Contra Sartre: Proust and Other People — Brian Patrick Eha
We have to forfeit three-fourths of ourselves in order to become like other people.
Arthur Schopenhauer
I also am other than what I imagine myself to be. To know this is forgiveness.
Simone Weil
Solipsism is the only strength. However mysterious to us is, and must remain, our own inner life, nonetheless we really live: were the world merely a perpetual dream, we could be sure at least of being the dreamer; or were it a hideously convincing simulation, we would be ourselves the only certain soul enclosed in artificial walls. The self is solid. Taking color like a chameleon from its environment, cascading on a whim through a run of vibrant shades as an octopus can do, the self has been called inconstant, ephemeral, fragmentary, fictive. But something there is that takes the stain, and the self is not the colors that it cries. So there is one moon, however shaded; the same sphere, whatever shape it shows. If you want to stay safe, keep to your own castle. If you want to remain surefooted within the domain of certain knowledge, stay rooted in the native soil of self. All venturings forth, from this vantage—all overtures to other little fiefdoms—make you weak, are weakness itself, for they betray a lack (what is desire but a confession of something lacking?) and to satisfy this lack they place you on uncertain ground, which is to say among other people. There is much to argue against such a course of action, and (contra Sartre) in favor only this: that way salvation lies.
—————
“My mind dressed in flesh, my flesh dressed in the cosmos,” Mircea Cărtărescu says. What does the mind dress? Other people. Proust found it terrible that love begins deceitfully with a kind of pretend or puppet show, the object of our play not a real person but “a doll inside our brain,” the idealized form (unreal as Eliot’s city) to which we stand in relation much as Pygmalion stood to his sexy statue; only it isn’t necessary for the doll to be perfect for it to preoccupy us: its primary quality is not perfection but fabrication. Recall Pygmalion’s hopeless embraces of the cold ivory before it quickened, scarcely believing blood could ever run in its dentine veins. We moderns are more optimistic. We try to bring life to this “artificial creation which by degrees, and to our own hurt, we shall force the real [person] to resemble.” This is the only person, Proust writes, who is always available to us, the only one—doleful insight!—we shall ever possess. There is ambiguity there, at least in English: does he mean this is the only person we shall possess at all, or the only one who will remain forever in our possession? Both meanings may be true. Through intervening space our real arms, arms of the physical world, arms downed with hair, like two hirsute serpents—slender or brawny, shod in genuine skin capable of being bled, freckled like mine or altogether fair—reach out to touch the beloved . . . and dreamlike in the light of a dreamt sun we embrace a body as different from our imagined idol as was Pygmalion’s hard bright carving from shy supple Galatea in the moment before divine intervention turned his masterpiece beeswax-soft. Headbound our plaything stays—and, without our intending it, superintends our relationship to the real, the living person. Against that breathing, suffering self we set this stronger ghost. The art connoisseur Charles Swann, in À la recherche du temps perdu, falls for Odette—a dreadful, debauched woman, decidedly not his type—because of her superficial resemblance to maidens painted by Botticelli. It serves as myth, the story of Pygmalion, because for him and him alone invented splendor and actual attainment wholly fused.
The imagined person we hold in our heads partakes of fantasy, but differs from fantasy in that often we remain unaware of the nighted abyss between her and the real person. And even when we steel ourselves to admit this as the general case, we persist in believing our own to be the rare exception. Surely the motivated reasoning, the sundry cognitive biases and blindnesses which put such rosy distortions in other people’s mental pictures of their partners, like swatches of sunlight sweeping off the Hudson River into the city grid (for light can blind as effectively as pitch black)—having broken like a charge of cavalry through brain-gray cloud, ending a morning’s onslaught of arrowing rain—surely these foibles and failings, so obvious in our friends and colleagues and acquaintances, outlined in so many bestselling books, don’t afflict us. Yet one of the distressing features of truth, as Solzhenitsyn once told a class of Harvard graduates, is that even as it evades us it leaves us with the illusion that we are still on its trail. And mostly it evades us when our attention slackens.
