Reflections on the Art of Living: Our Society’S Predicament

By Henry J. Zeiter MD

In all my years of travel I have seldom met anyone as sagacious as Henry Zeiter, and even more seldom have I met anyone more widely read. He knows a great deal about a great many things and something about almost everything else! This new volume of his musings will enrich anyone blessed enough to read it.
Joseph Pearce, Author, Biographer of C.S. Lewis, J.R. Tolkien,
Oscar Wilde, Solzhenitsyn, Chesterton, others
Writer in Residence, Ave Maria University



Many thanks to Dr. Henry Zeiter for collecting and sharing insights gathered over many years. I am amazed at the variety ranging from intensely personal reflections on to struggles of daily life to impressive literary, philosophical, and medical analyses. I especially recommend his essay on James Joyce; it is written with real feeling for a tortured soul
Brian T. Kelly, Ph.D., Professor of Philosophy, Mathematics and
Science, Dean of Thomas Aquinas College, Santa, Paula, California


Dr. Zeiter has lived intensely, and experienced the whole ride on the emotional rollercoaster. He has observed much, learned some, and reflected a lot on life. We can learn from him.and there is a great connection between learning and fully living.
There is a memorable line in the movie The Shawshank Redemption: Get busy livingor get busy dying Henry Zeiter will certainly help you get busy living. Read his material slowly. Taste it, digest it in small bites, and reflect on it. That way you can enjoy the meal and absorb it in your own way.
Dr. J. Mitchell Perry, JM Perry Learning Center, Ventura, California

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Mar 6, 2015
• ISBN: 9781503546868

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Copyright © 2015 by Henry J. Zeiter, M.D.

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Rev. date: 04/20/2015

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CONTENTS

Preface

Introduction

Memoirs And Reflections

Times Of Sorrow

A Medley Of Poems

Literary Essays

Alienation In Modern Society And Literature

James Joyce, Artist And Writer

A Study Of The Tragic Hero In Literature

Historical Inquiries

The Golden Age Of Spanish Literature

Historical Interpretation Of Current Events,

Hegel And Marx

Philosophy And Mysticism

An Introduction To The Origins Of Philosophy

Philosophical Comments

Carmelite Mysticism And The Search For The Ultimate

On The State Of Politics, The Art Of Governing And Economics

Political And Social Satire In Swift And Orwell

The Prince Of Machiavelli

Religion And The Rise Of Capitalism

The Medical Arts

The Mysterious Origins Of Modern Medico-Pharmaceutical Chemistry,

A Study Of Psychotic Art

The Use Of Vision As An Aid In Better Driving

A Farewell To Arms

PREFACE

T HE FEELING AND energy generated when writing and putting together a new book is exhilarating, to say the least. Now that it is ready for publication, the author can rest and wish that his friends and readers will enjoy reading it as much as he has enjoyed writing it. It is a collection of old and new writings that span a life. I originally intended to call it Memoirs of a Lifetime, because much that is in it is nostalgic to me. The simple fact is that it reminds me of times gone by when writing either prose or poetry increased my knowledge and taught me that creative writing gave me satisfaction. Yet memoirs are a small part of this book and the greater portion consists of several essays with subjects just as pertinent today as they were when first written; when I was reviewing some of these essays I was surprised how prophetic they turned out to be about social conditions sixty years later. I found it a real joy to update and publish them. So I cannot call the book simply Memoirs; delving into the book the reader will see for himself the variety of the topics I have chosen from my writings; he will find I am offering him a meal with many ent rées.

In my lifetime I have written on many different topics, in college and out of college, even in medical school when I was supposed to be studying twenty four hours a day. In those days I was unable to nourish myself on the dryness of science alone, but needed the fresh air of writing on topics and controversies within the liberal arts which I have loved all my life. I also became a specialist and enjoyed the practice of medicine for forty years. When I say all this I am reminded of Raphael’s masterpiece in the Vatican chambers, The School of Athens. In the center of the fresco is Plato, the philosopher artist, standing tall pointing to the Ideas in the heavens, while next to him is Aristotle, the philosopher scientist, looking down, his eyes searching for the laws that make our world the way it is. That just about divides the human race between the poetic idealist and the hard-working realist, and the two together comprise total reality. It is that complimentary total life that I have tried to emulate since my first year in college.

