Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters

"Seymour once said that all we do our whole lives is go from one little piece of Holy Ground to the next. Is he ever wrong?"
--J.D. Salinger, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters.

The Klezmatics and a Yiddish chorus sing Woody Guthrie's Holy Ground.

"We never look enough, never exactly enough, never passionately enough."
--Colette, quoted in

a wonderfully ascerbic look at the usefulness of negative (or at least balanced) thinking as we age, written by Susan Jacoby: Never Say Die: The Myth and Marketing of the New Old Age, 2011. Jacoby praises those "whose dark view of life prevents them from thinking about an Alzheimer's diagnosis as an opportunity for personal growth" (293). Jacoby exposes the tyranny of positive thinking and denial, especially about aging, especially when the result is a kind of blame-the-victim attitude that if anything is wrong in your life, you're not thinking positively enough. She encourages us as we age to stay angry. She finds no inconsistency between gratitude for all we have and fury at all the cruelties and idiocies that surround us. Because, she suggests, if this is holy ground (and it is, of course it is), we have reason to be absolutely furious at the greed and injustice that fouls it and weakens our genuine bonds with each other by flabby sentimental fantasies like "you're only as old as you feel." Jacoby concludes, "It is impossible to look enough, to look exactly enough, to look passionately enough while rejecting reality in favor of fantasy" (295). Amen to that.