Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book Read Online Free PDF Page B

she “couldn’t wait to get out of the boonies.” For their part, too, the town folk might get sick and tired of the antics of, say, Mel Brooks.
    Though both actors and town folk have reached for what they perceived to be a heightened reality, it, reality itself, has somehow fallen between them, like a dropped ball.
    Question (II): Test your own index of misplacement.
    (1) Imagine meeting Robert Redford under the most ordinary circumstances: you’re a bank teller and he comes in to cash a check. He is very nice, almost preternaturally nice. You perceive that Redford’s self has, perhaps by virtue of his film image, a higher or at least a different reality from your own.
    (2) Imagine that you are a movie star finding yourself in a small town, you with all the well-known self-problems of movie stars—What if these people recognize me and hassle me, about autographs? What if they don’t recognize me?—and all the anxiety caused by three failed films, dearth of good scripts, unsympathetic directors, producers, and moneymen. Now imagine you as such a movie star watching the locals at work and play; you envy the A & P manager perched in the manager’s box keeping an eye on the checkout lines, watering the lawn of a late summer evening.
    Which of the two would you rather be, the bank teller or the movie star?
    ( CHECK ONE )

    Thought Experiment: Imagine you are walking down Madison Avenue behind Al Pacino, whom you have seen frequently in the movies but never in the flesh. He is shorter than you thought. His raincoat is thrown over his shoulder. Hands in pockets, he stops to look in the window of Abercrombie & Fitch. His face takes on a characteristic expression, jaws clenched, eyes dark and luminous, like young Corleone in The Godfather. The sight of Pacino in the flesh acting like Pacino on the screen gives you a peculiar pleasure. Then you become aware that though Pacino is looking at the articles in the window display, he is also checking his own reflection in the glass. This, too, gives you pleasure, though of a different sort. Explain the difference. (Hint: The esthetic pleasure of seeing an instance of a symbol, Pacino in the flesh at Abercrombie’s, measure up and conform to the symbol itself, Pacino on the screen, and the different pleasure of seeing the instance, Pacino, rescued from the symbol and restored to human creatureliness, the self in all its vagary, individuality, and folly. The first case: Ah, there is Pacino acting just like Corleone! The second case: Ah, there is Pacino acting just like me!)

(8) The Promiscuous Self:
    Why is it that One’s Self often not only does not Prefer Sex with one’s Chosen Mate, Chosen for His or Her Attractiveness and Suitability, even when the Mate is a Person well known to one, knowing of one, loved by one, with a Life, Time, and Family in common, but rather prefers Sex with a New Person, even a Total Stranger, or even Vicariously through Pornography

    A RECENT SURVEY in a large city reported that 95 percent of all video tapes purchased for home consumption were Insatiable, a pornographic film starring Marilyn Chambers.
    Of all sexual encounters on soap opera, only 6 percent occur between husband and wife.
    In some cities of the United States, which now has the highest divorce rate in the world, the incidence of divorce now approaches 60 percent of married couples.
    A recent survey showed that the frequency of sexual intercourse in married couples declined 90 percent after three years of marriage.
    On a talk show a female sexologist reported that a favorite fantasy of American women, second only to oral sex, was having sex with two strange men at once.
    According to the president of the North American Swing Club Association, only 3 percent of married couples who are swingers get divorces, as compared with over 50 percent of non-swinging couples.
    In large American cities, lunch-break liaisons between business men and women have become commonplace.
    Sexual activity and