So the topics I chose reflect that variety in life that makes living it interesting. I hope that I was successful in this enterprise. The book provides subjects for a variety of tastes and it was divided into eight contrasting topics where I thought the various selections I have chosen belong. So the reader can pick and choose and go to whatever section appeals to him. As to the production of this work I confess that I selected, revised, typed and edited what’s in it. I am solely responsible for both the agreeable and the controversial ideas expressed in it. I must also thank Dr. Mitch Perry for his thoughtful introduction and Dr. Brian Kelly for combing through the text for typographic corrections. I also want to thank my long-time friend, the biographer Joseph Pearce for his kind words on the back cover. The person I must thank the most is my dear spouse Carol who with her kindness and her smile was patient enough to wait out the few months it took me to finish this enterprise, and on February 14, Valentine’s Day was happy to see me come back to her as a free man. As for me, I thoroughly enjoyed the challenge of writing this book and can’t wait to do it again.

Henry J. Zeiter, M.D., February 14, 2015

INTRODUCTION

I T OCCURS TO me that throughout his writings Doctor Henry Zeiter is consistently trying to make sense out of the senseless and to bring sanity out of the paradox of li ving.

He is passionate, intense, fascinated, voracious, and highly interested in the business of living.

He possesses an ongoing mission to contribute to society in a way that adds value to it, and meaning to him and others.

Dr. Zeiter has spent an enormous amount of time asking questions regarding philosophy, metaphysics, epistemology, family, friends, society and life in general.

I admire his ongoing quest to reconcile the gap between how life should be in contrast to how it is.

Somebody once said: Nothing works, but the enterprise is noble…. though this sounds a little negative and full of resignation…there is something to it.

We are a curious species in the respect that on the one hand, we can do and create spectacular works of art, music, architecture, medicine, literature, technology, etc.

On the other hand, we can be incomprehensively destructive, violent, greedy, narcissistic, stupid, and lazy.

One minute, we can touch the lives of millions to give them meaning, inspiration, motivation, and hope.

The next minute, we can waste such time and energy simply consuming, whining, criticizing, destroying, and feeling entitled.

Sometimes we operate from common sense, and in a heartbeat we abandon common sense and replace it with insanity.

As humans, we are a bewildering combination of wonder and disappointment, love and hate, maturity and childishness, selflessness and selfishness, grace and sloth.

We are blessed with the gift of reason which results in allowing us to create magnificence in education, science, society, technology, and the arts.

And yet, we too often fail to learn life’s lessons, and seem doomed to repeat the same mistakes while ignoring the reasoning we already have.

It is a very curious mix between the following three options of dominance (all of which are within our choice of actions):

1. The Spectacular

2. The Horrible

3. The Underwhelming

For those of us who really care, and want to give life meaning and value…. the above is very hard to reconcile.

It is clear that Dr. Zeiter has been struggling with this dilemma for a long time, perhaps his whole life. (I really understand…. as I have as well).

I have long concluded that at the end of the day, life is about two things and two things only:

1. Touching people’s lives

2. Getting your life touched

All the rest is noise.

The most beloved memories that you keep in your mind are when you have clearly touched the lives of others, family, friends, and strangers. And it is more than coincidental that your own life gets touched when you realize this. From this knowledge, life begins to develop meaning…after which you develop grace and gradual comfort inside your own skin.

Most people say that life is short, and it goes by too fast. How true; therefore it is insane to waste time failing to make opportunities to touch the lives of others. What makes most people depressed is dreading that their lives are meaningless without a legacy of value.

Dr. Zeiter’s writings center round all the above paradoxes. His great attempt to get his arms around the dilemma of life is commendable.

The author is a man of intensity, discipline, passion, ongoing learning, and strong character. He has lived a long life filled with achievements, ups, downs, and always with a need to understand the human condition. Over many years, he has found value in often writing and journaling thoughts, reflections, and questions about life. Trying to make sense of it all, he sometimes finds answers, and other times finds more questions.

Dr. Zeiter has lived intensely, and experienced the whole ride on the emotional rollercoaster. He has observed much, learned some, and reflected a lot on life. We can learn from him…. and there is a great connection between learning and fully living.

There is a memorable line in the movie The Shawshank Redemption: Get busy living…or get busy dying Henry Zeiter will certainly help you get busy living. Read his material slowly. Taste it, digest it in small bites, and reflect on it. That way you can enjoy the meal and absorb it in your own way.

