"Let us return to yourself," he said, "and my plans for you. There exists among certain men a freemasonry of which I cannot now say more than that it numbers in its ranks four of the reigning sovereigns of Europe. Now, the entourage of one of these, who is the Emperor of Germany, is trying to cure him of his fancy. That is a very serious matter, and may lead us to war. Yes, my dear sir, that is a fact. You remember the story of the man who believed that he had the Princess of China shut up in a bottle. It was a form of insanity. He was cured of it. But as soon as he ceased to be mad he became merely stupid. There are maladies which we must not seek to cure because they alone protect us from others that are more serious. A cousin of mine had a stomach ailment: he could digest nothing. The most learned stomach specialists treated him, to no avail. I took him to a certain doctor (another highly interesting man, by the way, of whom I could tell you a great deal). He guessed at once that the malady was nervous, persuaded his patient of this, advised him to eat whatever he liked unhesitatingly, and assured him that his digestion would stand it. But my cousin also had nephritis. What the stomach digested perfectly well the kidneys ceased after a time to be able to eliminate, and my cousin, instead of living to a find old age with an imaginary disease of the stomach which obliged him to keep to a diet, diet at forty with his stomach cured but his kidneys ruined. Given a very considerable lead over your contemporaries, who knows whether you may not perhaps become what some eminent man of the past might have been in a beneficent spirit had revealed to him, among a generation that knew nothing of them, the secrets of steam and electricity. Do not be foolish, do not refuse for reasons of tact and discretion. Try to understand that, if I do you a great service, I do not expect my reward from you to be any less great. It is many years now since people in society ceased to interest me. I have but one passion left, to seek to redeem the mistakes of my life by conferring the benefit of my knowledge on a soul that is still virgin and capable of being fired by virtue. I have had great sorrows, of which I may tell you perhaps some day; I have lost my wife, who was the loveliest, the noblest, and most perfect creature that one could dream of. I have young relatives who are not - I do not say worthy, but capable of accepting the intellectual heritage of which I have been speaking. Who knows but that you may be the person into whose hands it is to pass, the person whose life I shall be able to guide and to raise to so lofty a plane. My own would gain in return. Perhaps in teaching you the great secrets of diplomacy I might recover a taste for them myself, and begin at last to do things of real interest in which you would have an equal share. But before I can discount this I must see you often, very often, every day."
Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way, pp. 300-301
The conversation continues between M. de Charlus and Proust. At this point I had trouble figuring out whether M. de Charlus was actually just insane or merely one of his century's great chickenhawks - or both. Yesterday's M. de Charlus rant about the Jews could, I suppose, be attributed to that age's rampant anti-Semitism, and not just general lunacy on his part. However, following up today with his theories on his nephew's stomach ailment, the freemasonry of European leaders, and the bottle that contained the Princess of China, he may be winning me over. The other day in one of my predictably anti-Trump rants on Twitter I proposed that one of the reasons why he says such stupid things is that people who have grown up with that much privilege simply don't understand the relationship between cause and effect. You saw this with George W. Bush and I fear it would be much worse with Trump (although, thankfully, the death spiral of his campaign has begun and now we're just waiting around to see how magnificent his failure is in the general election). There's always someone to bail you out, so there is not way to learn the connection between a bad decision and its implications. Here's the thing, I wonder if there is actually a biological side to this as well, that is, nature as well as nurture. We know from the Accident Mind that environment can impact the chemistry of the brain, essentially the wiring. So, if you grew up in such a implication-free environment your brain wiring would end up being different, so not only would you not fall back on experience to decide the problem but your brain would less effectively process the possibility of a terrible consequence.
Now, in regards to him being a world class chickenhawk. I might just be reading too much into his statements, "I have but one passion left, to seek to redeem the mistakes of my life by conferring the benefit of my knowledge on a soul that is still virgin and capable of being fired by virtue." and "Try to understand that, if I do you a great service, I do not expect my reward from you to be any less great." and "But before I can discount this I must see you often, very often, every day." Of course, to be fair, he shares, "I have had great sorrows, of which I may tell you perhaps some day; I have lost my wife, who was the loveliest, the noblest, and most perfect creature that one could dream of." Somehow I don't think he would have said the same thing about her when she was alive. As the Joe Pantoliano character Lenny tells Leonard (Guy Pearce) in Memento, "You're living a dream, kid. A dread wife to pine for . . ." Or maybe I'm just overly cynical in my old age.
Now, having said all that, I think the Proustian observation that, "But as soon as he ceased to be mad he became merely stupid" is going to find a place on my Champlain College business cards.
No comments:
Post a Comment