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In Virtute Posita Vera Felicita*

Dr. Satinover lived for five years in Switzerland, in both the German and French regions, and has never fallen out of love with it. In the German region he deliberately spoke Schwyzertüüstch as best and as often as he could; smugly used septante, octante and nonante at every opportune moment in the French—thereby casting a tacit glance upward at the Neuchatel accent and attitude and down upon Rousseau; climbed every mountain he was able, including those around the Austrian border near St. Anton where he was put up overnight in a hayrick by an Austrian cowherd who once smuggled cigarettes through the Schwyzertör under the noses of the Nazis: a cowherd with neither TV nor tabloids who without malice had until that moment merely thought every Jew dead at the hand of Hitler, as that’s what he’d been told, and who was amazed to be serving a live one homemade distilled Gentian and mountain pumpernickel at 2:00am and 2000m in a spot where the Sound of Music plays eternally, while being caught up on what happened since the doctor’s dad had flown B17 & B24 Flying Fortresses over Amarillo (but not Dresden).

"The beginning of research is curiosity,

its essence discernment,

its goal:

truth and justice."

-- Isaac Satanow, 1732 - 1804

When his parents visited, they spoke Yiddish to the Swiss farmers and they Schwyzertüüstch in response with perfect mutual understanding. 

Dr. Satinover never rode the Swiss trams without a ticket. In the same spirit, he loves straight-ahead jazz, J.S. Bach and the art of the Renaissance—while finding much of its love of philosophies past merely nostalgic: *"In virtue lies all true happiness." He used to correspond with his now-deceased maternal grandmother in Russian (of which language he recalls approximately nothing, and something only while she was alive); he still recites the opening verses of Caesar’s Gallic Commentaries reflecting ruefully on their undiminished perspicacity, and is an avid if slothful skier and keyboardist: meaning bumps, baroque harpsichord, be-bop keyboard and Korg sequencer all dragged down by sufficient exercise of neither foot nor finger, a knee-brace required for the former as he was struck by a car while in a crosswalk at the proper time in—of all places--Switzerland.

In matters of dress, Dr. Satinover is partial to “strictly”—whether formal or informal. He considers men’s suits the sartorial equivalent of a courtier’s smile and is unsurprised that the tuxedo was “invented” when someone, doubtless drunk, cut the tails off proper dinner attire. As apart from Oslo white tie, alas, is temporarily out, he prefers jeans. He tries to be polite, as one must, to people who claim to be neither liberal nor conservative, wholly disbelieves the insistent in such matters and partially credits only the truly tepid. He admits, after all, that there may be some people, however few and mysterious, who genuinely like suits, dislike equally both Levi Strauss and Fred Astaire and think their opinions originally conceived. Neither is he surprised that “to thine own self be true,” has become the motto to a generation oblivious of the mouth into which Shakespeare put those words: A courtier’s, advising his departing son on how yet more successfully to fawn.

On whatever outré subjects are currently spooking the herd Dr. Satinover enjoys writing both fiction and non-fiction; his critics of the latter insist with noteworthy vehemence that he writes exclusively the former, and badly at that (see critics). He plays tennis, but can’t hold a candle to Julie, his wife of twenty years. He couldn’t even beat her when she was a week away from delivering. To make matters worse, she’s taller than he is and it looks as though one of his three daughters is going to be, too. This wouldn’t irritate him were it not for the fact that for some time, Dr. Satinover lived in the Canton of Appenzell where he unfortunately grew attached to the vice of being taller than others. The Appenzellers, you see, descend directly from Etruscans displaced northward by the founders of Rome and have maintained a remarkable degree of cultural and familial integrity. They are equally well-known for being independent of thought, witty, not to be trifled with and short: By voice vote they have variously (1) prevented a massive federal highway from wrecking their landscape; (2) prevented licensure laws for physicians (anyone may practice medicine; patients vote with their feet and the canton suffers an excess of neither morbidity nor mortality, nor of physicians, for that matter); (3) almost prevented women from getting the vote. Indeed, women's suffrage was forced upon the sub-canton of Appenzell Innerrhoden (AI) by the Swiss federal court ("Bundesgericht") much as not so long before (really) their migration North had been forced upon them by the Roman federal Senate ("fascii"). Thus did Modigliani model his justly-famous sculptures on the Appenzellers and on their Etruscan ancestors, disguising his echte muse-li by making her -- what else? --tall.