—————
“Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer,” writes Simone Weil. “It presupposes faith and love.” We jib, most of us, at considering others for long. So loud is the self’s insistence, so poor in love our thin and spended hearts, that other people often bore us to death. Of this type par excellence is Proust’s glittering Madame de Guermantes. The brightest star in Parisian society’s firmament, she can hardly stand to hear another woman praised; even her closest associates are but whetstones for her mendacious wit, occasions for cruel mockery under the guise of good-humored tolerance. Irritation swiftly follows infatuation if she finds herself too often besought by a man whom she initially thought charming. Even when secretly pleased, she feigns boredom: “Oh, God, more princes!” Having a reputation for kindness, she attends to others mainly so as to undermine them, to amuse herself in running them down. Zeroing in on their virtues, she publicly identifies them with the opposite vices. No pleasure of others is too small to escape her notice, nor too innocent for her to kill aborning:
The footman’s face glowed with happiness. At last he would be able to spend long hours with his betrothed . . . He floated, at the thought of having an evening free at last, on a tide of happiness which the Duchess saw and the reason for which she guessed. She felt a sort of pang and as it were an itching in all her limbs at the thought of this happiness being snatched behind her back, unbeknown to her, and it made her irritated and jealous.
“No, Basin, he must stay here; he’s not to stir out of the house.”
However holy in its highest form attention may be, it has like every human attitude an infernal side. If the former is synonymous with prayer, the latter—Weil failed to say—is akin to cursing. But the Duchesse de Guermantes’s kind of attention, “corrupted by the nullity of life in society,” is a cursing under her breath, a blasphemy sotto voce: few if any of her intimates—apart from Proust’s hero—guess her true motives. Perhaps they too are deficient in the right sort of attention, preoccupied as most of us are with their own little social gambits and gambols, uninterested in penetrating to the heart of their hostess, whose cruelty lies hidden behind an ancient family name, concealed by winsome grace and exquisite tact and great personal beauty, as if behind the voluptuous scenes decorating a series of Japanese folding screens. Proust’s hero alone scours the lacquer down to bare wood, and is disillusioned.
Like a pattern repeated in nature there is in each of us a mazy mind, an inner labyrinth of shifting walls. We are fortunate if two or three people in a lifetime will patiently follow, at progressively more intimate scales of understanding, the fractal repetitions of our habits, needs, neuroses, will suffer the Fibonacci windings—as though on a staircase forever ascending and descending—of our nautilus self. Who, having entered upon another’s helical subjectivity, as inimitably his own as a twist of DNA, can be sure of safe passage? Ariadne paid out the clue for Theseus in the Minotaur’s lair, but who could clue the king’s daughter in to the nuclear involutions of Theseus himself? In Ovid’s Heroides, forsaken by the churlish hero while asleep in their love-bed, the jilted woman moans: “Gentler than you I have found every race of wild beasts; nor could I have been entrusted to more faithless hands.” (Here I have combined two English translations, one of 1813, the other of 1931.) Madame de Guermantes’s husband, immensely rich and proud, self-satisfied, is himself unfaithful to her many times over; that he does not love her, and never has, immunizes him against her capricious wiles. His brutality makes him unbreakable.
—————
“Nothing, I suspect, is more astonishing in any man’s life,” says C. S. Lewis, “than the discovery that there do exist people very, very like himself.” Lewis rated friendship as highly as Proust was inclined to disparage it. Aristotle considered a true friend a second self, yet he loved truth more than Plato, when you got down to it. Truth is not merely a higher good than, but constitutive of, the truest friendship—and in the interest of truth we must admit the essential foreignness of our friend. The other is no mirror of us. Or if he is, he mirrors after the fashion of M. C. Escher’s Puddle, in which a dirt path—pockmarked with footprints and scored with tracks like the lines of sutures—is interrupted by an irregular surface which at first glance we take for an ordinary, a natural feature: the eponymous patch of wet. Only then does our vision reorient, and we see the puddle as a hole in space, a chasm of air through which we spy, not the upside-down forms of the trees above our heads, but the black trunks, fuzzed with foliage, of an inverted world beneath our feet, a wholly alien dimension where the forms are indeed familiar but their method of growth is unimaginable, their mushrooming aim opposite to our own, their fluid element something other than the air we breathe. Where we meet and intermingle our substance is in that plane bisecting the vertical striving of two souls, in the tangle of roots like a fist of snakes, sharing nourishment. This is closer to Montaigne’s conception of friendship than Aristotle’s: the truth which forms the basis of a bond may be a private, an invented truth. Like a shared secret.
