Edwin Forrest — What Makes a Man's Life Large or Small?

A Preference for Smallness

Growing up in Miami, Florida in the 1960s, I felt bigger whenever I heard Cantor Bornstein sing at Temple Israel in his resonant, powerful tenor voice that filled the synagogue. That sound made for a feeling of awe and wonder in me.

And from as early as I can remember I loved seeing and taking part in performances of singing, dancing and acting. Aesthetic Realism shows that art itself arises from the largest thing in a person—the desire to see meaning in things and give it beautiful form. An actor literally tries to do what Mr. Siegel described, "to become another self, to have other feeling." In seventh grade I was in a school production of Christopher Sergel's comedy Cheaper by the Dozen, my first full-length play. I was one of 12 children in a family, and on opening night, even though the entire cast lost our place, improvised, and then jumped back in about ten pages ahead in the script—I had a wonderful time, and felt something big had happened to me.

But I also had intensely a desire to arrange a small world I could own and control. Ellen Reiss describes this in The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known as a "preference in everyone for a world we can tidily rule rather than a large world we need to understand." As a boy, I daydreamed about playing with a train set that had a miniature town built around it. It was populated by real, miniature people, and I could make them do anything I wanted.

An important aspect of how I came to see largeness and smallness was how I felt about my shorter size. Rather than seeing it as a deficit, in many ways I thought it was an asset. I felt my build was compact and neat, and equated this with being wily and agile. When I played touch football with other boys in the neighborhood, I could maneuver in and out of the pack quickly, while others couldn't. I saw bigger people as verging on clumsiness and even a little stupid.

In an Aesthetic Realism lesson, Mr. Siegel spoke to a young man who was shorter than average and said that he had resented people who were tall. He asked the man:

Eli Siegel. How does a smaller person have contempt for another? It's in the phrase, "The best things come in small packages."... It's a great American phrase.

That is a saying I quoted often—and hoped was true! Then Mr. Siegel said, "You feel, then, that small people have, by ordinance of the world and divine ordinance, more intelligence?" That's just how I saw it. Said Mr. Siegel with logic and charm:

Eli Siegel. It happens that Lincoln and Napoleon both had power and also sense...You can have sense anywhere from four and a half to seven feet.

Meanwhile, that preference for smallness took in many things, including my own emotions. I often felt incapable of feeling anything sizable or passionate, both as an actor and in my life. But I was also desperate to be able to do so, and I think my desire to be an actor was part of that. I am very grateful to Class Chairman Ellen Reiss who has spoken to me about this in Aesthetic Realism classes. These are just a few of the beautiful, life-changing questions she asked me:

• Do you think everyone is in a fight between great emotion and little emotion?
• If you had a tremendous emotion, do you think you would be a fool? Is it good for oneself, or is that when one is giving in?
• Do you like wonder? It's related to the opposites of large and small—you want to be large, but when you are, something controls you.

And she asked did I want to have a "sense of awe, the grand feeling." Questions like these and the education I have received for over twenty five years have changed my life top to bottom. I can certainly see more and hope to, but I have had large, grand feeling—about poetry, what people deserve economically, as an actor, and very much in my happy marriage to Meryl Nietsch-Cooperman whom I love so much. I have a conviction that large feeling is good for me, that if I don't have it I am missing out on something luscious and bedrock.

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