Individuals in Community

            Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love is a self-indulgent travelogue and diary about the search for Self. The author takes readers into her mind and gives them a complete tour, disclosing her deepest depressions and her most exuberant elations in thoughtful, witty prose. Gilbert cites no substantial difficulties in her life. She has resources with which to maintain two expensive properties, a wholesome family life and a sense of personal safety. Yet she is woefully unhappy. She can point to nothing as the particular cause of her despair, only that her life is not what she wants. Self-actualization is low on the hierarchy of needs, so it is only once her physical needs are fulfilled that she begins to notice the hole that she spends the rest of the book filling in. She wants to lend meaning to a life she seems to feel is rather vacuous, and so she looks inward and strikes out to Eat, Pray and Love her way to fulfillment.

When carefully detailed and personified loneliness or depression sweep over the author, there is not much for the reader to laugh at. The humor comes instead from Gilbert’s mastery of language. She employs the Mark Twain storytelling method and pretends not to find herself funny. She pauses in the right places and uses vivid, seemingly incongruous examples that suck one into her story. She writes what she knows, uses some slightly humorous self-debasement and writes an ultimately serious account of an individualistic search.

This kind of internal, individualistic approach to writing only finds success where readers can relate in some degree. Why should we care about the personal, internal musings of one mind? Readers must find some mirror of their own experiences in these pages. When we find something universal in the musings, a book has new meaning and importance. Anyone can relate to this Search for the Meaning of Life, and that makes Gilbert’s book successful. It works even better when Gilbert’s individual account details her journey to align herself and her will with that of a higher power. By documenting her internal musings, she is giving up her individual existence, choosing instead to exist in a community. She finds a community of pleasure-seekers in Italy, of spiritual souls in India and of balanced personalities in Bali, and ultimately aligns her individualism with service to a thing beyond herself. When she pools all her resources to buy a house for Wayan, she tells her friends that sometimes, when one sets out to help herself, she ends up helping everyone. Perhaps this is the lesson here; individualism is important, but it is even more important to align with a human community.

Refreshing Humor

            It is often difficult to digest pieces of writing based on such large questions and ideas as Elizabeth Gilbert discusses in Eat Pray Love, but somehow she managed to make it all actually quite easy to take on. While her “search for everything” may seem a daunting task to take on and her entry into a conversation about her relationship with God may strike fear into a reader as it can often be an abrasive and offensive avenue to travel down, Gilbert handles all of this with seamless grace and it’s all in her attitude.

            Elizabeth Gilbert has a very unique view on life and this view matched with her sense of humor allow for a certain accessibility to her work. All of this can be boiled down to her use of metaphor: comparing huge, overarching questions that people seek answers to for lifetimes, to mundane occurrences. My favorite example of this technique comes in the first fifteen pages of the novel where she discusses her view on God.

            Personally, I know if someone were to come up to me and say, “let me tell you what I think about God,” I would immediately feel an urge to leave the situation as soon as possible, and this was no exception with my reading of this book, but of course I kept reading anyways and was cheerfully surprised by the outcome.

At the end of her third bead, Gilbert compares her belief in God to owning a really great dog. Some people could probably get very easily offended with this idea, but the way in which Gilbert explains this metaphor sheds such light on her own personal truth, that it becomes sweet, even funny, rather than abrasive. The sweetness stems from the simplicity of the comparison and her description of the dog and her love for it. The humor comes from this grand concept of God being compared to something so earthly and simple as a dog and it works.

            One of the main reasons that this strategy works for Gilbert is because she is very aware of the circumstances under which and within which she is writing. She knows that people may potentially be offended by her talking about her own views of God, but she also sees the sweetness and humor behind her own, personal metaphors that she lives by. Gilbert recognizes the complexities and ambiguities of life and the need for simplicity in order to cope with the harder questions and sometimes we all need to see this too.

