Succotash,...Venison, Roast Duck, Roast Goose

The USA gets a bad rap in the rest of the world. Despite Australia's Prime Minister sucking up to the US Congress recently, most Aussies have a well-honed BS meter, and know it was just politics. But I unashamedly love America cause I lived there for two years with my wife and three young children. Although their politics and health care might be problematic, and their ultimate freedom can be described in a Clint Eastwood way as 'The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly', there is much to love about Americans. They are friendly, funny and tough. That's how I would summarize them. There is a lot to like. And then there's the food.
Now, those who just don't get it tend to knock American food. Outsiders criticize the fast-foods joints and the soda (which pretty-well everyone else in the English-speaking world calls soft drink),  but you gotta live there to understand. Let's take the crab sandwich.
It was 1980, just two months into my life in DC, and the staff said we were going to the best place in DC to get a crab sandwich. A crab what? I couldn't believe it. It was about 5 minutes drive from the Walter Reed, a smoky, dare I say grubby place, full of very loud people sitting on bar stools, and I had the most mouthwatering sandwich, crab, with some sort of sauce, it was superb.
After that we had lots of real American food. Corn, beans, pork, seafood, pies, other foods all cooked in various styles, French, German, Spanish, Native American, Italian. We bought lots of cookbooks, the best we found was 'American Food: The Gastronomic Story' by Evan Jones. The first part tries to answer the question 'What is American Food?' and the author starts at Plymouth 'when Myles Standish and friends shot and roasted over coals an eagle "which was excellent meat hardly to be discerned from mutton'''. He continues through dried sturgeon,, beach plums, eels, stifle, hominy, clambakes, julep (in 1774 it was noted that 'a julep before breakfast was believed to give protection against malaria'), crab loafs, slapjacks, the list goes on. And then the influence of the later great migrations.
He reminds us of the first Thanksgiving dinner in 1621: dried beans and whole corn called 'succotash,...venison, roast duck, roast goose (no turkey), clams, eels, wheat and corn bread, leeks, watercress, wild plums, homemade wine'. Yum. I encourage you to experiment next time you visit the USA. Don't be seduced by by volume and efficiency. Go for the real stuff.

The Manipulation Of Significant Symbols

It seemed at best an innocuous Tweet, at worst boring, directing the reader to an link called 'Who Says What to Whom on Twitter'. The only reason I opened it was the sender, Dr Ves Dimov. Now Dr Dimov, who tweets as @Allergy and @DrVes, is an allergist, immunologist, internist and Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago. He produces by far the best allergy educational Twitter site in the world, with over 5000 followers. His Blog, 'Clinical Cases and Images: Casesblog', is very good, indeed superb, but I feel the best description would be that it is generous. Generous of his time, and of his knowledge. So when I receive his Tweets, I always open his links. 'Who Says What to Whom on Twitter' was, I knew, going to be disappointing. Dry, statistical stuff that would do nothing for me. Boy, was I wrong.
They say that a book editor can read one page of a submitted novel and make a decision - reject or read on. The introduction did it for me; '...media communications research is encapsulated by what is known as Lasswell's maxim: "Who says What to Whom in What Channel with What Effect"'. Who was Lasswell? Why hadn't I heard of this before? It was so relevant to medical education, indeed any education. I printed the paper and got to work with the pink highlighter. Wu from Cornell and three other authors from Yahoo! Research introduce us to 'mass' communication and 'interpersonal' communication, and then morph us into the microblogging platform of Twitter. They then attempt to answer the question posed in the title of the paper, and their calculations are fascinating. There is a lot to absorb, but in brief they studied five categories: media, celebrities, organizations, bloggers and ordinary. They found that half of the media information passes to the masses via a layer of 'opinion leaders'. They found that 50% of consumed tweets are generated by 20,000 elite users or 0.05% of Tweeters. They found that the longest-lived URLs that are Tweeted are generated by bloggers, and the longest-lived content are music and video. What they didn't, actually couldn't, study, was the Effect of Twitter as a form of communication.
Inherent in their study question was this quote from Lasswell, again, in full, "Who says What to Whom in What Channel with What Effect'. Harold Lasswell, who died in 1978, was a political scientist who studied in the 1920s at the same institution as Dr Dimov, the University of Chicago. He was part of the so-called Chicago School of Sociology. Some of his writings are readily accessible, and I found a stunning treatise he published in the August 1927 edition of The American Political Science review. It's called 'The Theory of Political Propaganda". His final statements are strangely pertinent to our day: "The ever-present function of propaganda in modern life is in large measure attributable to the social disoganization which has been precipitated by the rapid advent of technological changes' (my italics). He goes on: 'Literacy and the physical channels of communication have quickened the connection between those who rule and the ruled'. Dare I breathe the word Libya at this point. But I have left the best to last, Lasswell's definition of propaganda as 'the management of collective attitudes by the manipulation of significant symbols'. Symbols drawn by the pen, by gestures, by the voice. Can we add 'and by Twitter'? Should we extend the analysis of Twitter to determine whether it can ever fit his definition of propaganda? I think so.

