"No, in spite of your gloomy look," I said to Albertine, "I can't feel sorry for you; I should feel sorry for you if you were ill, if you were in trouble, if you had suffered some bereavement; not that you would mind in the least, I dare say, considering your expenditure of false sensibility over nothing. Besides, I'm not very impressed by the sensibility of people who pretend to be so fond of us and are quite incapable of doing us the smallest favour, and whose minds wander so that they forget to deliver the letter we have entrusted to them on which our whole future depends."
A great part of what we say being no more than a recitation from memory, I had often heard these words uttered by my mother, who (always ready to explain to me that one ought not to confuse genuine sensibility with sentimentality, what the Germans, whose language she greatly admired despite my grandfather's loathing for that nation, called Empfindung and Empfindelei) once, when I was in tears, had gone so far as to tell me that Nero probably suffered from nerves and was none the better for that. Indeed, like those plants which bifurcate as they grow, side by side with the sensitive boy which was all that I had been, there was now a man of the opposite sort, full of common sense, of severity towards the morbid sensibility of others, a man resembling what my parents had been to me. No doubt, as each of us is obliged to continue in himself the life of his forebears, the level-headed, caustic individual who did not exist in me at the start had joined forces with the sensitive one, and it was natural that I should become in my turn what my parents had been to me. What is more, at the moment when this new personality took shape in me, he found his language ready made in the memory of the sarcastic, scolding things that had been said to me, that I must now say to others, and that came so naturally to my lips, either because I evoked them from mimicry and association of memories, or because the delicate and mysterious incrustations of genetic energy had traced in me unawares, as upon the leaf of a plant, the same intonations, the same gestures, the same attitudes as had been characteristic of those from whom I had sprang. Indeed it often happened to my mother (so many obscure unconscious currents caused everything in me even down to the tiniest movements of my fingers to be drawn into the same cycles as my parents) to imagine that it was my father at the door, so similar was my knock to his.
Marcel Proust, The Captive, pp. 102-103
First off, let me provide the background info on the German terms, which are essentially what Proust suggested: Empfingung is sensation or emotion while Empfindelei is sentiment. For a person who has such a fascination with language, and with obscure references from literature or the ancient world, you would think that I would spruce up my own speech and writing with more foreign words and phrases, which, sadly, I don't. I suppose this is mainly because I suck so hard at foreign languages. I need to get back to working on Arabic, not only for the obvious reason, but also because it's a part of the world I love - and also because learning a foreign language at my age keeps the brain lubricated - and also because it pains me that I'm not fluent in a second language. After that brief sojourn into the realm of self-loathing, I'll return to the main thread and point out that I think that Proust is right and that Empfindung is definitely different from Empfindelei, although we tend to conflate the two.
I also think that Proust was spot-on in his observation, which is far more than a mere throwaway line, that, "A great part of what we say being no more than a recitation from memory . . " I've commented before about my propensity to, at odd moments and without warning or conscious intent, repeat aphorisms from my grandfather Herbert (Jum), the Hoosier philosopher: "You gotta dance with who brung ya" or "You can't run with the big dogs unless you can pee in the high weeds" or "I don't have a dog in this fight" etc. Certainly I've said enough things to my own son over the years which were just recitations from my father or mother, despite my long-held approach to parenting which was to stop at every moment, remember what my parents would have done, and then do the opposite. That said, I think that Proust is also getting at something much deeper here, which is how little time we spend consciously perceiving the world or consciously thinking about what it means or consciously fashioning an appropriate response or, for that matter, consciously living. It's like when we read and we just gloss over the words without really identifying the letters and putting them together as words - rather, through routine and conditioning we unconsciously "know" what is being said. Instead, I think we recognize what it being written, which is not nearly the same as knowing what was intended. On the one hand it's good because we'd go crazy if we focused on every letter of every word, just as, I suppose, we would be driven mad if we struggled over every little decision. On the other hand, it means that we're not really living because we're not truly perceiving and analyzing and thinking about the world; we're on auto-pilot.
No comments:
Post a Comment