Dr. J. Mitchell Perry

JM Perry Learning

4203 Foothill Road, Ventura, CA

MEMOIRS AND REFLECTIONS

LIVING ONE DAY AT A TIME

T ODAY THE SUN is shining following several weeks of fog. It really matters little anymore whether the sun is shining or not. The hundreds of small chores that one has to do every day get done whether the sun is shining or not. A good meal, a drink or two, and the chores are forgotten after the sun sets. Someone once said that Brahms’ long second piano concerto was a great collection of short pieces and melodies. And so is life: A collection of chores, short periods of repose, fleeting periods of happiness and much, much that is banal in between. How does one separate the grains of wheat from the chaff? Compared to the grain there is a lot of chaff. That is a logical interpretation of the chronology of a lifetime. A spiritual interpretation will include St. Therese’s view of the merit attached to the little things that we do patiently and quietly every day; and I suppose under the watchful eye of God’s redeeming grace. (February 5, 1992)

How can one explain this conglomeration of phenomena and fleeting experiences? Pain and sorrow, wasted days and lost or forgotten dreams in succession one after the other; dreams of childhood, dreams of future grandeur and accomplishments rarely realized; and once accomplished the taste and the hope is gone. Once done, the desire is lost and the ambition melts away. The anticipation is often more joyful than one’s satisfaction with the accomplishment. Once the target and the aim are gone one loses heart. O God, my heart was made for Thee and it will not rest until it rests in Thee, so said St. Augustine centuries ago.

Today, the many problems I’ve been struggling with—our lot in this life—are showing signs of dissipating. I am beginning to believe that no cloud remains in the sky forever. Clouds and gloom are contingent, as Aristotle would say. Their existence is simply not necessary in the sense that they are not absolutes; they depend for their being on something else whose being is absolute. That was also the metaphysical logic of St. Thomas Aquinas in one of his proofs for God’s existence (that of Contingency and Necessity). Maybe these problems will solve themselves by providential order since we do everything possible to solve most of them by ourselves to little or no avail.

So I picked up a book of philosophy and started to read whatever fragments have come down to us from the Pre-Socratic Greek philosophers. I was amazed at their sagacity. To wit: The passion for wealth, unless limited by satisfaction, is far more painful than extreme poverty, for greater passions create greater needs. Or again, The excessive accumulation of wealth for one’s children is an excuse for covetousness, which in such action displays its peculiar nature. And again, The things needed by the body are available to all without toil and trouble. But the things which require toil and trouble and which make life disagreeable are not desired by the body but by the ill-constitution of the mind. The right minded man is he who is not grieved by what he has not, but enjoys what he has. All this wisdom is from Democritus, the first philosopher to postulate the atomic theory. Then there is Empedocles, It is the earth itself that makes night by coming in the way of the sun’s rays. It is we who create our own gloom and get in the way of our deserved joy.

I turned on the radio and I heard something I never heard before. It sounded like a mixture of Schumann and Wagner, if such a combination is even imaginable. It was very good. It turned out to be Macbeth opus 23 by Richard Strauss. No wonder I’ve always loved his music, complicated music, yet wonderful and melodious. And now it is followed by Tchaikovsky’s Third Symphony, nicknamed The Polish. (February 12, 1992)

For the past few days we’ve had a lot of rain in the San Joaquin Valley, a welcome happening for our dry area of the world. We’ve seen a few minor floods over the years but today everyone in this dry valley is happy that it rained. Carol is seeing clients in her counseling office and the sunshine just came down on the backyard; so all is well with the world. The fishies, (John Henry’s fishies, when he was a toddler) that is the goldfish, are happily swimming in the backyard’s little pond at 943 El Camino Road. Very soon spring will arrive and I will be very happy to sit in the yard and soak up the sunrays for an hour or two in the afternoon. Hopefully by then most of the present problems will have slowly dissipated one by one. I rather suspect that God will then send other problems my way, but I’ll worry about those when they come. For now, I’ll work on one problem at a time! I really don’t need these hassles any longer at my age. How can one stay out of trouble? Well, I’ll give it a good try!

Carol, my dear wife, just came home from the office for one hour between patients because one of them cancelled; she wants to lie down and rest. Turn down the music darling, just for me! Of course I would, and did. I don’t know what I would have done had Carol not married me. Well, I may have done better or worse or the same, who knows? I might have become a monk and turned out to be the third greatest mystic in the history of the Church, after Saint Teresa of Avila and Saint John of the Cross. But I would have missed Carol greatly, I am sure. You see, I was always in love with her and never doubted that love for a moment ever since I first met her. After so many years of marriage, independent though we both are, we are glued to each other for happiness or sadness. Whatever may come, we share it together.

I told Carol that I am going to marry her on our first date, then waited about two months for her to finally tell me that she loved me too. It was the night of her sister Judy’s wedding when Carol realized she also loved me. She loved my mind and unrelenting spirit, she said, and my zest for life and good looks! (God help me!) She had always prized intelligence and reason, and so had I; and we have both avoided irrationality whenever we could.