Mental Illness Is A Metaphor

When I was a young man, working through a medical course in the 1960s, there were 10,000 psychiatric beds in the State of Victoria. That is, in a population of about 3 million. Now our population has doubled and the number of psychiatric beds has fallen by about 80%. We spent weeks and weeks in the confines of psychiatric hospitals talking to the 'disturbed' and 'mentally ill'. Merely a generation earlier these institutions were called lunatic asylums. The deinstitutionalization of psychiatric care was one of the greatest advances in medical care of the modern era, and it was no accident.
There were many triggers for this movement. David Rosenhan published a landmark study in Science in 1973. He broke every rule in the clinical trial handbook of today, but it worked in 1973. The study was called "On being sane in insane places". Eight volunteers pretended to hear voices, and were soon admitted to psychiatric hospitals, whereupon they immediately behaved in a completely sane manner. This is not the forum to describe their inpatient experiences, the report is easily available, but seven were finally discharged with a diagnosis of 'schizophrenia in remission'.
And the previous year, in 1972, Thomas Szasz published one of the great iconoclastic medical books of last century, The Myth of Mental Illness. To give you an idea of his approach, right at the beginning, on page 11, he writes: 'bodily illness stands in the same relation to mental illness as a defective television receiver stands to an objectionable television programme'. Szasz then applied a scalpel to entrenched psychiatry, working his way from Hysteria of the 19th Century through rules and societal acceptance and odd behaviour and game-playing and everything that the psychoanalysts made up. I once attended a meeting in the nineties on somatoform disorders mimicking allergy. I asked the guest psychiatrist about his views on Szasz. He replied: 'Well, Szasz was an essayist'. I think he meant that Szasz was to psychiatry as Nietzsche was to philosophy, both had the ability and desire to write about complex matters in a populist manner. I also thought that it was a backhanded compliment. But I had, and continue to have, a lot of time for Thomas Szasz. He wrote that the incarceration of the mentally ill was a crime against humanity. He felt that most people labelled as mentally ill were dealing with the personal, social and ethical problems of life in a manner that was different to the majority. He reserved restraint only for those who would harm themselves or others.
I remember being especially shaken by his statement that 'mental illness is a metaphor'. He believed that minds can be 'sick' only in the sense that jokes can be 'sick'. His assertion that true mental symptoms arise from physical abnormalities in the brain has, of course, proved correct. And, what's more, neuroscience will sort out those physical abnormalities for us. At the moment, however, we still use the term mental illness, albeit in a non-pejorative way. That's progress, but until we do away with the term completely, and assert, like Szasz, that it is indeed a metaphor, we will still be hamstrung by history.

