{"product_id":"how-to-live-what-to-do-isbn-9780593316207","title":"How to Live. What to Do","description":"\u003cb\u003eA brilliant psychoanalyst and professor of literature invites us to contemplate profound questions about the human experience by focusing on some of the best-known characters in literature—from how Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway copes with the inexorability of midlife disappointment to Ruth's embodiment of adolescent rebellion in Kazuo Ishiguro’s\u003ci\u003e Never Let Me Go.\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003e“So beautiful ... a fantastic book.” —Zadie Smith, best-selling author of \u003ci\u003eWhite Teeth\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn supple and elegant prose, and with all the expertise and insight of his dual professions, Josh Cohen explores a new way for us to understand ourselves. He helps us see what Lewis Carroll’s Alice and Harper Lee’s Scout Finch can teach us about childhood. He delineates the mysteries of education as depicted in \u003ci\u003eJane Eyre \u003c\/i\u003eand as seen through the eyes of Sandy Stranger in \u003ci\u003eThe Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003eHe discusses the need for adolescent rebellion as embodied in John Grimes in James Baldwin’s \u003ci\u003eGo Tell It on the Mountain \u003c\/i\u003eand in Ruth in Kazuo Ishiguro’s \u003ci\u003eNever Let Me Go. \u003c\/i\u003eHe makes clear what Goethe’s Young Werther and Sally Rooney’s Frances have—and don’t have—in common as they experience first love; how \u003ci\u003eMiddlemarch’s \u003c\/i\u003eDorothea Brooke deals with the vicissitudes of marriage. Vis-a-vis old age and death, Cohen considers what wisdom we may glean from John Ames in Marilynne Robinson’s \u003ci\u003eGilead \u003c\/i\u003eand from Don Fabrizio in Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s \u003ci\u003eThe Leopard.\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eFeaturing:\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e   • \u003cb\u003eAlice—Lewis Carroll, \u003ci\u003eAlice's      Adventures in Wonderland \/ Through the Looking Glass\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e \u003cbr\u003e   • \u003cb\u003eScout      Finch—Harper Lee, \u003ci\u003eTo Kill a Mockingbird\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e \u003cbr\u003e   • \u003cb\u003eJane      Eyre—Charlotte Brontë, \u003ci\u003eJane Eyre\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e \u003cbr\u003e   • \u003cb\u003eJohn      Grimes—James Baldwin, \u003ci\u003eGo Tell It on the Mountain\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e \u003cbr\u003e   • \u003cb\u003eRuth—Kazuo Ishiguro, \u003ci\u003eNever      Let Me Go\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e \u003cbr\u003e   • \u003cb\u003eVladimir      Petrovitch—Ivan Turgenev, \u003ci\u003eFirst Love\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e \u003cbr\u003e   • \u003cb\u003eFrances—Sally Rooney, \u003ci\u003eConversations      with Friends\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e \u003cbr\u003e   • \u003cb\u003eJay      Gatsby—F. Scott Fitzgerald, \u003ci\u003eThe Great Gatsby\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e \u003cbr\u003e   • \u003cb\u003eEsther      Greenwood—Sylvia Plath, \u003ci\u003eThe Bell Jar\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e \u003cbr\u003e   • \u003cb\u003eClarissa      Dalloway—Virginia Woolf, \u003ci\u003eMrs. Dalloway\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e \u003cbr\u003e   • \u003cb\u003eAnd more!\u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003eAuthor’s Note ix\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eIntroduction xi\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e1 Childhood Part 1: Play 3\u003cbr\u003e2 Childhood Part 2: Schooling 51\u003cbr\u003e3 Adolescence Part 1: Rebellion 95\u003cbr\u003e4 Adolescence Part 2: First Love 134\u003cbr\u003e5 Adulthood Part 1: Ambition 171\u003cbr\u003e6 Adulthood Part 2: Marriage 211\u003cbr\u003e7 Adulthood Part 3: Middle Age 254\u003cbr\u003e8 Old Age and Dying 296\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eAcknowledgements 341\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eNotes 343\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eBibliography 355\u003c\/i\u003e“So beautiful. I really enjoyed it. A fantastic book.”\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003e—\u003c\/i\u003eZadie Smith\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e “Successful fiction, like successful therapy, Cohen notes, ‘sets a mirror before us, in which we see not only the self we know but the self we don’t.’ Relatability gives way to a more transformative recognition: seeing ourselves as others see us, or seeing ourselves as others, as strangers-and therefore as people whose stories and scripts aren’t as fixed as we thought . . . By the end of this wonderful book, we have learned to read its title not as a prescription but as a set of questions.”\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003e—The Times Literary Supplement\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Cohen makes the case for fiction as a crucial aid to introspection, suggesting that our ability to see ourselves in literary characters runs parallel to the all-important ability to see ourselves.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003e—\u003ci\u003eLitHub’s \u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e“Most Anticipated Books of 2021 Part 2”\u003cbr\u003e \u003c\/b\u003e \u003ci\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e “Absorbing . . . Uniformly insightful. . . Compelling . . . An engrossing consideration of how reading fiction can lay a pathway for emotional and intellectual enrichment.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003e—\u003ci\u003eKirkus Reviews\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e \u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e“Original . . . Fascinating . . . The premise is a brilliant one with plenty of room for fun.