            My favorite example of this sort of situation has been popping up on the internet a lot lately for some reason and it always has to do with kids. Kids don’t understand the complexities of life yet because their world is still so small and simple and because of this their views tend to be refreshing and slightly comical. Two videos in particular come to mind when I think of this idea: one of which is a little boy, maybe about three years old,  being asked the question, “Do you like boys or girls?” and his answer is “I like scorpions!”

            The other video struck a few chords with a lot of people I know because it tackles such a common issue that everyone deals with: body image. This group of people interviewed some adults and some kids and asked them all the same question: If you could change one thing about your body, what would it be? I’m sure the adult results are pretty easy to guess, but it’s the kids’ answers that made me chuckle and brought me joy. After a little bit of thought, one girl decided she would like a mermaid tail, another little boy wanted cheetah legs so he could be fast.

            Sometimes we need to just step back and simplify; we need to readjust and reawaken ourselves to our reality and the things we put importance on and whether that importance is well-placed or not. These videos of children answering questions that plague the older generations and create such societal and personal issues shed light on just how ridiculous the importance we place on these things might be. This kind of humor, much like Gilbert’s, allows us to reevaluate ourselves and our values without condemning anyone. There is a sort of tension and release play when such a loaded question is asked and then responded to with utter simplicity and boldness: it’s refreshing.

I like scorpions video

The Illusion of Adulthood

After having both read and watched Eat, Pray, Love, I can easily say what struck me the most about the story was its ‘heroine.’  In all honesty, I started reading in the (admittedly bitter) mindset of what can be roughly summed up as: ‘here is this newly-thirty, wildly successful, accomplished, and fortunate woman blathering (for lack of a better/more sensitive word) on about her boy-troubles ad nauseam.’  I agreed with Depression and Loneliness wholeheartedly when they accused Liz of being selfish and immature.  But, I soon reevaluated my rash and generally unfair judgment of the candid Liz Gilbert when I reluctantly began to see something of myself in her character.

            I’d like to think that my (just short of crippling) feelings of uncertainty about my future post-graduation are not individual.  As college seniors, my peers and I are at a stage in our lives when we must define the trajectory of our careers and future relationships, and that is a very scary, almost unfathomable thought to me.  There is no option except to be proactive, as even the lack of choice in these matters could set your path in stone—or so it so often seems.  We are dangerously close to the age at which our society expects us to “have it all figured out,” or, in other words, be a self-sustaining adult. 

But what is this great “it” that we are expected to have had a sudden and fundamental epiphany about?  Should we really be held accountable to know our identity for the rest of our lives at the age of 21 or 22?  What does it even truly mean to be an adult?  I think, as Liz Gilbert does in an exceptionally catastrophic and elaborate way, most individuals reach a point (or points) in their life when they must examine who they are, decide if that’s who they really want to be, and act accordingly depending on their decision. 

Liz’s story is an overwhelmingly hopeful one in this regard.  One thing that can definitively be said of Liz is that she never loses her quirky and refreshing take on life.  Even as she describes the vicious cycle of her extreme neediness and the resulting debilitating ostracism from her boyfriend David which causes what may be her most extreme bout of depression, she manages to slip in the aside, “(Dating tip: Men LOVE this)” [Gilbert, 20].  I remember I actually scoffed aloud reading this line; it was so completely unexpected and surprisingly hilarious given the almost inappropriate context.  This was a moment when I started to gain a little more respect for Gilbert and began to see the tenacity that lay beneath the surface that I had previously dismissed as nothing more than complaints from an entitled and unaware individual.

We’ve talked in class about how humor can be used as a buffer to bring certain subjects to the table that may otherwise be taboo.  Eat, Pray, Love is a perfect example of this kind of power at work.  Gilbert doesn’t make a joke of or make light of her struggles with identity and depression, but instead makes humorous and witty observations that make the subject matter more palatable and less intimidating and devastating than it can be for readers.  This is an approach that establishes an acceptance of this issues, but also determination to move past them to self-actualization.

