- “. . . twichin’ like a finger on the trigger of a gun.” [Paul Simon, “My Little Town”]
Salvador Dali, The Enigma of Desire, or My Mother, My Mother, My Mother (1929)
An ethical and moral life necessarily is built on values (grounded in emotion), which guide us in the direction we should go. Yet if our values are misguided or too rigid, they can lead us astray.
We perform best when we expect great things of ourselves. Children fare best when important adults expect great things of them. However, unrealistic expectations (values plus evaluation – emotion and thought) can lead to unhappiness. And when we expect things from others, depending on the nature and quality of the relationship, we may be setting ourselves up for disappointment.
Desire can motivate us, and lead to great accomplishments, but it can also lead to expectations. Expectations, too, can lead to great accomplishments but they can also be unrealistic. When that happens, a critical check is absent from desire.
Real
Technical and Analytical Readings
- William Glaser, Choice Theory: A New Psychology of Personal Freedom (Harper Collins, 1998).
On some of the difficulties with systems of ethics and morality:
- Mark Osiel, The Right To Do Wrong: Morality and the Limits of Law (Harvard University Press, 2019): “Osiel argues that to better understand how law works, we need to pay more attention to this interaction between relatively lenient rights and a more stringent morality.”
- Todd May, A Decent Life: Morality for the Rest of Us (University of Chicago Press, 2019): “ . . . May argues that whichever moral theory we might favor — be it utilitarianism, Kantianism or virtue ethics — ‘we will find it difficult to live up to its requirements’ because ‘all these theories ask more than most of us are capable of.’”
- Holly M. Smith, Making Morality Work (Oxford University Press, 2018): “What if we grasp the principle of utilitarianism, for example, but because of ignorance or uncertainty about the predicament we find ourselves in, or because we simply aren’t smart enough, we can’t determine which of our actions would in fact promote the greatest good?”
True Narratives
- R. Tripp Evans, Grant Wood: A Life (Knopf, 2010), suggests that this American painter of simple rural life was more complex than he let on. Evans' biography suggests that his Midwestern stoicism masked conflicts about his past and his sexual identity. Perhaps his life is in part a cautionary tale about the damage that can be inflicted by the expectations of others.
- Christopher B. Krebs, A Most Dangerous Book: Tacitus’s ‘Germania’ From the Roman Empire to the Third Reich (W.W. Norton & Company, 2011): arguing that the German encounter with Rome nearly 2,000 years earlier led to observations being preserved in the classical literature, which later were transformed into virulent Nazi prejudices.
- Michael Holroyd, A Book of Secrets: Illegitamate Daughters, Absent Fathers (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2011): this narrative account of two women in early twentieth-century Britain “casts the spell of a time long gone, of loves endured and lost, expectations dashed on the rocks of reality, of inner desires forever stilled, casting their shadows into history.”
- Emily Rapp, The Still Point of the Turning World (The Penguin Press, 2013): a mother’s grief memoir about a parent coping with crushed expectations when a child receives a dreaded medical diagnosis
- Michael Kimmel, Angry White Men: American Masculinity at the End of an Era (Nation Books, 2013): an exploration of a once-dominant cultural group’s reaction to its loss of political power
- Patricia O’Toole, The Moralist: Woodrow Wilson and the World He Made (Simon & Schuster, 2018): “ . . . the Hazards of Idealism”
- Amy Chua, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother (Penguin Press, 2011): “So many parenting memoirs capture the various ways the authors’ children have taken them to hell and back. Refreshingly, and perhaps uniquely, Chua instead catalogs the various ways she tortured her two young daughters, all in the name of Chinese tradition and the goal of reaching Carnegie Hall (or at least the Juilliard precollege program).”
- Robin Romm, Double Bind: Women on Ambition (Liveright, 2017): “. . . explores the way American women are taught to dream very big, and expect very little”.
- Hugh Thomas, Rivers of Gold: The Rise of the Spanish Empire, from Columbus to Magellan (Random House, 2004).
- Hugh Thomas, The Golden Age: The Spanish Empire of Charles V (Allen Lane, 2010).
- Hugh Thomas, The Golden Empire: Spain, Charles V, and the Creation of America (Random House, 2011).
- Hugh Thomas, World Without End: Spain, Philip II, and the First Global Empire (Random House, 2015).
