"Why, naturally, Madame, one cannot have - if you'll forgive the expression - every form of mental derangement. You have others, but not that particular one. Yesterday I visited a home for neurasthenics. In the garden, I saw a man standing on a bench, motionless as a fakir, his neck bent in a position which must have been highly uncomfortable. On my asking him what he was doing there, he replied without turning his head or moving a muscle: 'You see, Doctor, I am extremely rheumatic and catch cold very easily. I have just been taking a lot of exercise, and while I was foolishly getting too hot, my neck was touch my flannels. If I move it away from my flannels now before letting myself cool down, I'm sure to get a stiff neck and possibility bronchitis.' Which he would, in fact, have done. 'You're a real neurotic, that's what you are,' I told him. And do you know what argument he advanced to prove that I was mistaken? It was this: that while all the other patients in the establishment had a man for testing their weight, so much so that the weighing machine had to be padlocked so that they shouldn't spend the whole day on it, he had to be lifted on to it bodily, so little did he care to be weighed. He prided himself on not sharing the mania of the others, oblivious of the fact that he had one of his own, and that it was this that saved him from another. You must not be offended by the comparison, Madame, for that man who dared no turn his neck for fear of catching a chill is the greatest poet of our day. That poor lunatic is the most lofty intellect that I know. Submit to being called a neurotic. You belong to that splendid and pitiable family which is the salt of the earth. Everything we think of as great has come to us from neurotics. It is they and they alone who found religions and create great works of art. The world will never realise how much it owes them, and what they have suffered in order to bestow their gifts on it. We enjoy fine music, beautiful pictures, a thousand exquisite things, but we do not know what they cost those who wrought them in insomnia, tears, spasmodic laughter, urticaria, asthma, a terror of death which is worse than any of these, and which perhaps have experienced, Madame," he added with a smile at my grandmother, "for confess now, when I came, you were not feeling very confident. You thought you were ill, dangerously ill, perhaps. Heaven only knows what disease you thought you had detected the symptoms of in yourself. And you were not mistaken,; they were there. Neurosis has an absolute genius for malingering. There is no illness which it cannot counterfeit perfectly. . . "
Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way, pp. 315-316
Proust's grandmother's health begins to fail, so they send for Dr. du Boulbon, a noted doctor. This is part of his lengthy (this is Remembrance of Things Past after all) comments to her. We'll have more tomorrow. I have to admit that I was amused by his comment, "confess now, when I came, you were not feeling very confident." I don't know how that discussion would have inspired much confidence (especially after we complete the dialogue tomorrow) although it is a pep talk in a way.
Once again we are reminded that artists are just wired, constructed, made differently than the average person. So if Marcel's mother is "different," is in fact a neurotic (a pretty malleable term that, like the disease, mutates to fill a need), then she should take pride in it. "Submit to being called a neurotic. You belong to that splendid and pitiable family which is the salt of the earth. Everything we think of as great has come to us from neurotics. It is they and they alone who found religions and create great works of art." It is interesting here that the doctor includes the founders of religion in this category, which, following this logic, makes sense, but which wouldn't make most true believers very happy. For a long time in the non-Islamic world it was fairly common for people to promote the idea that Muhammad was an epileptic, and this explained his visions, but it would have been inconceivable to say the same thing about the Jewish or Christian prophets. Essentially, we played fast and loose with the facts to justify a belief system and to denigrate another. However, as the doctor reminds her, there is a price to be paid: "The world will never realise how much it owes them, and what they have suffered in order to bestow their gifts on it. We enjoy fine music, beautiful pictures, a thousand exquisite things, but we do not know what they cost those who wrought them in insomnia, tears, spasmodic laughter, urticaria, asthma, epilepsy, a terror of death which is worse than any of these . . ."
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