There Is No Limit To This Moment

I would like to thank Fritjof Capra. Like millions of others since 1975, I own a copy of The Tao Of Physics. I have the 1982 Flamingo paperback edition, pages dog-eared and yellowed, cluttered with scribbles and highlights, re-read often. The subtitle of this book summarizes its attractiveness: 'An exploration of the parallels between modern physics and eastern mysticism'. Sounds daunting, but its relaxed, easy-going style is seductive, and by the end of the book you feel that you know it all, or, alternatively, you know nothing, but hey, there's no difference between all or nothing.
After some brief paragraphs on the Eastern religions, Capra then follows with nine brilliant chapters linking those religious or philosophical concepts to modern physics. In 'The Unity of All Things' he quotes Heisenberg: 'Natural Science (ie Physics)...is part of the interplay between nature and ourselves'. 'Beyond the World of Opposites' covers the quantum disparity between rest and movement and observation, and Capra quotes one of those frustratingly disturbing Zen sayings: 'At dusk the cock announces dawn; at midnight, the bright sun'. It's not meant to be understood, but to upset our sensibilities, sort of like quantum physics, you know, the particle is there until you try to measure it. The Void is an integral part of Buddhism, and Capra discusses this under 'Emptiness and Form' and tells us that, in physics, matter and space are inseparable. Every one of those nine short superb chapters is enthralling.
My favourite? 'Space-Time' because none of us understands infinity, which is a real drag. Capra has curved spheres and arrows and vectors, all good, but, you know, his best scientific citation comes from Huinang, a 7th Century Zen master, said to be illiterate, a most important figure of his time. Capra quotes him: 'The absolute tranquillity is the present moment. At this moment there is no limit to this moment, and herein is eternal delight'. Yeh, I don't understand it either, but it will have to do, er, for the moment.

Point Your iPad At The Sky

Michael Leunig is an official 'Australian Living Treasure'. He is best known for his minimalist, laconic cartoons, often without captions, which do seem to capture many of our insecurities. Sometimes they don't work. Often they do and we are enthralled. Although opinions vary, I feel one of his best depicts a father and his young son sitting on the floor in front of a TV on which is displayed a beautiful sunset. Both are enjoying this experience, and one gets the sense that it is bringing them closer together. You know, bonding. But in the background is an open window through which we can see the identical sunset, the real one, and it's completely ignored by the two entrenched in front of the TV set.
I was reminded of this cartoon by a friend this week. We were having a few drinks; there are seven of us that have met every couple of weeks for 30 years. This time it was at Steve's place. Steve and his wife live in an authentic sixties highrise with a great view of the Melbourne skyline, and of the sky. I looked out and asked Steve whether he had enjoyed last week's supermoon, what was it, 15% brighter because it was the closest to earth for 18 years? Steve stopped talking, and after a minute or so he made which could only be described as a confession. 'Bless me Father', he started, and said he was in his study one evening last week and he was playing with his iPad, with an App called Star Walk. This allows you to hold the iPad up in the air and view all the stars, constellations, planets, and any other stuff in that part of the sky. He showed it to me. It's very spooky. I have no idea how it works. It does look beautiful. So, Steve looked at the supermoon on his iPad, and, you know, he forget to take the 20 paces from his study to his balcony and look at the real moon with his own eyes. He confessed to me that he only saw it on his iPad. The best view of the sky in Melbourne!
So I went to the iTunes store and looked up Star Walk. It's $5.99 and available in 11 languages. This is the description of the App: "Star Walk enables you to point your iPad at the sky and see what stars, constellations, and satellites you are looking at in realtime" So, we can watch the sunset on TV, the stars on iPad, we can buy all necessities over the internet, all that is left are Apps for digestion, elimination and procreation, and we won't have to leave our room at all.

