Saturday November 20, 2004 – Holding Divergent Views Concurrently

Saturday November 20, 2004 – Holding Divergent Views Concurrently

From the time we had discretionary income, Friday evening was the time my wife “I”, our two daughters, and I would go out to dinner. Now that both daughters have families of their own, the two of us keep the tradition alive by going to one of our favorite restaurants around San Jose. In an earlier blog, I mentioned Paolo’s, but last evening our choice was A.P. Stumps on East Santa Clara Street near St. Pedro Square, one of the hubs of nightlife in San Jose.

The restaurant is the place where humans intellectualize the basic act of sustaining themselves with food. The earliest humans by contrast killed their own prey or scavenged meat of more powerful predators. That was the main course. The starters consisted of nuts, berries, and other edible plants that could be gathered. Needless to say, we’ve improved on the process considerably, but the results are the same: meat, poultry, or fish that other humans have killed, butchered, and prepared to our order in conjunction with greens, vegetables, and other edible plants grown, picked, and prepared also to our order.

In the 1950s, the café in Paris had been raised to great heights. Jean-Paul Sartre in Being and Nothingness wrote. “The Café is a fullness of being.” America during the early part of the 20th century had coined the term “café society” to describe the practice of dining and drinking to all hours, with the emphasis more on drinking. At least the French tended toward lower alcohol-content wine, which brings up the question of where did all of this hedonism begin? And the answer lies—as for most all of modern practices—with the Greeks. They were the ones who invented the pleasure of eating and drinking.

In James Davidson’s fine book Courtesans & Fishcakes, he writes. “The most formal context for the consumption of wine in the Greek world was the drinking party or symposium… Eating and drinking… were formally quite separate activities; dinner was concluded, the tables sided, and the floor swept, before the symposium, the liquid part of the meal, could begin.” During this part of the meal, men would sit for hours sipping wine and indulging in the kinds of discourse we were all required to read when assigned Plato in school.

Now, here we are close to 2400 years later doing much the same thing—if a Woody Allen movie is accurate—eating and drinking while indulging in conversations about our lives. My conversation tonight with “I” was about the duality in which we humans live our lives. There is the life we know to exist and the life we aspire to believe exists. In the former all life on the planet lives by killing and consuming other forms of life. If you think about it, this is a terrible place where the only way you can survive is by killing and eating something else. “My God, this salmon over a bed of spinach and rice is perfect,” I proclaim to “I”, who is equally expressive about her delicious tuna salad with its delicate, thin slices of fresh caught tuna.

The reality is no different than that of the Serengeti, 14,763 sq km of endless rolling plains that begin on the Indian Ocean, just north and west of the island of Madagascar and extends North to the Kenyan border and almost to Lake Victoria. In May or early June millions of zebra and wildebeest migrate through the region in search of water and forage as the seasons change. The place becomes a feeding frenzy with predator and prey coming together in large numbers.

I think of myself living in a modern day Serengeti of concrete and steel, where the competition is no less intense. Each day sees numbers of births and deaths—some by accident, some by design, some by old age and natural causes. It just that the humans so far haven’t had to resort to eating one another, though the science fiction thriller Soylent Green predicts that as we overpopulate the planet, we may have to resort to eating one another to survive after we’ve eaten every other life form to extinction.

We finish the main course, and “I” and I decide on a Latte for me and a cup of Earl Gold Tea for her. I shift the conversation from describing the duality of how we view sustaining ourselves, to how we view ourselves. The average human is not the most attractive thing to contemplate. If you look at any evening news broadcast that shows a busy street in any city in this country, you will see the real us. People walking the street come in an endless variety of shapes and sizes.

Most are dressed in clothes that for the most part provide the utility of hiding human nakedness. And yet the sitcom, crime drama, variety show, or rerun movie that play on those same television stations after the news broadcast portray a world where people are largely attractive and pleasant to look at. The commercials aimed at the 18 to 25 year old set portray a world of pristine beauty. The models we see in these 30 to 60 second clips are perfect by comparison to us viewing those images. Our natural instinct is to believe that such a world is somehow achievable—if you spend enough money and buy the right products.

The ability to hold contradictory views of just about anything is what makes us human. Or more likely, the ability to hold contradictory views is what enables us to make life not only bearable but for the most part enjoyable.