How life changes! Now Carol and I are used to being together alone; but years ago when all the children were home we never thought we would enjoy our togetherness when they were gone. And soon after all the children had left home we would welcome the time when relatives came for vacation from far away to stay with us and break up the monotony. Not necessarily anymore! We love being with each other with no company, and yet…. Here’s something I wrote on February seventeen, 1992: Yesterday Jeff and Julie came up from Los Angeles to visit us. What a pleasure it was to see family members since our children are at college self-actualizing and seeking their independence. Good luck to them! Soon enough they will reach our age and be alone with their spouses and find their own children gone. Life is mostly a repetition, with very little new under the sun. Though, with Jeff and Julie here, we realized that deep down we also miss our children at times, not being with us.

We drove Jeff and Julie to Jackson and the Mother Lode country near us, here in California; that was something we had not done since the children left several years ago. It was a glorious day, since after two weeks of rain—it has just stopped falling—the countryside was freshly green and aromatic. The hills were singing. With Jeff and Julie with us it was as if a void in our life had been filled. We were only sorry to see them leave the next day and go back to Los Angeles, that city of smog and traffic and noise.

I was just praising our togetherness and being alone in the house, Carol and I, and yet there is another part of life with children, family relations, and other friends. Aristotle spent two chapters in his great Nicomachean Ethics on the topic of friendship. Family whether extended or not is wonderful. And so are true friends. They provide a feeling of warmth and closeness that no desire for independence can replace. It is a consoling companionship in one’s older years; not smothering closeness, but a simple friendship allowing a sharing of love and caring. And yes, when Julie and Jeff left we settled back to our usual togetherness and welcomed the moments of tranquility and intimacy.

The Bach Goldberg Variations are playing now and my thinking, meditating and contemplating cap is on. Yes, we miss the children now that they are gone, but Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Brahms are a worthwhile replacement in times of aloneness. I said aloneness, not loneliness. They are a source of tranquility leading to illuminative spiritual transformation. After all, we were born into this world naked and naked we shall leave it. The spirit, yes the spirit, will go on! It is our Hope that the mind full of ideas and abstract concepts will rise above matter to its ultimate End, the purpose for which it came into being.

We must be able to live by ourselves surrounded both by memories and hope for what the future brings. Ultimately the content is not as important as the medium, the form or the style. A life that is essentially patrician, refined and cultured is worth living. One hour of refinement and nobility is worth more than a hundred years of a vulgar, mediocre or plebeian existence. It is a decision, a choice, better to make it early, of how one wants to live: In the sewer or in the purified air of the spiritual and cultural heights. A taste for culture is getting rarer and rarer in people. The majority are mired in mud and don’t know any better. Alexis de Tocqueville writing on the new American democracy in the early nineteenth century predicted the end result: a hyper-democracy, the dumbing down of taste and values to the lowest common denominator. How plebeian! Nobility of soul is the condition of state found in few people; it is the result of long education, cultured living and good will towards oneself and others. It comes about through a lifelong dedication of learning the value of knowledge and the pursuit of excellence.

I will never forget an outing to the San Francisco Giants ballgame in 2012 with Dr. Hand, my friend of many years. As we entered the stadium we were handed a large print of a Giants ballgame taken in 1912, when they were still in New York, at the Polo Grounds; that was a hundred years before. It was a commemorative gift. In the large photo we were given, all the men at the ballgame wore a tie and a hat, not a cap, and were dressed in a suit; some had a folded umbrella or cane in hand. I pointed it out to Dr. Hand. I remarked, How proper and elegant were those who could afford to go to a ballgame, in the old days He turned around and said to me, Henry! Look around you. O my God! I said. Look at that mess! People at the ball game now in 2,012 had torn jeans and shorts below their knees, ugly caps of all kinds, dirty tennis shoes or thongs, long hair and unshaven beards. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.

That day, I was surprised that I really never paid much attention to such messy and un-groomed humanity at the ball games I’ve gone to watch before. O my God! I repeated. To my surprise Dr. Hand said to me, I have a name for that. What name? I said. He replied, I call it, "Low Class Envy. What is that I asked? Look at the photo of baseball fans in 1912, and compare it with the plebian mess you see all around you now. A hundred years ago people wanted to emulate the nobility, the well to do, the genteel breed, so they dressed accordingly. Now, with our interpretation of democracy, diversity, multiculturalism and total emancipation of self and all the other isms, people want to imitate the dress code of the peasants, the youth in the inner city, the rappers and gang members, rather than the high classes; so I call the trend, Low Class Envy. Henry! It is an example of the dumbing down of everything! That’s what’s been happening slowly for a hundred years now, from 1912 to 2012." (May 29, 2012)

