3622. “the law of his heart”
The individual … carries out the law of his heart. … The
law of the heart, through its very realization, ceases to be
a law of the heart. For in its realization it receives the form
of an [affirmative] being, and is now a universal power for
which the particular heart is a matter of indifference, so
that the individual … no longer finds it to be his own.
Hegel, “Actualization of Self Consciousness,”
Phenomenology of Spirit
I wonder about the fear that fills my heart on the eve of the Epic of its triumphant evacuation. Say the story is true: Say that once I put out of my heart what is into my heart—say, at the pitch of night, when I am most afraid (the time now): Then the heart that so fears ceases to be mine, and the fearer so fearful ceases to be me. If so, why be afraid, so?
Is it that I might be scared that you might be scarred by whatever it is beyond all sight that fills my heart with so much fright?
It’s not that. I am certain that by the time this telegram reaches you, the terror that dictates it will have dissipated through the very fact of its conveyance. By the time it reaches you, I do not doubt that whatever ghost, which got me going to write you, will be long and a little enough gone. Whatever it was that so “harrow[ed] me with fear and wonder” (quoting Hamlet, you can hear already—thank God—the ghost giving up), will be hollowed (hopefully halfway hallowed) into the very type by which it makes its way to you. At worst, what reaches you will cause no harm—merely a faint reflection of someone else’s failed terror. And at best—a lot to wish for, I know, but well within the bounds of recorded human power—an object lesson in how men and women learn to become, a little bit, their better selves by the practice of renouncing their own “small … shivering” (George Eliot) specificity (a practice, never perfect—which of us self-respecting self-reliers would want that?)—renouncing a little the deed we hold dear as the native ground of our own particular souls.
So what now is it that still murmurs in the heart? Nothing now, I guess—dread and dreader, being gone, I am a man again.
Still, there’s tomorrow night. Still.
3269. “He somehow felt he was headed in the right direction”
As he peered ahead into the great land that stretched before
him, the way seemed long. But the sky was bright, and
he somehow felt he was headed in the right direction.
E. B. White, Stuart Little
His search for the bird he loves best having stumbled, a little pilgrim, susceptible to just about everything that the world has to throw at him, but pretty sturdy still, is helped up and set straight by a Good Samaritan, a roadside repairman who is there to remind him that “a person who is looking for something doesn’t travel very fast.”
His doubts were his own property (Isaiah Berlin on John Stuart Mill)—but the directions that help any kind steward, no matter how doubtful, toward his destination: well, that comes from gifts you only get once you’ve given them to someone else.
Note:
The symbol star it lifts against your ceiling
Help me accept its fate with Christmas feeling.
(Frost, “The Gift Outright”)
3270. “I track my uncontrollable footsteps”
… while they take their quick turn, even on stealthiest
tiptoe, toward the point of view that, within the compass,
will give me most instead of least to answer for …
Henry James, preface to the New York
edition of The Golden Bowl
I can answer for this much, concerning my nocturnal movements and moments of seeing right now: never, in my weirdest dreams, did I imagine that Late-Night-Life would look as crazy as this. It’s as crowded and busy and hard to figure as it was back in its bright-lights, big-city phase and, in its own way, no less hazardous. (No wonder I sometimes get so tired during the day. My late-night running mate from that earlier dark age used to say: it’s like having a second job!)
The mysterious calculating of seeking strangers across a crowded, darkened Club has been replaced by the wily ambiguity and willful allusions of the hooded ancestors, as they conduct themselves across a space of time and text as dim and demanding as any distant-starlit desire to close the distance—that desire so defining the transports and compass of youth … and age. On the bright side, you sure save a lot in cab fare and faring—one thing I still remember, clear as day: getting from the west side to the east side and back again could be murder on your pocket and your peace of mind. Nowadays, everyone you want to see, and everyone you don’t, and everyone you do and don’t—the gang’s all here. No need to go out and seek them—like Chinese Food and Trouble, they’re perfectly ready to come to you. No need to go out to seek them: the mission now is to really see them. They come to you now, crossing your threshold, and whatever courage inheres in simple courtesy requires that you greet them at the door.
There’s a problem, though, when the party comes to you, now: you don’t really know their language anymore: a dreamy demotic that has faded from the sphere of your familiars. So the lot to answer to—all those now masked faces you once (or wished to) love; all those precedent principles and principals to whom you pledged your allegiance (maybe you were just reciting at first, but not at last)—the Lot you Answer to, what with all the weirdness of its messaging and the consequent weirdness of your mirroring, is a Lot to Answer for (gaps in your transcript; flawed and failed translations; excesses or inefficiencies in formalities and familiarities).
Whatever. In dreams begin responsibilities: It isn’t easy, but you try. So much of the company seem so strange now—but don’t be scared. Just welcome them as brightly as you can. “Subsidence of the fearsome …
Note: was always, at first, positive emergence of the sweet” (James, The Golden Bowl).
3272. “the masked pain of his bewilderment and solitude”
Who that has had experience of our social reality will doubt
its alienated condition? And who that has thought of his
experience in the light of certain momentous speculations
made over the last two centuries … will not be disposed to find
some seed of cogency in a view that proposes an antinomian
reversal of all accepted values, of all received realities?
But who that has spoken, or tried to speak, with a psychotic
friend will consent to betray the masked pain of his bewilderment
and solitude by making it the paradigm of liberation from
the imprisoning falsehoods of an alienated social reality?
Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity
I’ll bet a lot of people will remember the post-1960s intellectual sentimentalists Professor Trilling takes his stand against here (the pro-crazy crowd—R. D. Laing, Deleuze and Guattari, inter alia). On the other hand, aside from me, there are only three people in the world who know or knew the story I’m about to tell you, and two of them are dead, and one of them would never tell. Here’s the story: There was a lady who lived across the way from us when I was a kid, and I loved spending time with her. So engrossing was the companionable compassion of her conversation that I really can’t remember what the other kids were doing while I was spending all those hours talking to her. All I remember is what sure felt like the sincerity and authenticity of her engagement with me. I would follow her around while she performed (or didn’t) her housewife chores (usually with a cigarette dangling from her mouth), telling her about what made me afraid (mostly my father), and listening to her tell me that I was stronger than I thought, and that I didn’t need to be so afraid. (Your father loves you, she would say. I know your father, and I know that he loves you.)
And here the story goes south: her husband lost his job, the family lost the house, and she lost her mind. Her husband left her, the kids were taken from her, and she was moved to some kind of halfway house. My mom and another neighbor lady used to go visit her when they could, which wasn’t as often as they thought they should, and still more often than they really wanted to: in the last years, she was mostly locked in her private madness—all traces of the hilarious charismatic my mom and the other neighbors remembered as the most magnetic social force this side of Pearl Mesta were pretty much worn away by then. Sometimes, though, she would break free of her personal prison for a few minutes, and remember the old days. It was on one of those leaves of lucidity that she told the story about how when I reluctantly left her house (she had to send me home—it was dinnertime), I would walk backward, so that I might keep her in my sight for as long as I could.
I just kept looking back. Still do, sometimes.