HOW AM I TO LIVE?

Here’s Josh’s Explanation of the Book Title

“How to Live. What to Do” is the title of a poem by Wallace Stevens.

Last evening the moon rose above this rock

Impure upon a world unpaged.

The man and his companion stopped

To rest before the heroic height.

Coldly the wind fell upon them

In many majesties of sound:

They that had left the flame-freaked sun

To seek a sun of fuller fire.

Instead there was this tufted rock

Massively rising high and bare

Beyond all trees, the ridges thrown 

Like giant arms among the clouds.

There was neither voice nor crested image,

No chorister, nor. priest. There was

Only the great height of the rock

And the two of them standing still to rest.

There was the cold winds and the sound

It made, away from the muck of the land

That they had left, heroic sounds

Joyous and jubilant and sure.

It tells a bare-bones story of a wandering man and his companion seeking the extravagant spectacle of the fullest, most fiery imaginable sun, and stumbling instead across a massive, tufted rock.  Resting before it, something unexpected is revealed to them—the high, bare mountain, its ridges “thrown like giant arms around the clouds.”  Notice the Hemingwayan austerity of that image, a concentrated expression of the poem’s stripped-back sensibility. But more than the sight of this plain, unadorned mass of rock, there is the sound of the wind blowing through it, “heroic sound/ Joyous and jubilant and sure.” It is with this sound that the poem ends.

What does the poem teach us about how to live and what to do? Clearly there are not simple rules or programs to be extracted. But it offers a life wisdom nonetheless. It presents us with a search for a “sun of fuller fire”—some ultimate object of worship. What if, instead of searching vainly for an elusive entity ahead of us, we stopped at something in front of us, and rested, and listened?

What would it mean to live this way?

In this book author and psychologist Josh Cohen invites us to look at novels as mirrors that reflect for us our inner experience as we navigate stages of life. What can Alice in Wonderland tell us about our childhood? What can Virginia Woolf show us about middle age? He helps us hold up the life of a character against our own experience to offer reflection, guidance and, really, just a sneak peek into how someone else navigated it.

If we allow the characters to work as archetypes for our psychological experience, Cohen posits, we can get some help with the questions we ponder at each stage. He gives us 8 different life stages with associated novels. About the role of literature in self-awareness, Cohen says:

Part of the problem is that we’re trapped inside our own heads, unable to see ourselves from the outside. This accounts for why we’re so much more adept at pointing out the habitual mistakes of others than our own. Here, fiction can help in ways real-life experience usually can’t. What the best fiction does—which is also, hopefully, what the psychoanalyst would do—is help us to experience the same errors and illusions from the inside rather than to view them from on high, to enter the world of the person who made them for long enough to understand why.

Here’s a sampling of the many books Cohen references in his eight categorical stages of life, with each stage indicated.