But the secret of Proust’s hero’s friendship with Robert de Saint-Loup isn’t shared between them. The former cherishes rather the historical and romantic associations of Saint-Loup’s aristocratic name than the man’s personal virtues, which are considerable. Later he regrets not having done justice to his noble friend, who remains oblivious to the true nature of their bond.
—————
The greatest deceptions are self-deceptions, abetted by imagination and desire. Principally what we deceive ourselves about is others in all their ineradicable strangeness, their multiplicity. The narrator of À la recherche du temps perdu is forever espying girls who appear attractive from a distance, only to find upon closer examination how flawed they are. So powerful is the erotic longing of youth, and so easily is it disappointed, like a lofted kite momentarily released—and that is all it takes, it’s gone: the string trailing free of the eager hand, the bright sail of its body vanishing among the mundane clouds, which in an instant conceal the kite from view as fully as a wanted man’s complicit relatives hide him in the old neighborhood where he goes to ground—that invariably Proust’s hero experiences this comedown not as a shift of perception but as a real metamorphosis in the substance of those he perceives. Maturity, a state it may be said that Proust never fully attained, consists of waking from our delusions. We shed as a snake sheds its skin the scales we have unwittingly placed over our own eyes.
Some of us never wake, however. Some scales stay mortared in place. One of the most disturbing revelations of Proust’s novel concerns the identity of Robert de Saint-Loup’s mistress. A vigorous yet callow young nobleman, with a military commission and socialist pretensions, up to his eyes in debt, Saint-Loup finally introduces to his friend (and us) the mistress on whose account he has so bankrupted himself. She is none other than an ex-whore the hero had known at a brothel years earlier. Here the change is not merely from one state to another, as the ideal and distant collapsed for Proust’s hero like a wave function into the flawed and near; rather Robert’s wench and that of his friend exist together in superposition, like waves of differing lengths, simultaneously. As light shatters into spectra, so the single person separates into an array of separate elements which exist beside while seeming to exclude each other. Imagination, experience, or chance dictate which of them we perceive above the rest:
I saw that what had appeared to me to be not worth twenty francs when it had been offered to me for twenty francs in the brothel, where it was then for me simply a woman desirous of earning twenty francs, might be worth more than a million, more than family affection, more than all the most coveted positions in life, if one had begun by imagining her as a mysterious being, interesting to know, difficult to seize and to hold. No doubt it was the same thin and narrow face that we saw, Robert and I. But we had arrived at it by two opposite ways which would never converge, and we would never both see it from the same side.
Kierkegaard laughed when at last he beheld reality; Proust’s hero, piercing the veil, whether as a boy transfixed by lovely visions beside the sea at Balbec or as a young swell in sordid-glamorous Paris, time and again is repelled. He is appalled to discover how far short of his imaginings the world falls. He is Adam losing in each nubile body, in a hedge of hawthorns the Garden all over again.
—————
“It is not good that the man should be alone,” God declares in Genesis. To say with the ancients Omnia mea mecum porto, and mean it, is sagelike. But self-sufficiency (so the Eden story tells us) pales beside a proper mate. And it is through the human family, not the squabbles of prideful deities, that the divine in the Old Testament is made known. From Homer on, internecine conflict perpetually clouds Mount Olympus, like a series of Looney Tunes scuffles: the hundred-handed Hecatoncheires hurling boulders; Zeus pitching Hephaestus from the summit, ambrosial limbs flailing; Eros piercing Apollo with an arrow; Hera (we may imagine) whaling on her changeable husband with a sandal, while Aphrodite schtups Ares in her marriage bed. Never mind Hades in his black chariot dragging down to his lightless kingdom poor Persephone, pomegranate bride. Genesis locates the violence elsewhere, in the family unit: Cain shedding Abel’s blare of blood, Joseph sold into slavery by his brothers, Isaac bound to a bundle of sticks. Divine intercession likewise takes one domestic scene after another for its stage.