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003e—\u003ci\u003ePublishers Weekly\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cb\u003eJOSH COHEN\u003c\/b\u003e is a psychoanalyst in private practice and a professor of modern literary theory at Goldsmiths, University of London. He is the author of many books and articles on modern literature, cultural theory, and psychoanalysis, including \u003ci\u003eHow to Read: Freud, The Private Life: Our Everyday Self in an Age of Intrusion, \u003c\/i\u003eand \u003ci\u003eNot Working: Why We Have to Stop. \u003c\/i\u003eHe lives in London.\u003ci\u003efrom\u003c\/i\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eChildhood Part 1: Play\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e“Let’s pretend”: Alice\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e#\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThere’s nothing all that exceptional about Alice. Unlike a lot of Victorian child heroines, she’s no paragon of angelic wisdom and delicacy. She is stubborn, awkward, impatient, often daft; she is, in short, a kid. But then why is she the first stop on our literary life journey? What does a kid like Alice have to tell us about how to live and what to do?\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Perhaps the most important insight into childhood we glean from psychoanalysis is that we forget most of it, particularly the parts that most matter. The years up to three or four tend especially to be shrouded in a fog of amnesia. Our childhood feelings become ever more inaccessible to us. The sheer intensity of our daily life experiences come to seem to us comical and alien. We laugh at the sobbing, screaming, tyrannical monster we once were, as though they had nothing to do with who we are now.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e This chasm between adult and child is as much a problem for adults as it is for children. The Hungarian psychoanalyst Sándor Ferenczi called it a “confusion of tongues”; adults and children seem to speak the same language but are separated by a cognitive and emotional chasm that mires them in permanent misunderstanding. The child’s world is too elastic and excitable, the adult’s too rule-bound and repressed. The child doesn’t yet know what an adult mind is like; the adult has forgotten what it is to inhabit a child’s mind. That teacher was right in a way: it \u003ci\u003edoesn’t \u003c\/i\u003emake any sense.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e This might be one explanation for why we write and read stories. Stories, and especially the ones we come to love as children, loosen the grip of logic and law on our inner lives. They help us reach the child still lurking in us, whose playfulness hasn’t been entirely crushed by the demands of the adult world—don’t make up silly stories, don’t excite yourself, don’t be childish. \u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e One of the most common ways this conflict between child and adult realities manifests itself is in our different experiences of time. “Not being childish” means conformity to a regimented clock-time, adapting oneself to rhythms, schedules and speeds imposed from the outside. When I recall my own childhood, it often comes back to me as a relentless montage of irritable adults telling me to hurry up, get on with it, stop dawdling. \u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e When I talk to a friend about this, she relates an exchange with her daughter, then aged about six. Anxious to get to a scheduled appointment, my friend told her daughter to hurry up, they had to leave, that moment. Her daughter remained impassive, sitting on the carpet absorbed in the intrigues unfolding between the various toy farm animals she was playing with. “Come on, Rosie, we must go!” Still no answer. “Rosie!” she shouted. “Stop taking your sweet time! Stop being so childish!” \u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Rosie turned her clear blue gaze on her mother and said, “But, Mum, I am a child.” \u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Rosie’s gentle protest illustrates more lucidly than any theory could the value of a child’s right to inhabit the time and space of play. In Alice’s dreamworlds, time won’t be pressed into a single, uniform rhythm. It can pass with breathless speed or easy leisure, collapsing anarchically at one moment, expanding languidly the next. Every character, every region of these imaginary worlds, forges its own rules of time and space. \u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e One of the most reliable ways to reconcile this conflict of perspectives is to read a story together. When bedtime rolls around, we may be itching to recover our own time and space. We will often have spent the entire day trying to impose adult rules and disciplines and agendas, to cajole our children into conforming to the world as we see it, into moving at our pace, only to be left reeling with exhaustion and defeat. Story times create a space in which we’re licensed for a while to suspend the conflict between our reality and theirs. Parent and child alike can forget all we’ve told them about the impassable laws of physics, morality and self-preservation, and enter a world—like Wonderland, or the Looking-Glass—where none of these apply. \u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e At seven and a half, Alice is well past early childhood. Very much the older child forever protesting that she’s not a baby, she likes to assume an exaggeratedly sensible posture while remaining a child nonetheless. More than anything else, what separates her mind from an adult’s is her casual indifference to the boundary between reality and illusion.