of schizophrenic.  Outwardly—in my relationship with the world-at-large—I can’t resist being humorous, even bitterly, blackly comical.  At worst, the remarks I pass are smart-alecky, snide, and even mean, but I always aim higher, for some combination of wit, sarcasm, and vulgarity (which always amuses me).  And I like a straight-faced delivery that often confuses people who aren’t completely sure what they heard was a joke.  Sometimes they are sure it isn’t—and that I’m a total jerk.  I’m sorry when a joke or witticism falls flat, but I can’t resist them.  I just fire away and hope I can bring it off; I do have a lifetime of delivery practice.  This drive to see the humorous hidden away in every day events and conversation is hard-wired into my DNA. It’s who I am, for better and worse.  

          Mind you, I am aware that this is not the sort of personality feature anyone should be proud of, and I know that my life would have gone differently, better no doubt, if I could have controlled myself more often, but I’ve never been able to do much about it.  I’ve tried to root out the nastiness, of course, but my sense of humor, for better or worse, is what it is, and I feel powerless against it, the way a person learns to live with a debilitating physical affliction.

          However, I have spent most of my adult life being serious too—mostly as a late bloomer trying to become a better student, and eventually as a scholar who has strung together a long bibliography of serious writing.  That man never looks for the cheap joke or the pointed gibe.  He is always on message and carefully in control of his words.  It hardly seems possible that I can be both these people at the same time.  But I am, it seems, that particular variety of schizophrenic.

Divided I Stand, Part II

You Don’t Say. . .Monday, September 5, 2011

I was born and raised in an Italian ghetto of parents born in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, and of grandparents born in south-central Italy. In my blood there is a hot-headedness that drives me to outbursts that flash for a moment and then go out forever.  But I am also an American, the product of a cool-headed, Anglo-influenced school system: my excitability is thus neutralized by patient, even-tempered  problem solving.  And so it is that, in another sense, I stand divided.

Divided I Stand, Part III

You Don’t Say. . .Monday, September 5, 2011

I am so thoroughly conditioned by my Puritan work ethic that a friend once observed that I must have descended from John Milton when he lived in Italy.  The remark passed as a cleverness because I spent many years studying American Puritanism and because Italians, he thought, were incapable of such dedicated, Milton-like study.  Putting the defamation in the second part of the equation aside, it is thus, in a related (though perhaps disputed) sense, that I stand divided.

Divided I Stand, Part IV

You Don’t Say. . .Monday, September 5, 2011

I am a Catholic non-believer, an atheist for all practical purposes, but one who is nonetheless committed to the calming qualities of silent prayer.  I can sometimes talk myself into believing in a Creator, but one  who has nothing to do with the Bible or with Jesus or with any church or faith.  I think of myself as a cultural Catholic (akin to those who comfortably refer to themselves as cultural Jews)--that is, I am one born to the faith but educated to know better.  I like the machinery of the Church, the hierarchy, the pomp and ceremony, the smells of incense and candles, the Stations of the Cross, the sacraments, and so on—but I like it all for cultural reasons that tie me to my Italian-American roots, not spiritual ones that I long ago outgrew.  And yet I often return to the calming quality of prayers like the silent Hail Mary, even the Act of Contrition.  And nothing settles my nerves like the Twenty-third Psalm, “The Lord is my shepherd, / I shall not want,” empty words I’m certain, but ones that nonetheless add a quieting benefit to my days.  I’m a non-believing man of prayer—once again, a man divided.