перевел вот On Torture and Parenting - давно собирался.

This is, i'd say, almost a textbook case of an essay. Pretty good quality too. This is the level of the best Harper's essays. What is done here, basically, is bringing two distinct things together and showing their connection. Each is explored separately and in the relation to another one. I am not inclined even to discuss the political agenda here, or, for that matter, validity of bringing Dostoyevsky in the current political context - this i rather disliked for obvious reasons.

What attracts me, though, is Roth's underlying view of the paradoxical nature of human upbringing in particular, and, as a consequence, human condition in general, a conflict as an integral part of existence/interaction.

An infat comes into this world from his "previous" world of total satisfaction.

A human, obviously, has some purely physiological needs, like food, for instance, and we are to devise and implement certain strategy to satisfy those needs.

An infant does not have much in terms of strategies available: when she's hungry, she cries. She does the same when she's left alone: she wants her mother, now! We know that if a baby is not fed - it dies eventually. On the other hand, we know that a baby won't die if she's not fed, say, for 4 hours. Same with emotional contact and cuddling, and her mother being near.

But an infant does not know whether her mother would come in 4 hours and feed her.

The thing is that as long as we are not satisfying immediately the need expressed, the infant's brain and psyche gets a message: this particular circumstance is beyond my control. When a human meets a challenge, when there's a need to be satisfied, whatever it is, a human is supposed to be active and find a way to satisfy this need.

Once we get a message in the early childhood that something is beyond our control, a very important thing happens: we discover that pure happiness is unattainable in principle, because there are things in this world which are beyond our control. Once our brain gets this message, it should attempt to adjust it's goals, their weights and priorities, to get to happiness through the back door.

This system of re-orientation and changing priorities can not really be used to take care of frustrated physiological needs: nobody can say i don't care about food. The most one can say is "I don't care about quality of food". The main question here is how flexible the re-alignment and re-orientation system is in a given individual. Frustrated needs are always here, this is true for every single human. So the happy one is the one who efficiently eliminates unattainable goals.  ¶ 11:33 PM