No Definitely Good News At All

Eric Blair is a gentle name, and it's hard to believe that an Eric Blair was, inter alia, a policeman, a tramp, a wounded soldier, and a (sort-of) revolutionary. This bio might fit a name such as Che Guevara or George Patton, but an Eric Blair? However, Eric had another life, and using the nom-de-plume George Orwell, he wrote two of the most important books of the 20th Century, Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm. He died of consumption at 46, leaving those novels, and seven others. But his literary output was far greater. As a working journalist and literary critic, he wrote extensively on stuff, and a four volume collection of his work, 1920 through 1950, is published.
I've enjoyed these volumes more than his books; you can read each essay at random, he writes as if he is talking to you, and although politically dated, his many human observations remain true. The best are from the series of articles he wrote for The Tribune. He calls his column "As I Please", a title simultaneously aggressive and self-effacing. There is no doubt that if Orwell were writing now then "As I Please" would be an immensely successful blog. On the 29th November 1946 he looked at the front page of his newspaper and observed that the USSR was querying the numbers of Allied Forces in occupied Europe (Cold War here we come), the civil war in Greece raged, a blood-bath occurred in India, Ghandi was on a hunger strike, and there were more bombs in Jerusalem. Even minor stories, Orwell observes, are, at best, only marginally good news. So he writes "There is no definitely good news at all on the front page" Mr Orwell, where ever you are, let me just inform you that nothing has changed.

If It Were Not For Reality

When Gary Larson retired in 1995, the world became a poorer place. Everyone has their favourite cartoon. Mine is the lookalike Freudian psychiatrist carefully writing in his imposing notebook while a clearly disturbed patient on the couch talks and talks and talks and if you look carefully at the notebook he has written "Just Plain Mad". You know, psychiatrists get a bad rap. You "have to be crazy to become one" or "you get crazy after you become one" but, like a toilet flush, they are essential.
There is one psychiatrist, however, I admire. I have read her book "Neurosis And Human Growth" more than I have read any other book. Karen Horney, who died in 1952 at the age of 67, was an outstanding psychoanalyst. In some people's eyes, that's even more arcane that a plain old psychiatrist, but I love reading them and about them, especially Horney. She was a "Neo-Freudian",  a rather gentle term which actually means that she dramatically split from the pessimistic libido theory of Freud to an optimistic social and cultural theory. Theory of what, you ask? Well, er, stuff. It was all made up, anyway, with no evidence as we know it.
But the result is a classification of Personality, in Life and especially in the Workplace. And this is where Horney's book excels. You will read it and you will understand your friends, family and, especially, your workmates. Wordy, but beautifully written, it's terrific. All about our fight with reality, with our true self, or as one of Horney's patients put it: "If it were not for reality, I would be perfectly all right" I thought I was sane until I read this book. Now I know that everyone is insane. It's reassuring.

And This Image We Call Time

People spend a lot of time thinking about Time. I've just searched Amazon books for 'time management' and there are 17,283 entries. From 'The 4-Hour Work Week' (in your dreams) to 'Getting Things Done'. The seductive titles are bespattered with noble nouns which are all attractive, and all relate to managing Time: Happiness, Discipline, Strength, Survival, Wellbeing, and the subtle Overcoming Dysfunction.
Some people never think about Time. In my experience, these people are usually surfers, or surfies, depending on your culture. You know, blonde, relaxed, erudite in a beat generation sort-of-way, just want to be out there, on a wave. But, hang on, there are tides (Time) and weather (Time) to consider, oh well, there goes my theory.
And there are people who philosophize about Time. What is it? When did it start? When will it end? Everyone's got a theory, but no-one really knows. Although I reckon Plato came close. There it is, in my copy of Timaeus (part of the Britannica Great Books of the Western World, the entire set bought on Ebay for $35 last year, yes, I know you can download it all for free, but the books LOOK so good). He writes: "Wherefore he (here insert she, God, it, creator, or, if Buddhist, leave blank) resolved to have a moving image of eternity, and when he set in order the heaven, he made this image eternal but moving according to number, while eternity itself rests in unity; and this image we call Time" Couldn't have put it better myself, although Bob thinks zero is better than unity when he sings, "Where black is the color, where none is the number". Which reminds me, "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" is sort of topical again at this Time.