Cheer for the Home Team

            Elizabeth Gilbert’s memoir is not only a story of finding self, God, and happiness in the world it is also a story about finding humor and good humored people in very dark times. I can think of few ways more effective at cheering someone up than making them laugh or feel contented; which is why I believe that Gilbert’s journey for bodily pleasures and happiness in Italy was the most pivotal of her three journeys and set her on the path to finding true happiness and God. That is not to say that the bodily pleasures she experienced in Italy were more remarkable than her spiritual transformation in India or Bali; rather, without the carnal pleasures she used to overcome her initial depression, Gilbert never would have been able to reach spiritual enlightenment.

          

  Perhaps the most humorous moment in Part I, or the moment that struck closest to home, was Gilbert’s description of going to a soccer match with Luca Spaghetti. Being from Philadelphia, a city whose fans are often considered the most unruly in the country (they once actually booed Santa Clause), I felt a particular resonance with this chapter. As Luca describes to Gilbert, “’We can change our wives,’ he said, ‘We can change our jobs, our nationalities and even our religions, but we can never change our team.’” (Gilbert 68). This statement raises both confusion and hilarity. How can someone not switch allegiance between sports teams, something that is seemingly so marginal or ultimately pointless to our lives? However, at least from a male perspective, I know exactly what Luca is talking about. This kind of obsession with sports seems crazy and as Gilbert points out, “the word for ‘fan’ in Italian if tifoso. Derived from the word for typhus. In other words – one who is mightily fevered.” (68).  Gilbert then proceeds to translate a slew of obscenities and laments from an old man behind her, which is also quite hilarious. The passage in its entirety is hysterical but it also raises an interesting point about acceptable social roles and behavior. We often laugh at the absurdity in the way people act at sports games. In no other place is it socially acceptable to berate or denigrate a group of people, especially people you technically do not even know. You may know a player’s name, number, and statistics but you know absolutely nothing about him or her as person unless it’s been plastered all over the news. For some reason however, it is not only acceptable but somewhat expected for people to cheer for the home team and boo the away team. Perhaps this is a different form of release theory. By feeling animosity towards a team, and directing it towards the mascot or the idea of the team as a whole, people may be able to relieve built up tension or aggression. However, I believe that this form of release is nowhere near as effective as humor because it is done in a negative fashion and it can become quite easy to get out of control and become personal and harmful.

        

    Another interesting aspect of rooting for a team is what the team says about an individual’s identity.  As Luca Spaghetti says, you can change many things but you can never change the team you cheer for. He believes that love, nationality, and religion are all fluid; people can change their allegiance at any moment and they should have the right to do so. However, in some weird way, the team that a person roots for is concrete and unchanging. It is a part of their identity, which often they have no part in choosing, and that cannot be changed. The team someone cheers for reveals where they are from and what their family is like; two choices, that not a single person has control over. In a way, Gilbert through Luca, reveals that our identities are always inextricably geographically tied somewhere. It is fitting then that the second part of her book is focused on removing her spirit from the physical world and experiencing the world as a whole, spiritually. Perhaps, by walking the same meditative path as Gilbert, people can shake the physical bounds of their identity and discover who they truly are spiritually.

Twain, Pain, and Spiritual Gain

Eat, Pray, Love is not a funny book. Or more accurately, it does not have a funny plot. On the surface, there is little to laugh about at the story of a recent divorcée who embarks upon a spiritual journey across Italy, India, and Indonesia. However, as Mark Twain emphasized in “How to Tell a Story,” “The humorous story is told gravely; the teller does his best to conceal the fact that he even dimly suspects that there is anything funny about it” (239). As we have often discussed in class, there are certainly points in life when all you can do is laugh. The events in Eat, Pray, Love are a prime example. What more could Gilbert do after she hit the self-destruct button on the perfect life that she spent years trying to cultivate because she thought it was exactly what she wanted?