—————
The two greatest epics of Christendom find their savor elsewhere than in the salt of the earth, however. Locate their action far from hearth and home. Dante planted his enemies like hanging trees in hell and raised his beloved Beatrice to heaven, lofting his Godsong, Paradiso, so high into the air of late medieval Europe that Milton, centuries later, would have to content himself with decline and Fall: the story of Satan’s headlong descent and man’s transgression. Satan’s is the only fully formed consciousness in Milton’s epic, alive to loss and the possibility of revenge. Paradise Lost is finally not a poem about people—though we have in us, as other authors have found, vastnesses fully as insuperable as that between perdition and God’s throne. In her Pillow Book, Sei Shōnagon lists three things that are near yet distant: paradise, the course of a boat, and relations between a man and a woman.
For a long time, Proust’s hero idealizes Madame de Guermantes as much as Dante did Beatrice. Lovesick, he posts himself along the path of her morning walks; longs for a smile, a glimpse of her gown; he ingratiates himself with her relatives, tries every stratagem to secure an invitation to her inner sanctum. But having finally won her favor, he sees her in a new aspect. In this single woman he watches “so many different women superimpose themselves, each one vanishing as soon as the next had acquired sufficient consistency.” Yet in the novels they exist side by side. Proust’s art isolates and analyzes each woman in turn, as the motion studies of Muybridge show us in sequential frames a running horse, now with its hind legs outflung, now with its front legs thrusting or planted perpendicular to the earth, now with all four hooves tucked high like the appendages of a winged insect in flight—the animal eternally airborne in this captured slice of time.
—————
Proust’s own movement was not a linear series. He spiraled outward—from the hothouse family environment into widening gyres of society—only to coil inward once more, winding up finally in the cork-lined room where he composed the epic of his times. An elaborate ouroboros, closing a circuit between the child’s unthinking solipsism and the mature artist’s wholly private siege. A silence as loud with voices, peopled as vividly with apparitions, as the solitude of St. Anthony. In that flowering desert he made for himself Proust wrote above all of the impossible desire to clasp in our arms at one and the same time a living body and a dream.
—————
“Souls never touch their objects,” Emerson says, outdoing Sei Shōnagon. “An unnavigable sea washes with silent waves between us and the things we aim at and converse with.” Here you have the authentic American ethos and idiom: learned alliterative prose, limning the subject of irreducible individualism if not solipsism, and ending in a demotic preposition. Why is America—no longer so rugged as in Emerson’s day—still the number-one refuge of human monads, the native soil of those hapless or willful outcasts whom Melville called “isolatoes”? If it is the land of the free, it is the land also of the lone and lorn. Did the wild solitude of the place wound them so deeply, those Puritans and Virginia planters, alone with their God in the eastern reaches of this vast continent—the English king reduced by three thousand miles of shipwrecking distance to a kind of rumor, a whisper on the waves; his power attenuated, his edicts thin as a voice at the end of a bad phone line; his dread majesty that of a fairy-book beast fit to scare little ones at night—did that fearful freedom (against which the colonists sought to erect barriers, however flimsy, from the first) so penetrate their marrow that centuries on, in shrunken confines, even those of us whose ancestors arrived later, setting foot as it were on ground leavened with those earliest bones, still feel the radical violence of that revelation? To ask the question is already to affirm the echoes shed by those spent steps in the forest primeval. That they still resound in the American psyche is so obvious as to be past argument. Of course they do; of course we still hear and heed them, however faintly. How can you hide, asks Heraclitus, from what never goes away?
