Thoughts

The heart is like a turnstile, At times turning to the beat of men; At others returning to itself again. And when it ceases to let them in, It knows its time is through; For the heart is not alone meant for me, But is always meant to be turned by you.

Sigmund Freud believed dreams are the mind's way of fulfilling wishes. In an excerpt from his Interpretation of Dreams , he offers several examples of dreams with obvious ties to wish fulfillment. One of these is from a young medical student who had difficulty waking up in the morning. To help, he asked his landlady to wake him each morning. On one of these mornings, she yelled through his door, "Wake up, Herr Pepi! It's time to go to the hospital!" He dreamed in response that he lay in a sick bed in the same hospital as a patient. In his dream, he said, "As I'm already in the hospital, there's no need for me to go there," and continued sleeping. This dream was a way to reconcile his need to get to the hospital and his desire to continue sleeping. The examples Freud uses in this excerpt are exclusively positive. They are all dreams that represent some desire being fulfilled, whether it is a dream of Freud himself drinking water to quench his real ...

The path through which I have walked with music has at times been broad and spacious, giving ample room along the way to meander here and there through the variegated patches of green and gold; at times cramped and directed by clear markers, posted as reminders of where I was and where I'm going; and at other times blocked completely, stopping me cold on a path mute of all manner of bird and beast. Shifting in sight and sound along its route, this path has always reflected a larger world to me, where the landscape is either fogged by trial or illuminated by joy. I had the chance along this path to look backward with my father, whose oldies revealed to me a vista of beaches with surfboards and classic cars. The Beach Boys and Chuck Berry shared this space, alongside artists like the Monkees and the Beatles. We peered long at this landscape, for this was where my father had grown up. Along with the old shows found on "Nick at Night," this anachronistic thrust into the pas...

One of the most esteemed virtues in the United States is independence. Independence is a sign of success. It isn't surprising, then, that we would find it hard to ask for help. By doing so, we lose something of our stature, at least in our own eyes. There is something about asking for help, though-- when the need is truly there-- that is endearing to the one being asked. It represents a bowing of the soul, an admission of vulnerability that leaves one in the hands of another. More often than not, that admission leads to mercy, compounding virtue upon virtue. Manhattan resident Jeff Ragsdale is an example of this. His story is old now by contemporary standards, but it is inspiring nonetheless. Lonely after breaking up with his girlfriend, Jeff created a flier with his phone number, duplicated it, and posted it all around Manhattan to see what would come of it. The person, who signed the flier "One Lonely Guy," eventually received nearly 70,000 calls, first from people in...

Through all the erudite and eloquent prose, the visually powerful figurative language, and even  through his formula for change, W.E.B. Dubois sought to bridge an understanding for his reader of the African American condition. His larger purpose in a chapter titled "Of Our Spiritual Striving" within his most famous work, The Souls of Black Folk , was to allow the reader to fathom the efforts levied by African Americans to realize their freedom. Within this chapter, something else surfaced that is important for all of us to understand. I mentioned yesterday that slavery remains today, albeit of a subtler kind. Within his chapter, Dubois mentions the consequences of prejudice, which itself can be a result of slavery. He says, in the context of explaining what he called a "shadow prejudice," that  "...the facing of so vast a prejudice could not but bring the inevitable self-questioning, self-disparagement, and lowering of ideals which ever accompany repression...

In a section of his autobiography, called "Learning to Read and Write," the nineteenth-century former slave Frederick Douglas examines the changes he experienced because of his new-found literacy, explaining that it was through these changes that he eventually fled to his freedom in the North. The freedom-- and, he would argue, bondage-- he experienced as he learned to read foreshadowed the official freedom he found after his escape. His was a freedom first of the mind. Such freedom, however, was to him both a blessing and a curse. While his ability to read for the first time gave him the ability to express his feelings in words, it also led him to hate his masters and to cause him discontent with his slavery. The frustration he felt at being a slave became all-consuming, so that every object, "animate or inanimate," reminded him of freedom. His thoughts became so overwhelming that he envied his fellow slaves for their ignorance and wished he were dead. They als...