Case studies of political philosophers, as examples of how expectations can lead us astray:
- George F. Will, The Conservative Sensibility (Hachette Books, 2019): “ . . . conservatism stems in part, as all conservatism does, from a profound sense of loss: in Will’s case, of the founders’ revolutionary vision of limited government, separation of powers, maximal federalism and inviolable individual freedom. This book, at its best, is a celebration of that vision, and of its counterintuitive impulses — to keep politics in its place, to silo religion outside of government, to resist centralized plans for the imposition of justice and to let a society breathe, live and innovate on its own.”
Documentary and Educational Films
Documentaries on Expectations:
- Bigger, Stronger, Faster: on steroid use among body builders
- Deep Water: a man cuts corners to sail solo around the world, leading to his own tragic undoing
- Sound and Fury: examining the lives of deaf people with deaf children – members of a “deaf subculture” – and the aversion of some parents toward cochlear implant surgery
- Sherman’s March: a young man sets out to make a documentary about the Civil-War Sherman, and ends up making one about himself
Imaginary
Fictional Narratives
Jean Valjean was sitting in a cross-walk on some planks deposited at the gate of a timber-yard. His face was turned towards the highway, his back towards the light; he had forgotten the sun which was on the point of rising; he had sunk into one of those profound absorptions in which the mind becomes concentrated, which imprison even the eye, and which are equivalent to four walls. There are meditations which may be called vertical; when one is at the bottom of them, time is required to return to earth. Jean Valjean had plunged into one of these reveries. He was thinking of Cosette, of the happiness that was possible if nothing came between him and her, of the light with which she filled his life, a light which was but the emanation of her soul. He was almost happy in his revery. Cosette, who was standing beside him, was gazing at the clouds as they turned rosy. [Victor Hugo, Les Misérables (1862), Volume IV – Saint-Denis; Book Third – The House in the Rue Plumet, Chapter VIII, The Chain-Gang.]
Novels and stories:
- Jonathan Franzen, Freedom (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010): a “family romance” about the clash between dreams and power, in which the protagonists, “(l)ocked together in obligation and duty, assailed by guilt and love . . . thrash against the cycle of needs – to forgive, to explain, to solve the riddle of unacknowledged hurts buried under thick layers of half-repressed memory”.
- Theodor Fontane, Effi Briest, Or many who have an idea of their possibilities and need nevertheless accept the prevailing order in the way they act, and thereby strengthen and confirm it absolutely (1895): the author’s subtitle expresses the theme.
- Bart Schneider, Beautiful Inez (Shaye Areheart Books, 2005). {"As in Secret Love, Schneider explores with great sensitivity the way that confronting our inherited sense of the forbidden can unlock us from ourselves." - from Booklist review}
- Bart Schneider, Secret Love (Viking Adult, 2001).
- J. D. Landis, Longing (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2000).
- Dinaw Mengestu, The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears (Riverhead Books, 2007).
- Thad Ziolkowski, Wichita (Europa Editions, 2012): “a novel about expectations and outcomes, about what is open and what is veiled.”
- Samantha Schweblin, Mouthful of Birds: Stories (Riverhead Books, 2019): “Her stories are obsessed with notions of purity and danger; with the ways people can be deformed, very early on, in the name of tenderness, teaching and care.”
- Curtis Sittenfeld, You Think It, I’ll Say It: Stories (Random House, 2018): “‘And underneath all the decorum, isn’t most everyone judgmental and disappointed?’ wonders Hannah Gravener, the judgmental and disappointed narrator of ‘The Man of My Dreams.’ ‘Or is it only certain people, and can she choose not to be one of them — can she choose this without also, like her mother, just giving in?’”
- Vanessa Hua, Deceit and Other Possibilities: Stories (Willow Books, 2016): “The most memorable stories address familial expectations placed on the next generation: A closeted gay couple pretend to be traveling roommates when they run into family friends at a bed-and-breakfast; a pastor bribes an entire East African village to claim he converted them on a mission trip, to save face with his family and congregation; a man in his 70s returns to a tiny town west of Hong Kong to fulfill his (he thinks) dying mother’s wish that he marry someone from home.”
- Mecca Jamilah Sullivan, Big Girl: A Novel (Liveright, 2022): “. . . an 8-year-old girl in Harlem is forced to change her body to fit someone else’s standard.”