Let’s move on to a loftier subject. Maturity, Age, Knowledge, Experience and all the powers of this world do not spare a person from the fear of the unknown or the fear of God, or the fear of extinction. Having reached old age and having conquered the world, achieved success, worldly possessions, education, social position, learned languages and reached the zenith of worldly accomplishments, does not spare one from feeling alone, afraid and melancholy, foreseeing the evanescence of it all. I feel sorry for the man who has never experienced this deep sadness of naked being, of pure existence; that man has not lived at all, writes the unknown author of The Cloud of Unknowing, a fourteenth century mystic. Yet, not being happy amounts to ingratitude to God who has given one all these wonderful things. And yet sadness grips one, the sadness of realizing that life will soon end even though it has been beautiful. One feels bereft. Vanity of vanities, so said Quoheleth (Solomon?) in Ecclesiastes. Yet one has to be thankful that in spite of these feelings, a deep faith in the All in all, in God, will sustain us through the ups and downs of the little time we have left on this earth.

        — Henry Zeiter, written in 1992, edited in 2014.

A natural setting for reflection and meditation –Living as planned in 1962, on Mallard Lake in Lodi, California’s new wine country; enjoying four mild seasons; equidistant between San Francisco Bay and Lake Tahoe, Yosemite Park and Carmel-by-the-Sea.

C:\Users\Henry\Pictures\Flowers Zeiter Garden\Zeiter Home View.jpg

A Reflection, March 25, 1992

I have less taste for violence and sordid episodes in movies and on television than in the real world. After supper my dear wife Carol says to me: The Silence of the Lambs is on TV tonight. Wow! I watched fifteen minutes of the movie and became disgusted. Murder, insanity, violence was all over the place. So I went online You Tube and watched Glenn Gould play Beethoven’s thirty second piano sonata, one of his last mystical works. It was divine, spiritual, a feast for the ears. What a difference from the violence I had just seen on television. Great music makes me feel like a god, close to God. What chasm there was between the sordid late twentieth century movie and Beethoven’s nineteenth century description in music of beauty at its highest form! Beethoven composed all of this even during a time when the Napoleonic wars were devastating Europe. Even then the world was full of violence and blood; and yet there were artists who expressed a beauty that was hidden from the political mess around them. It was God-given inspiration while the vast majority of people were wallowing in mire and dung, killing each other. (Read about Jonathan Swift’s (Gulliver’s Travels) opinion of crass humanity later in this book).

Then I reflected on why Homo sapiens is a disappointment at times, behaving as if he was still living in a jungle, a jungle that we call civilization now. Most people seek entertainment of the most vulgar kind, when beauty, essentially the face of God, is all around them in nature, in the harmony of the skies, in the trees, in the grass and the flowers, the mountains and lakes, the sunrise and sunsets. How beautiful and inspiring it all is. I thought to myself, Music and nature have been a lifelong enjoyable pastime for me, pleasant and beautiful, that is my peace-giving natural world! All of this beauty is the reflection of the face of a happy angel on the face of a serene lake. And what is God’s essence I asked myself, and recalled that in my first-year philosophy class we read that God’s essence is his Existence, also reflected in his creation. And his spirit is seen most of all in the angels, and in the souls of the mystics and the saints who have lived a virtuous life in his service, and who have sprinkled goodness and grace on others all their life no matter where they went. Arnold Toynbee once said that the greatest heroes of mankind were the saints because they lived least for themselves and mostly for others. That to him was true heroism.

The cellos are playing in the background a part of Bach’s Art of the Fugue the all-filling diffuse sound of the universe. I once asked one of our symphony conductors to explain to me what is there in the sound of the cello which makes it seem like God the Father is speaking, and he replied, it is because the sound of the cello is quite low, a bass sound like a father’s bass voice. I was satisfied with that simple answer. The music director had zeroed in on a brilliant simple explanation, Ockham’s razor, I thought.

A Reflection on April 21, 1992

This is the first day of spring. The flowers are blooming and the birds are singing again. Yet the human predicament is still the same, winter or spring. Only the mediocre can believe that he will always remain at his very best. The rest of us alive will have our ups and downs. There will be days when we must struggle to keep a smile and chase away forces that want to keep us down. Despair and sadness are simple to recognize; but there are other miseries which approach us with a smile; they are difficult to recognize and conquer: feelings of pride, anger and greed. Each day we wake up, we have to reinvent the wheel. Life, like nature, has its own system of compensation. To breathe and be alive is a victory; so we are winners all the time when our heart is still beating. So let’s keep smiling. Og Mandino once wrote,

If I feel depressed I will sing.

If I feel sad I will