—————
America was alone before she was America; alone, as Frost might say, before we were her lonely people. The great naturalist Louis Agassiz tells how it was in this old New World: “Hers was the first dry land lifted out of the waters, hers the first shore washed by the ocean that enveloped all the earth beside; and while Europe was represented only by islands rising here and there above the sea, America already stretched an unbroken line of land from Nova Scotia to the Far West.”
My America is Manhattan, where isolation howls in the wires and steams from the street-grates, drips like condensation from bristling air conditioners, stifles with the summer heat. Everything is amplified, accelerated. Loneliness here grows more intense, our city life—the life of the crowd—taking it through some kind of sound barrier beyond which souls like V-2 rockets outrun their own screaming. For them, at least, the noise of their unnoticed transit through the mass subsides, and if they are very alone a sense of irreality may attend them as frictionlessly they describe the parabolas of their flight paths or glide along in their grooves, as they impact or break apart with no audible warning . . .
Such phenomena struck sensitive nineteenth-century observers as a revelation. The restless urban crowd—pressing, teeming, mindless or hive-minded, which cuts every man off from his fellows, as a whiteout dust storm on the desert playa leaves each person separately cocooned—marks the advent of the modern. In Proust the crowd is present negatively, as in Baudelaire’s “Meditation,” which finds the poet with his sorrow standing back from “the common multitude,” or is included out, as the very thing that middle-class and aristocratic—and, to a lesser extent, artistic—society has erected bulwarks against. Wealth is a wall. Proust shows it as such most explicitly during the hero’s summer with his beloved grandmother at Balbec, where a strange ritual is reenacted every night. The dining room of their upscale hotel, flooded with electric light,
became as it were an immense and wonderful aquarium against whose glass wall the working population of Balbec, the fishermen and also the tradesmen’s families, clustering invisibly in the outer darkness, pressed their faces to watch the luxurious life of its occupants gently floating upon the golden eddies within, a thing as extraordinary to the poor as the life of strange fishes or molluscs (an important social question, this: whether the glass wall will always protect the banquets of these weird and wonderful creatures, or whether the obscure folk who watch them hungrily out of the night will not break in some day to gather them from their aquarium and devour them).
Even in this alienation there is among the lower classes a sense of togetherness. The spectacle of other people’s inconceivable wealth, and their own act of voyeurism, forms a social glue for “the dumbfounded stationary crowd out there in the dark.” But Proust doesn’t leave it there, with the binary of rich and poor, leisured and working classes. There may have been among them some writer, he says, standing apart like Baudelaire, some third kind of person, in the crowd but not of it—“some student of human ichthyology . . . amusing himself by classifying them by race, by innate characteristics.” His is a truer witness—a knowing study, not an awestruck regard.
I have myself played all the parts in this drama, the divergent versions of me fanned out like a deck of cards on the infinitely long table of spacetime. I have been the young college graduate who for a time in the Great Recession could scarcely buy canned tuna and peanut butter, but fed his hunger on glossy-magazine fantasies of a luxurious life; and I have been one of the wonderful fishes floating in the fishlight of fine dining rooms, light billowing and breathing as of sunstruck water seen from below its undulating surface; and I have been the amused taxonomist who sorted the inhabitants of his broken social scene by genus and species. What I never felt, never, neither as a skint singleton nor as a prosperous-seeming mark whom panhandlers on busy streets singled out to ask for alms, was a sense of belonging. Never any identification with the group. That other people were in the same position neither added to nor subtracted from the reality of me.
—————
“Perhaps all unsheltered people are angry in their hearts,” Marilynne Robinson muses. Other people—people from elsewhere, people who carry their own private elsewhere around with them—are the political flashpoint of our times. Tent cities spring up like strange fungi in the rotted hearts of American cities. Who can say how many times a scene like Proust’s at Balbec has been enacted in the more than a century since? Robinson’s novel Housekeeping contains a passage that exists in dialogue with the Frenchman’s metaphor of the human aquarium. When one looks from inside at a lighted window, we are told,
one sees the image of oneself in a lighted room . . . the deception is obvious, but flattering all the same. When one looks from the darkness into the light, however, one sees all the difference between here and there, this and that. Perhaps all unsheltered people . . . would like to break the roof, spine, and ribs, and smash the windows and flood the floor and spindle the curtains and bloat the couch.