Visual Arts
- Grant Wood, Death on Ridge Road (1935)
- Grant Wood, Self-Portrait (1932)
- Salvador Dali, The Birth of Liquid Desires (1932)
- Salvador Dali, The Great Masturbator (1929)
- Giorgio de Chirico, Philosopher and Poet (1916)
- Gustav Klimt, Portrait of Mada Primavesi (1912)
- Gustav Klimt, Expectation (1905)
- Jacques-Louis David, Antiochus and Stratonice (1774)
Music: songs and other short pieces
- Peter, Paul and Mary, Lemon Tree
- Franz Schubert (composer), Die Erwartung (Expectations), D. 159 (1814) (lyrics)
Film and Stage
Values and expectations:
- Jalsaghar (The Music Room), a tragedy about a once-wealthy man whose addiction to music and social standing leads him to squander the remnants of his fortune.
- A Separation, writes Roger Ebert “is a film in which every important character tries to live a good life . . . That this leads them into disharmony . . . is because no list of rules can account for human feelings. The film involves its audience in an unusually direct way, because although we can see the logic of everyone’s position, our emotions often disagree.” These comments are accurate as far as they go but the film goes beyond emotions into their resulting values and expectations.
- Mud, a story of murder, romantic love, disappointment, fidelity and infidelity, and growing up
Values:
- Repulsion, abouta woman who becomes obsessively violent when her sister carries on a relationship with a married man
- Summer, a light-hearted treatmentof one woman’s attachment to ideals
- The Little Foxes, a “fable of second-generation carpet-baggers in a small Southern town around 1900” and their mercenary values
Expectations:
- Devi (Goddess) relates the unrealistic cultural demandsplaced upon women in traditional Indian society.
- Tabu: idyllic love denied in Polynesia
- Rebecca, Hitchcock’s suspenseyarn about “the second mistress of Manderley, a simple and modest and self-effacing girl who seemed to have no chance against every one's—even her husband's—memories of the first”
- Ugetsu, about the pitfallsof ambition
- Harakiri, illustrating the pitfallsof social expectations
- 8½, about the pitfallsof personal expectations
- The Godfatherand The Godfather II, films that explore violence-laden expectations of organized crime families
- The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, a dry critique of upper middle-class manners and mores
- All About Eve, a film about ambition
- The Asphalt Jungle, illustrating that criminals too have aspirations
- Death of a Salesman, about a man’s failureto capture the American dream
- Effi Briest, a film abouthow social expectations turned into demands, consistently at a woman’s expense
- The Player, about a writerwho expected to be called back
- Pride and Prejudice: about husband-seekingin nineteenth-century “refined” society (also the 2005 version)
- Stage Door, on young women trying to make it in New York theatre
- The Story of Adèle H, a biographical dramatizationabout the romantic obsession and descent into madness of Victor Hugo’s youngest daughter
- Stroszek, a tale of three mismatched misfitswho seek their fortunes in Wisconsin, unrealistically and with little success
Two Bob Rafelson films questioning “American myths of success”:
- Five Easy Pieces, a now-classic American portrayalof 1960s-style alienation: the title refers to “the distance between (the protagonist), practicing to become a concert pianist (as a boy), and the need he feels twenty years later to disguise himself as an oil-field rigger”
- The King of Marvin Gardens, criticized for “exploiting rather than exploring its themes of failed dreams and tawdry realities”
Music: Composers, artists, and major works
Offenbach, Les Contes d’Hoffman (The Tales of Hoffman): another allegory about desire, and expectations of another in a slightly lighter vein (performances conducted by Karytinos , Denève and Tate)
In the classic German legend, Faust is a successful scholar who is not satisfied. He bargains with the devil for unlimited knowledge and worldly pleasures but the cost is his soul.