Pain And Pleasure Do Not Enclose Him

Please do not read The Writer's Journey by Christopher Vogel. You will never enjoy a movie again. Well, you'll never enjoy one in the wide-eyed childlike enchantment way that even hardened movie-goers experience. Instead, you will spend the two hours checking each stage of The Story. You see, Vogel's book, published in 1992, but preceded by many years of notes and summaries, is the handbook of the Hollywood scriptwriter. In it he outlines the stages of The Story, common to all fables and myths and legends. The Hero, living in the Ordinary World, is Called To Adventure, which she Refuses, but after Meeting Her Mentor, she Crosses The Threshold, and with the aid of Allies, undergoes The Supreme Ordeal, receives The Reward, and Returns, as Hero, bringing "The Elixir" to the Ordinary World. Get the picture?
Vogel explains at length that he has essentially scriptwritten Joseph Campbell's 1949 opus, The Hero With A Thousand Faces. A multilingual mystic who made a mark on mid-Twentieth Century America, Campbell wrote a beautiful book which more or less deconstructs the popular stories of mankind and in doing so establishes the pro forma by which all such stories are written. His early influences were Nietzsche and Joyce and Mann, and in later years he edited the Eranos Yearbooks, a series of arcane essays on life 'but not as we know it' as interpreted by European mystics and philosophers, also intriguing.
Vogler's Supreme Ordeal stage of the story, the impending death of the Hero, is split in Campbell's original into several parts. One is headed Apotheosis. It's the deification stage, where the Hero is transformed into something more than human. In early fables it was usually into a god. Now it can be anything vaguely super-human; Bruce Willis in a elevator shaft comes to mind. As Campbell writes: "..it is he who holds the world, the lotus. Pain and pleasure do not enclose him. He encloses them..." Perhaps this is the pivotal moment for us. We want the Hero to win. The Hero obliges us by shedding a human weakness or three. Nice job, if you can get it. Now, about that movie you're about to see...

I'll Go Your Way Too

You'll probably want to buy the CD. Now, iTunes will download it for you, but before you do that, let me tell you about an article I read a couple of years ago. It was in the Music section of our local newspaper, a blinded study of sorts. A DJ, a sound engineer, and an orchestra conductor were given very expensive earphones, and asked to listen to a number of recordings in various formats. They were CD, Lossless, 256 kbps and 128 kbps. The DJ couldn't separate them, obviously due to occupational hearing loss or concurrent substance abuse or both. The engineer and the conductor delivered the same results - CD the best, 128 the worst, and they could not separate Lossless from 256. So if you want to hear Leonard Cohen Live In London in concert-quality then get the CD. And the DVD.
Not just for Mr. Cohen. For Sharon Robinson and the Webb sisters, blues nightingales. For the best collection of musicians in a long time. And Leonard Cohen, well, I don't pretend even to try and add what is written about the man. You know it all. Especially that there appear to be three phases to his performing life - the literature, the early voice - thin, almost tuneless but enthralling - and the later voice, mellifluous and matched perfectly to his colleagues on stage.
The poetry varies, all interesting, some naughty, to use an old-fashioned word, and occasionally one verse. His Book of Longing was published in 2006, and has all these forms of poetry. The shortest one is the best. It delivers a feint then the punch, and it's about love, all in two lines. It goes "You go your way I'll go your way too" It's just that bit better than the Roman "Ubi tu Gaius..." wedding vow because it suggests togetherness, not just amalgamation. And that's love.