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Alice’s favourite phrase, we’re told, is “Let’s pretend.” It’s the one phrase I recall from first reading \u003ci\u003eAlice\u003c\/i\u003e. The world seemed to me at that time to be brimming with adults telling me to stop daydreaming. Schoolteachers warned my parents that if I didn’t drag my head out of the clouds soon, I’d continue to underachieve. \u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Twenty-two years later, I began psychoanalysis, which led in turn to my starting the long process of training to be an analyst. It strikes me that through all these years on either side of the couch, that daydreaming child has never been far away. \u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e The people I see in analysis are adults rather than children. They come with all kinds of troubles and maladies. But it’s surprising how often the same inchoate feeling will be expressed by otherwise very different individuals—of being blocked or inhibited. “It feels like I no longer know how to be who I am. Almost like I don’t remember,” a patient says to me in a first meeting. When we’re in this state, the world seems rigid, a series of roadblocks in the face of every change or development we try to effect, so that we too end up feeling perpetually stuck and anxious. \u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e What if this feeling has something to do with no longer being able to say, “Let’s pretend”? This is a question posed by the British psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, whose thinking had a profound and immediate effect on me when I first came across it, around the time I began my analysis.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e A paediatrician as well as a psychoanalyst, Winnicott was gifted with an almost eerie capacity to attune himself to the ways in which children think and feel. His most important insight is that play is the basic mode of a child’s existence. For a child, the imaginary world feels at least as real as the “real” world, and probably more so. We cannot feel properly alive in adulthood, he suggested, if in early childhood we’ve not known what it is to pretend, to experience the intimacy and permeability of real and imaginary worlds. \u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e To say we’re blocked or unable to be our true selves is to realise we’ve lost contact with the impulse to play, that the dividing line in our own minds between what is real and what isn’t has become too stark. The effect of this line on imaginative and creative lives is debilitating. This is why Winnicott insists that a child’s adult carers should never dictate to them what is real and what isn’t. \u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Telling Alice that her kitten doesn’t know how to play chess won’t help her grow up. On the one hand, she knows that perfectly well. On the other, if she’s allowed to reserve a space in herself where her kitten \u003ci\u003ecan \u003c\/i\u003eplay chess, her imaginative range and curiosity will only be enriched. \u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e This is how she’s able to move with such open curiosity and easy acceptance through the anarchic and disturbing dreamworlds of Wonderland and Looking- Glass. She simply has no use for the objection that this or that isn’t real. In Alice’s world, reality and illusion are intimate friends. \u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e This isn’t to say she doesn’t protest against the anomalies and oddities of Wonderland and Looking-Glass. But it’s not their unreality she objects to. At tea with the Hatter and the March Hare, she takes in her stride the fact that time is stuck permanently at six o’clock; she is bothered only by their rude and inhospitable behaviour. “It’s the stupidest tea-party I ever was at in all my life!” she complains, reacting to a violation of the laws of the physical universe with the kind of off hand dismissiveness you might recognise if you’ve ever watched kids’ reactions to a poor birthday party entertainer. \u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e When, without warning, the White Queen metamorphoses into a sheep, who happens to be a clerk in a shop, whose sale items float away the moment Alice looks at them, she says (“in a plaintive tone”), “Things flow about so here!,” sounding roughly as alarmed as someone who’s found a stray melon in the dairy section. \u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Alice doesn’t need the world around her to conform to the logic of ordinary reality. She just prefers it not to be annoying. In small, everyday matters, children demand consistency, reliability, regularity. Objects should be easy to pick up, people (and animals) should be nice; they will be upset by even minor aberrations from these norms. But in large matters, like reality itself, they are far more receptive, and more generous towards change and disruption, than we are—or perhaps just more unbothered by them. The Caterpillar smokes a hookah and talks? No big deal. He’s short-tempered and haughty? That won’t do. \u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e But while expanding exponentially our sense of what’s possible, \u003ci\u003eAlice \u003c\/i\u003ealso draws a vivid symbolic landscape of what we might call the ordinary madness of childhood. Lewis Carroll employs wild exaggeration and distortion to render childhood experience more precisely. Take physical growth: adults are prone to remember a sentimental and sanitised version of the whole thing, as though our massive, unpredictable gains in height and weight, the elongations of trunk and limbs, the fluctuations in tone and pitch of voice and bodily coordination, all occurred smoothly and evenly. \u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003eAlice’s Adventures in Wonderland \u003c\/i\u003ebrings to life the experience of growth as a bewildering and disturbing shock to the system. Alice stretches to double her height after eating a small cake and weeps inconsolably, flooding the hall, at the thought of her feet feeling lonely, writing to them to assure them they’re not forgotten. As poignant as it is bonkers, Alice’s tearful letter to her feet is a reminder of growth as a kind of universal human trauma. Only yesterday, every growing child might want to say, my feet seemed so nearby, and now they’ve moved all the way down there. Wonderland gives us a wonderful image of how sad and frightening this might feel.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e #","brand":"Pantheon","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46302689263845,"sku":"NP9780593316207","price":28.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780593316207.jpg?v=1767729432","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/how-to-live-what-to-do-isbn-9780593316207","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}