In the city, the sort of city whose impassive concrete face betrays nothing even when it rains, gives nothing back, a lousy place to rain upon, what are we to do with this parade of painful existences that files past the misted-up or dust-dry windows of our eyes? I recall once sitting in a Manhattan cafe on an August afternoon of unseasonable cold when a decrepit old crone entered, bent double, holding her neck painfully perpendicular to the floor, pushing with both hands a large wheeled suitcase and shuffling along behind it, a paper sack dangling from one arm. Seeing such human wretchedness, I have a lousy poker face. As she stopped directly behind my chair, I shot a glance over my shoulder; what should have been concern came off, I fear, as disgust. She said something I couldn’t hear. I removed my earbud: cafe noise, the noise of other lives, rushed in. “Are you talking to me?” I asked. “Is something wrong?” she said. It was useless to explain. I had no desire to cause a scene. I turned back to my laptop. “Have a good evening,” she huffed. And made her crippled way slowly to the ladies’ room and disappeared inside. She was in there a long time. When she finally reemerged and, retracing her shambling steps, passed behind me, we avoided each other’s eyes.
Where one can no longer love, says Nietzsche, there one should pass by. Yet often we shun in others what we hate or disavow in ourselves. So the ancient Greeks shrank from deformity and mocked the infirm. Perhaps isolation has no real existence, as St. Augustine argued that evil has no positive nature of its own, is not a substance unto itself but only the privation of good.
—————
George Szirtes has a poem in which a pair of fleas boast of their eminence:
Early one morning
two fleas were discoursing on
the majesty offleahood. Any flea
is superior to man,
they agreed and sippeda cupful of blood.
Man too likes to play with the bigness of his littleness, as another poet, E. E. Cummings, knew; to see our own absurdity, it helps to shrink ourselves down and incarnate our egoism in insects. While writing this essay at a university library one night during intersession, that is to say during the shortened hours between the spring and fall semesters, when campus quiets down, I lost track of time and found my footfalls as I departed echoing softly in the vast silence of the ground-floor foyer. It was perhaps 9:20 p.m. Behind the security desk a sour-faced mahogany stick figure of a man turned and gave me the evil eye. He had earlier proven singularly unhelpful when asked a simple question (about the library hours, ironically) and when nine o’clock came he hadn’t budged from behind his desk as the other guards habitually do to make their rounds and roust any last learners out of their cubbies. Hoping to avoid a confrontation, I said goodnight without breaking stride, passed through the metal detector, hit the crash bar on the front door—and came to a halt. The doors were locked: another first. The guard was slow to get up. “Why you walk away when I’m talking to you?” he demanded. (Please know that other guards in my experience have been not only more conscientious but also more gracious in the discharging of their duties.) He approached with jangling keys. “The library closes at nine. Nine,” he repeated, “nine o’clock. It closes at nine.” This one number appeared to be all he knew on earth, and all he needed to know. I recognized in him another guise other people can assume: obstructions, impediments, like the officious little functionaries we find everywhere in Kafka. I too was less a person than a pest in his eyes, a fly in the ointment, a problematic presence he looked only to eliminate. A rule intervenes between people. It can separate like a fence, bring together like a bridge, order like a set of stanchions, repel like a ramparted wall.
Kafka, whose gray days as a legal clerk are the stuff of legend, had these flealike officials dead to rights. A century on, his prescience regarding the harm they could do still astonishes. Kafka’s immediate family members died in concentration camps. So did his lover Milena. Bureaucracies staffed by these little men pushed the papers that murdered millions, more surely than did ovens or bullets—for it was they who requisitioned the rifles, allocated funds for barracks and barbed wire, and oversaw the shipments of bright yellow airtight tins containing the insecticide known as Zyklon B.