The narrative of Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love “bubbles gently along,” as Twain says, which is partially due to its medium – the full-length novel lends itself much more to a serious tale peppered with side jokes than one that demands raucous laughter from start to finish. Similarly to Amy Sedaris in I Like You, Gilbert simply glazes over her jokes and witty comments and moves on, rather than continually reminding the reader, “Hey! This was funny! You should be laughing right now!” There is a subtlety and sophistication to Gilbert’s writing that stems from her understanding that while her situation is not hilarious by any means, there is still some humor that can be found no matter how desperate a situation may seem.

Gilbert frequently inserts these jokes, which are often snarky, sarcastic, or self-deprecating, in between some of the most somber portions of the novel. When she recounts her tumultuous relationship with David, she says that her toxic cycle of “neediness” facilitated his pulling away from her, and that “soon he was retreating under fire of my weeping pleas of, ‘Where are you going? What happened to us?’” (20). If one can consider written version of Twain’s pauses in storytelling to be a paragraph break, Gilbert masters this art that Twain refers to as “the most troublesome and aggravating and uncertain thing you ever undertook” (243). The relationship that she and David have is full of pain and anguish, and is hardly humorous in and of itself, but as Gilbert employs what Herbert Spencer describes in his writings about Relief Theory, “the sardonic laughter...which result[s] from mental distress” (104). The following line of text reads, “(Dating tip: Men LOVE this.)” The juxtaposition of Gilbert’s troubles and the idea that she is in any place to dole out relationship advice at that point serves as both a way for her to release herself from the painful difficulty of her situation as well as for the audience to laugh along with her.

By using these tactics of self-deprecation to laugh at herself throughout her spiritual journey, Gilbert teaches herself to laugh at and love the world again.

Acorns and Visualization

My parents have always told me that thoughts are powerful and that whatever images you let yourself see, you will become. On my worse days (filled with exhaustion or senseless-worry), I would cry, and get angry with myself for letting myself get sucked into images full of worry and fear. On my best days, however, I am able to visualize a positive immediate (or sometimes long-term) future.

My first thought upon reading the first few chapters of Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat Pray Love, was, “Oh she’s like Anne Lamott.” Then I looked more closely at the front cover and saw Anne Lamott’s praise for the book. I felt the connection to Lamott’s work because both writers describe various parts of their lives, some terribly painful, and yet we read them in a humor class. Gilbert did make me laugh, but these laughs were in the vein of Lamott’s self-deprecating humor. What then, is this? For me, Gilbert’s work is studied in a course on humor because she grows to have a sense of humor about her own life, and can look back with a sense of humor at the times during which she did not.

The end of the story, as mentioned in other blogs, and by Gilbert herself, seems very much a fairytale. I too, wonder how all of this worked out for Gilbert. But then I recall my parents’ lectures on visualization and will. In the final section of the book, Gilbert tells us about the oak tree. She says that everyone can see the acorn. “But only a few can recognize that there is another force operating here as well—the future tree itself, which wants so badly to exist that it pulls the acorn into being, drawing the seedling forth with longing out of the void, guiding the evolution from nothingness to maturity” (329).

In order to practice this principle, one must have a sense of humor. Someone who is too stiff and demands immediate perfection will see the acorn only for what it is. But according to Gilbert’s narrative, if we can see the potential inside our acorn, and will it and visualize it, we can become it. Now does this sound hokey? Yes. Yes. Of course. But Gilbert also says that truth is what strengthens her belief in this potential.

Her now-husband says to her, “So I was thinking. . .we could try to build a life together that’s somehow divided between America, Australia, Brazil and Bali” (330). Her response is to laugh, because, as she puts it, “why not?” This reminds me of a section earlier in the story when she is in Italy with the couple Maria and Giulio. Giulio asserts that “all Americans are like this: repressed. Which makes them dangerous and potentially deadly when they blow up” (58). As Gilbert explains, the Western mentality is to be a “realist” (or rather, a cynic). When we serve as repressed American realists, we do not acknowledge our potential. Instead I wonder if we turn our acorns’ potential energy from positive to negative.