As Though They Had Been Flooded With Light

When Mikhail Bulgakov died in 1940, at the same age and of the same kidney ailment as his father, his works effectively died with him. The Great Soviet Experiment did not encourage wide release of his plays and novels; indeed, it was only in 1966, a generation after its near completion, that his most-loved, most-famous story, The Master and Margarita, introduced herself (books are feminine, aren't they?) to Western readers. Whisper the name of this novel to any quiet crowd and it's London to a Brick that a small but important minority of the group will, if not swoon, remind themselves that they must read it again. Complex, mystical and funny, and allegorical, this is his greatest work.
He gave us other manuscripts. Some deserve a crash-course in Russian history before enjoying. Others are better experienced on stage than read. But Bulgakov, like Chekhov, was also a doctor, well, a short-lived doctor, enjoying medical practice for 2 years before he was consumed by full-time writing. His A Country Doctor's Notebook, written in 1925, has nine vivid descriptions of medical cases in rural Russia, mostly fact but part-fictionalized, and is most rewarding. Indeed, even in this "modern" age of medicine, I would still prescribe this book as required reading for medical students. For its human rather than clinical lessons.
One story in the book, Baptism By Rotation, describes the young doctor deep in the Russian steppe, in the middle of the night, called to a woman in labour with a transverse lie of child, lethal to both mother and baby if not corrected by version of the baby. He had graduated with honours in Obstetrics, but needs the help of an experienced midwife, and a couple of peeks of his textbook, before both patients are saved, just. Afterwards, in the early hours, in his room, sipping his "cooling tea" and flipping through the textbook chapter on "Dangers of Version", he realises "all the previously obscure passages became entirely comprehensible, as though they had been flooded with light". He had learnt it, then done it, then learnt it again, with deeper understanding. I guess that's what experience does: it shines a light on what you've been taught.

A Tail, Like The Other Foxes

By 1859, when Charles Darwin's Origin was published, its author had a continuing history of multiple somatic complaints. He needed long periods of convalescence, and the inevitable debates that followed were shouldered, for the main, by the greatest science educator of the 19th Century, Thomas Huxley. Of prodigious intellect, and with an outstanding debating skill whether at the Royal Society (of which he later became President), or in public halls open to all-comers, Huxley carried the torch for this monkey to man hypothesis.
It is clear, when reading Adrian Desmond's splendid biography of Huxley, that he was driven more by revulsion of the Church's views than by science. His superb knowledge of The Bible and Church History enabled him to debate church leaders effectively.
But he had no personal religious or philosophical label. As he writes in an 1889 essay "most of my colleagues were -ists of one sort or another...atheist, theist, idealist...". He felt, well, put-out. He wanted a belief so that he, too, had "a tail, like the other foxes" So he coined the term "agnostic" for himself.
Now, this is not about agnosticism per se. It is about the astonishing observation that Thomas Huxley, FRS (with Medal), the best-known scientist of Victorian England, "Darwin's Bulldog", grandfather of author Aldous and Nobel Prize winner Andrew, wanted to be like everyone else! Part of the group. With a label of his own. Reassuring, isn't it?

Dreaming Up A Brilliant Labyrinth

If there's one thing Jorge Luis Borges has over Benedict de Spinoza, it's Style. Borges, a beloved son of Latin America and some say the best author never to win a Nobel Prize, nurtures his beguiling short stories until each develops a life of its own. Their content is rich and complex and always character-full, for want of a real word. Walter Truett Anderson said of postmodernism that it "mixed rituals and traditions like greens in a salad" and this is a good description of a Borges story.
Spinoza is unreadable. No, I take that back. Spinoza is unreadable to most of us. But some would say he is more important than Borges. He develops truly original concepts of pantheism and determinism and other isms in the form of The Geometry Textbook. You know, A is to B as C is to D so E...you get the picture.
So what happens when Borges writes a poem about Spinoza. I'll tell what happens - we suddenly get to love Spinoza. Borges writes about Spinoza polishing his lenses with the hyacinth in the confines of the ghetto walls, a quiet Spinoza "free of metaphor and myth". And when he writes that Spinoza sits there "dreaming up a brilliant labyrinth", the picture of Spinoza is complete. In those five words we suddenly see through the convoluted philosophical details, and appreciate the man himself. It's Borges' Style over Spinoza's Substance. The best of both worlds.