- Gounod, Faust: an allegory about desire (here are links to performances conducted by Prêtre, Binder and Friedrich)
- Berlioz, La Damnation de Faust, Op. 24, H111 (1854) (performances featuring Kaufman, Gedda and Vidal)
- Boito, Mefistofele (performances featuring Ramey, Abdrazakov and Giaotti)
- Franz Liszt, A Faust Symphony (Eine Faust-Symphonie in drei Charakterbildern), S. 108 (1854, rev. 1861, 1880): “The full title of the work, A Faust Symphony in Three Character Sketches after Goethe: (1) Faust, (2) Gretchen, (3) Mephistopheles, delineates the three movements of the composition.” “In Liszt's musical telling of the tale, Faust is a combination of the other two characters. He has a warm loving side and a dark, satanic side that is willing to do anything for knowledge, including selling his soul to the devil.” “The symphony was originally fully instrumental. Yet three years after completing it, Liszt added an ‘appendix’ with tenor solo and men’s chorus setting the ‘Chorus mysticus’ that concludes lines of Faust, Part II, extolling the spiritual power of Das Ewig-Weibliche ('the eternal feminine').” Top recorded performances are by Beecham and Silvestri in 1959, Bernstein and Bressler in 1960, Horenstein and Mitchinson in 1972, Bernstein and Riegel in 1976 ***, Solti and Jerusalem in 1976, Masur and König in 1981, Rattle and Seiffert in 1993, Ligeti and Molnár in 1995, Sinopoli and Cole in 1995; and Barenboim and Domingo in 1998.
- Liszt, Mephisto Waltzes: No. 1 in A Major (1862); No. 2, S. 515 (1881); No. 3, S. 216 (1883); No. 4, S. 696 (1885)
- Schumann: Szenen aus Goethe's Faust (Scenes from Goethe's Faust), WoO 3 (1853)
- Lokshin: Three Scenes from Goethe's Faust (1980)
In romantic tragedy, amore (often called “love”) is a central value and expectation, which always goes awry.
- Verdi, Il Trovatore (The Troubador) (performances conducted by Bartoletti, Rettig and Mehta)
- Donizetti, Lucia di Lammermoor (performances conducted by Rescigno, Guidarini and Karajan)
- Verdi, Don Carlo (performances conducted by Fulton, Haitink and Karajan)
- Massenet, Werther (performances featuring Dale, Carreras and Álvarez)
- Verdi, Ernani (performances conducted by Pirolli, Muti and featuring Licitra)
- Lully, Atys (performances conducted by Christie, Christie and Christie)
Occasionally, it works out:
- Rameau, Dardanus (1739): the title character wrestles with Jealousy, Troubles, Suspicions and Pleasures, and eventually marries his love (performances conducted by Pichon and Minkowski).
Bartók, violin concerti:
Other compositions:
- Kile Smith, “The Arc In the Sky”: “Kile Smith’s 2018 setting of journal entries and poems by Robert Lax (1915–2000) is an epic, hour-long tour de force of thought and feeling that traverses topics ranging from Louis Armstrong to Jack Kerouac, and from Jerusalem to the shores of the island of Patmos.”
Fire! Orchestra has created three albums whose lyrics speak to life's primal desires, underlain by wrought and urgent instrumentation. As a whole, this combination evokes expectations.
Other albums, from the dark/gray side:
- Wallace Roney, “Blue Dawn – Blue Nights” (expectations defeated)
- Alex Harding & Lucian Ban, “Dark Blue”
- Alister Spence & Satoko Fujii Orchestra Kobe, “Imagine Meeting You Here”: what did you expect?
- The Crossing, “The Arc In the Sky”: “Kile Smith’s 2018 setting of journal entries and poems by Robert Lax (1915–2000) is an epic, hour-long tour de force of thought and feeling that traverses topics ranging from Louis Armstrong to Jack Kerouac, and from Jerusalem to the shores of the island of Patmos.”
Poetry
VALUES:
- Robert Frost, “Reluctance”
- Edgar Lee Masters, “John M. Church”
- Edgar Lee Masters, “Lambert Hutchins”
EXPECTATIONS:
And, yes, we are far from polished, far from pristine, but that doesn’t mean we are striving to form a union that is perfect.
We are striving to forge our union with purpose.
[from Amanda Gorman, “The Hill We Climb”]
Poems:
- Robert Frost, “Dust of Snow”
- Robert Frost, “Home Burial” (analysis)
- Robert Frost, “To Earthward” (analysis)
- Billy Collins, “Another Reason Why I Don’t Keep a Gun in the House”
- Pablo Neruda, “Love”
- Pablo Neruda, Sonnet XI
- William Wordsworth, “A Complaint”
- Javed Akhtar, “Whenever the clouds of pain and sadness loomed”
- Edgar Lee Masters, “Fletcher McGee”
- Edgar Lee Masters, “Nellie Clark”
- Edgar Lee Masters, “Searcy Foote”
- Wallace Stevens, “The Well-Dressed Man With a Beard”