Good will can be described as the desire to have something else stronger and more beautiful, for this desire makes oneself stronger and more beautiful. [The Right Of #121] 

It is as much a drive as the drive towards food or sex...[It] is the authentic hope reality can be liked. [The Right Of #181]

As a man asks--how can I have a good effect on the people and things I meet, including a woman; how can I be a means of another person being stronger, kinder, more confident--the self-respect he feels and the happiness and freedom that go with it are tremendous. "If you are able to have good will," Eli Siegel said in an Aesthetic Realism class in l975, "you come into your full strength." 

I) Good Will and the Desire to Know 

I learned from Aesthetic Realism that in not wanting to see the full and rich reality of other people's lives, I had stunted my own strength. Though I thought I was an intellectual--when friends at college talked about things that excited them, I felt I couldn't listen except to figure out how to out-trump them. And though I told myself I wanted very much to be kind, and often would talk through the night when a friend had a problem troubling him--if, in the end, he didn't take my advice, I would feel insulted and use it to justify spending more time alone with myself. 

While I acted as if I were equal to the depths of other people, I arrogantly expected people hearing me talk to feel I was too deep for them to comprehend. I was very much like the "moody young man"--Ronald Hill--whom Eli Siegel writes of in "Love and Reality" in Self and World : 

He thought himself a profoundly distinguished being whose attitudes had a dimension to them that could not be discerned elsewhere.

On January 7, l975, in an Aesthetic Realism Ethical Study Conference, Eli Siegel explained to me, critically and so kindly, that the ill will with which I was using my mind in relation to Cynthia Malloy, the woman I said I cared for, was hurting my life--including my ability to do well with my studies of how to compose music. 

For example, when Cynthia was concerned about her parents, instead of wanting to see what she felt, I was angry having to think about her in relation to her family at all. I wanted to be the one important person in her life. 

When I told Mr. Siegel about this and about how I had been speaking with Cynthia at home, he said: 

While I hoped for this power as a musician, I learned it was exactly what I was not doing with Cynthia. "You should say," Eli Siegel told me, "Cynthia Malloy, you're a note in music, only a little more difficult." And he continued, "Do you think you have some of that woman diminishing-tendency? Remember, it was the weakest thing in Beethoven, his inability to see women well." 

He taught me what I needed most to know and for told me with such compassion: 

While there is anything in this world we don't care for enough and we don't try to, we are ashamed. There has to be a certain intensity about this. This matter of good will has been in all literature. Aesthetic Realism sees kindness as the most intellectual thing in the world.