Do we then, to some extent, control our truths? Are we responsible for the energy and the force we put into the world? Are we in charge of whether or not we bloom into an oak? I think that my parents, as well as Gilbert, would say “yes.” I wonder then, if those of us who angrily disagree are too scared to risk, and to put all of our energy into visualizing and willing and working for something that could end up not happening or could be taken away. I do not mean to attack, as it is a very human thing to be scared to risk. Yet it is also very much a part of our human nature to risk, to leap and to yearn.

Eat, Pray, Love: A Modern Fairytale

Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia stars Liz Gilbert, a successful career woman locked away in the remote castle of a failed marriage. Rather than waiting to be saved, she sets out on a quest for self-actualization: eating her heart whole in Italy, reaching enlightenment in India, and rescuing a friend in Bali before stumbling upon her Prince Charming and living Happily Ever After. Across the journey, she meets comedic relief in the form of Richard, her trusty steed in India, and Wayan, an amiable healer able to cure a tough urinary tract infection with a “brown juice … that stank like corpse” (299). Through the ups and the downs, Gilbert is able to charm readers with her feminine virtues: consistent humility, piety, and sexual modesty – with a finely tuned wit to match. In total, Gilbert’s memoir is nothing short of a fairytale for the modern-day woman.

However, Gilbert’s story is not sprinkled with fairy dust from the outset. Rather, the first two sections of her journey are grounded in a reality that is gritty yet inspiring. She is an independent woman who encounters difficulty in assuming the housewife role expected of her. The depression she experiences upon having her heart broken while enduring a divorce surpasses Rapunzel weeping in a tower. Gilbert writes: “I’d sat on the floor of my bedroom for many hours, trying very hard to talk myself out of cutting into my arm with a kitchen knife” (50). Moreover, when she decides to heal herself through a year-long odyssey of self-discovery, she does so with her own resources, independently financed by a successful writing career. Born into humble beginnings (although I live a hop, skip, and a leap away from her hometown which is quite urban and features few tree farms), she is a self-made woman who decides to purify her life from the distracting influence of men and take an adventure alone with her thoughts and wishes.

This is the kind of tale I want to push into the hands of the fifth-grade girls in my Tunbridge service-learning classroom (or rather, wish for them to read once they’re old enough to understand the mature content). At eleven years old, the boys have already gotten pushy – I mean this both literally and figuratively. The other day, a girl sat in a chair reading while a boisterous young man tried to earn her attention. She ignored him, only pausing from her book to ask, “Why are you standing so close to me?” He denied that he was and she replied, “Your knee is touching my knee. Back up.” He gave her a playful push and left her alone. I silently applauded her gall and hoped she would maintain that air of civil irreverence throughout the rest of her formative years.

Yet, the ending portion of Gilbert’s journey in Bali takes on an unrealistic tone that I would not want diluting the expectations of my young fifth graders. From the moment she arrives, Gilbert rides a wave of good luck that is simply improbable beyond belief. A borderline senile medicine man recalls her from years prior, she finds a rental property that resembles Eden without getting ripped off, a healer cures her terrible infection with some herbs, and lastly, she stumbles into the arms of a man who wants to love her selflessly forever. He is overwhelmingly warm and affectionate, declaring early on: “I recognize you don’t love me yet the way I love you, but the truth is that I don’t really care … You can decide to feel however you want to, but I love you and I will always love you” (311). He is the perfect feminist man, caring solely for her needs, and at the end they decide they can work out a life together in America, Australia, Brazil and Bali. Gilbert gets her cake and eats it too; a resolution saccharine enough to undermine the humanity of the rest of the memoir, reducing Eat, Pray, Love to an idyllic tale about the pursuit of Happily Ever After.