Proust too was a prophet. If anything in his thousands of butterfly-hued, backward-looking pages prefigures the atrocities of the machine age, it is the extended dramatization of the Dreyfus affair and the wave of anti-Semitism that swept over France. Wrongfully convicted of treason, Captain Alfred Dreyfus was merely the first and most famous scapegoat of his kind; later there would be trainloads of them. The Great War shadows Time Regained, the final volume of Proust’s magnum opus; he documents the degraded language, deluded notions, and social perversities that warped Paris during the war years, when women of fashion bedecked themselves in “rings or bracelets made out of fragments of exploded shells or copper bands from 75 millimetre ammunition.” He saw his countrymen become a cowardly, xenophobic mob. Privately he mourned friends dead in the trenches, and died himself, like Kafka, long before the outbreak of the Second World War. It was left to later, angrier novelists to transport us, as if through a wormhole, into panoramas of mechanized murder, and then to rescue from nonidentity the victims of these abominations. Here is how William H. Gass describes—but this is a poor word for the overwhelming imaginative sympathy he achieves—a father and son facing extermination at a mass grave in Dubno:
Father does not cup his boy’s wet cheeks in his hands and say, You shall die, my son, and never be remembered. The little salamander you were frightened of at first, and grew to love and buried in the garden, the long walk to school your legs learned, what shape our daily life, our short love, gave you, the meaning of your noisy harmless games, every small sensation that went to make your eager and persistent gazing will be gone . . . the toys you treasured, the dreams you peopled, but especially your scarcely budded eyes, and that rich and gentle quality of consciousness which I hoped one day would have been uniquely yours like the most subtle of flavors—the skin, the juice, the sweet pulp of a fine fruit—well, son, your possibilities . . . in a moment—soon—will be ground out like a burnt wet butt beneath a callous boot and disappear in the dirt. Only our numbers will be remembered—not that you or I died, but that there were so many of us.
Man as an undifferentiated mass is an absolute discovery. Taken as an ideological precept, it permits atrocities. What the mound of death in Dubno, which we can hardly assimilate to our consciousness, tells us, modifying Sartre, is that hell is not other people but the reduction of other people, in all their varicolored individuality, to the cloddish concept “other people.” (Sartre, it’s worth remembering, simped for the Soviet Union long past the point when its atrocities had become both evident and indefensible.) “Climbing up,” Gass writes, “there are quiet words to the wounded, and an occasional caress.” Love and fellow feeling even amid horror, even at the end. Perhaps at the end that unnavigable sea between one self and another parts as the Red Sea parted for Moses, permitting the dying to walk arm in arm, as they could not in life, into whatever awaits them. Their bodies fertilize the earth, though it is doubtful what can grow from so much death. This is what we resist, the grinding up into bonemeal of what Gass elsewhere calls “the treasured particularity we hope for for each human being.” The novelist gives names back to bodies, and puts faces to names. It is the artist’s job to restore essential humanity to the endless register of the dead.
—————
“The future belongs to crowds,” Don DeLillo asserts in Mao II, his farsighted novel of 1991. Yet his own commitment to the novelist’s art, even if only as a rearguard action, belies this belief.
His accounts of the mass wedding ceremony of 6,500 Moonie couples at Yankee Stadium, of the fanatic throngs of mourners at the burial of the Ayatollah Khomeini—mass events that are at the same time mass spectacles—have an authentic horror. This horror has a long history in English letters. G. K. Chesterton identified it in Browning: “He did not love humanity but men. His sense of the difference between one man and another would have made the thought of melting them into a lump called humanity simply loathsome.” Gass, in a late interview, said, “I hate mankind. But I like people.” Poets and novelists, as a species, are respecters of persons.
There is every kind of person in Proust, every sort of “extraordinary creature.” In his pages, as in medical case histories and confessionals, people are no better than they are in life, and no worse—only we see them in the round, with stunning clarity. To call it an X-ray moving picture gives some sense of his art’s penetrative power, but is finally inaccurate: far from eliding the epidermis and dermis, muscle and fatty tissues, slippery internal organs, rivering veins, and subtle organic factories of our cells to show the death’s head and capering skeleton within, Proust searches out every part “to the last grain,” just as Virginia Woolf said. So also the whole that is more than the sum of its parts. Human difference, the individuated other is his subject, as much as memory or time. In our own time, too, the miracle of consciousness, incarnated in another—even shadowed, shifting, inscrutable, medicalized or therapeutically mismanaged, surgically mutilated or half lost to an ideology that cooks off the self’s rich and subtle flavors; even from behind a digital screen that seems now a window, now a magic mirror, now an adumbrating wall—still makes to all and each of us alone its perpetual appeal.