The last holdouts resisted Rome until almost 700 AD, to whom some of my neighbors traced their ancestry; their descendants resisted Bern until November of 1990, a remarkable display of persistence in an era of such uniformity of opinion.  (The Canton of Glarus still won't let women vote on local matters. In Dr. Satinover's view, this ruins an otherwise perfect philosophy: It is precisely about those "large" matters upon which the impact of one's vote is as illusory as their importance that an intelligent woman would happily relinquish a ballot; over the "small" matters--those that affect one's life every day--she should on the other hand insist upon having exclusive control.)  Is it any wonder that a mere decade passed before the Swiss caved and joined the U.N., too?

But back to Appenzell: Late at night Dr. Satinover would leave his (rented) 300 year-old farmhouse in Wies with its own waterfall, swimming hole and 80 acres of fruit trees, to drink and carouse with his neighbors, who out of sight of priest or parson would cast off the patina of Christendom to celebrate in the old pagan ways. To guarantee a bountiful harvest in the fall, in the spring, in secret, they drank bull’s blood direct from throat to cup to throat. The practice is of course forbidden (by the Feds) and that probably explains why the city Swiss have to subsidize their agrarian heritage. The city Swiss are avid weekend hikers, nonetheless, and fan out into the countryside at every opportunity. Tellingly, though, few of the Dr.'s Appenzell neighbors had ever been in the opposite direction, to the cities: Zürich, 40 minutes away, or Basel or Bern, whence the laws that harass them emanate. What decent Etruscan would want to visit Rome?

A sense of the Appenzellers may be had from their official web-page (AI): “Appenzell Inner Rhodes is the smallest Swiss canton. The floor space amounts to 172.46 km². The people from Inner Rhodes maintain that this is not a lot but smirkly add that they have selected the best area.”

Smirkly indeed!

Dr. Satinover was for many years a Jungian analyst (the training to become which provided a plausible excuse for his being in Switzerland where he could climb mountains), but he soon grew weary of Jung’s cleverness in  anticipating the sixties by half a century and in then preventing them from ever going away. He is convinced that Jung’s true genius emanated largely from the brain of another Swiss: Wolfgang Pauli (who nonetheless remained properly grateful for Jung’s psychotherapeutic assistance and friendship in the years when the future Nobel Prizewinner was in despair at being rejected by a faithless cabaret singer).

Dr. Satinover has himself undergone numerous analyses and psychotherapeutic adventures, some helpful and some not, and has done likewise unto others. Looking back, the psychoanalytic moment most helpful to him—and not surprisingly, really, the funniest—was when one year he mused to his then analyst, a most taciturn Freudian, something along the lines of, “…I think I’m in analysis to get out of analysis,” to which his analyst responded with a rare speech, the entirety of which may be here quoted: “Yes,” thus forever sparing his fortunate analysand the ridiculous fate, fame, foibles and fortune of a Woody Allen (or for that matter the fate, fame, foibles and lack of fortune of a Jung or a Freud). His wife smiles knowingly.

Those of his heroes who have withstood the trials of maturation include (all since childhood or late teens) J. S. Bach, George Washington, Winston Churchill, Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman and Ella Fitzgerald, though he is partial as well to Blossom Dearie as also to the above-alluded-to, forever-nameless and taciturn Freudian.

And speaking of cabaret singers, he has recently become entranced by the jazz vocals of Tierney Sutton and equally by the harmonics and riffs of her pianist Christian Jacob (whose name translates with exquisite antique multilingual precision as "Jim".)

He lives in Weston, Connecticut with his (tall) wife of twenty years, Julie, and their three daughters, Sarah, aged sixteen, Anni, aged fourteen (tall) and Jenny, aged eleven. He is a member of the (Orthodox) Beth Israel Synagogue of Westport/Norwalk, Connecticut, and the Aspetuck Valley Country Club. His handicap is in the high thirties both with respect to observance and to golf, but he is glad to belong to clubs that are as glad to have him as is he to be had.