Well Then, Give Me Your Pain

I'm not sure that anyone reads Lou Salome, or about Lou Salome, anymore. The peripatetic Russian psychoanalyst and feminist, born in 1861, was linked to famous men of her age, including Ree, Nietzsche, Wagner, Freud and Rilke, inter alia. In fact, there was a menage of sorts with the first two, the Poet and the Philosopher, a deep love affair with Rainer Maria Rilke, and a love-filled albeit (supposedly) celibate marriage of 47 years with Friedrich Andreas. She was profoundly intellectual, smarter than pretty well anyone she met, and wrote profusely, in fact being one of the first to discuss female sexuality. Not a bad curriculum vitae.
She wrote a poem for Nietzsche. It's hard to track down, but you can find it in her own published portrait of Nietzsche, thankfully still in print. Ode to Life starts with an affirmation of her love of life, especially its joys and its riddles and its dangers, but the bottom line, after her cry "If you must destroy me", has to be on a par with Dylan's "Do Not Go Gentle". She dares life to "Throw all you have into the battle. If no more is left of joy, well then, give me your pain".
Its fitting that she wrote this poem for a man who believed Life itself created its own codes and structures and morals, and that Life was there to be celebrated whether happy or sad or dying. But it's tough when you are sad or dying. Does this challenge "Give Me Your Pain" help anyone. I don't know, but it's worth taking the baton offered by her, and running with it.

My Body Of A Sudden Blazed

In his Nobel Lecture delivered on December 15th, 1923, shortly after receiving the Prize for Literature, WB Yeats spoke at length about the Irish Dramatic Movement. The speech is a little like his poetry - brilliant, seductive and mellifluous, although the reader always feels that a PhD in History or Literature or Linguistics would be useful for full appreciation. But, buried in the characters and events and opinions, you can find a mystical spark, just like in many of his poems. He says "you desire beautiful emotion...and care not how fantastic its expression".
His poem that best demonstrates this statement is very short, and has the rather indecipherable title of Vacillation IV. The scene is set. Yeats is fifty, alone in a crowded shop, obviously miserable. The second stanza appears as though shot from a gun: "While on the shop and street I gazed My body of a sudden blazed; And twenty minutes more or less It seemed, so great my happiness, That I was blessed and could bless".
This brief intense happy transformation is good if you can get it. Mystics strive after it, some call it Sartori, or Prayer, or Nirvana, or whatever.  It doesn't have to last long. Yeats even suggests twenty minutes "more or less", but let's not put too fine a point on using time to measure something that is, well, timeless.

A Friend Who Would Understand Me

Anton Chekhov was 38 years old when he wrote "A Case History". He was already an experienced doctor and evocative writer, and some of his best short stories, including this one, effortlessly combined elements of both medicine and human nature. The dismal factory town in "A Case History",  to which a doctor is summoned, has all the depressing features of late 19th century Russia, or indeed of industrial Europe. Within it's walls languishes the neurasthenic daughter of the rich factory owner. She is always sick, tired and depressed.
Just a brief conversation and examination give the doctor the diagnosis - that of no diagnosis at all. Today, after a few tests, she would be labelled as depression or chronic fatigue or fibromyalgia. But Chekhov and his alter ego in the story know the real cause of her illness. She explains it herself in her last few words to the doctor: "I'd like to tell you what I think. It seems that I'm not ill, and I'm worried and terrified for that reason...I'm always having medical treatment and of course I'm thankful and I wouldn't say it's all a waste of time. I don't want to talk to doctors, though, but to someone close to me, a friend who would understand me and could convince me whether I'm right or wrong."
Of course, nothing is resolved, and the doctor moves on, out of the town, to the rest of his life.
Chekhov doesn't try to give us a feel-good story. But we feel better after reading it. Is it Schadenfreude? Maybe. Is it a confessional by proxy? Possibly. It's certainly real, and common, even in a different time and place.