—————
“You have no sympathy, no empathy at all, brother,” a friend once told me. His tone was about as light as it’s possible to be when tossing off a comment like that. We were hauling kayaks under a clouded sun on the shore of Lake Champlain. I had shown myself insufficiently keen, before we launched our own craft, at the task of hefting and marching back up the beach barefoot onto the hot concrete someone else’s left-behind boat, which by right it was the lackadaisical kayak-rental worker’s job to retrieve. My friend saw a man beleaguered and in need of assistance, to whom we could do a good turn. I saw an incompetent fool who had initially failed to provide me with a life jacket or an adequate paddle and who, in leaving the tub where it was, had evidently hoped to fob off on me a craft inferior to the one I wanted to paddle in—that is, a craft identical to my friend’s. Impatient with my persnicketiness, my pal was suddenly made of time when the chance to help a stranger arose. At first I was confused, having thought that he was in a hurry. Later I felt ashamed.
I have had a special need to write this essay, having struggled against incomprehension of other people all my life. Having so often wanted nothing to do with their misunderstood motives, any more than with their massed bodies. From a young age the relationships I yearned for were all one to one: my mother who read aloud to me, instilling a love of books; my older brother who fought beside me in pitched battles of pinecone commando and fished with me for make-believe brook trout in our pretend life on the frontier; my best friend down the street with whom I bonded over games of Magic: The Gathering; the girls for whose unwitting hearts I would gladly have given my own. I once wrote a fervent love poem that begins:
When I find you I want to be alone in you
like a hermit meditating a thousand years agoin his mountain cave. Alone on the heights of you
like a hiker on the rim of a volcano in Japanthat he might perish in and find was worth the fall.
Raised in a strict religious family, I nevertheless had to wait until adulthood to learn that Plotinus figured the process of spiritual realization, the journey of the soul to its Creator, as a flight of the alone to the Alone.
—————
“A cage went in search of a bird,” says Kafka in one of his aphorisms. It may be in this spirit that I moved to New York, that I became a writer. Yet if my cage is locked more securely than most, sealed tight as a submarine, still I have reason to hope that in my autistic bathysphere I can plumb more crushing depths, can perceive things hidden from those immersed in the crowd, just as Martin Buber remarked that the atheist gazing from his attic window “is often nearer to God than the believer caught up in his own false image of God.” An ichthyologist notices things the fish never do.
One of these things, which seems to dupe neurotypicals by the dozen but sticks out to me like a Joshua tree in desert scrub, fake as an acrylic nail, is the sort of ersatz empathy now weaponized in Western politics. A telescopic empathy, it overlooks one’s neighbors and near communities to fix its gaze on distant populations. To love selectively and hate generally is human. But here the natural tendency is reversed, as Emerson saw with disdain:
If malice and vanity wear the coat of philanthropy, shall that pass? If an angry bigot assumes this bountiful cause of Abolition, and comes to me with his last news from Barbados, why should I not say to him, “Go love thy infant; love thy wood-chopper; be good-natured and modest; have that grace; and never varnish your hard, uncharitable ambition with this incredible tenderness for black folk a thousand miles off. Thy love afar is spite at home.”
My own malice wears no coat, dons no false mustache to pass in polite society. I have hated people, I confess (though it pains me to say it). I have hated them for all the ways in which they fall short—and for going so easy on themselves when they do. I have hated them for being lax-minded, complacent, ignorant, incompetent, ill-mannered; for uglifying their surroundings and being so unlovely to look upon themselves; for being what Ortega y Gasset accused us of being: the spoiled children of history. I have hated them for being both better than me and worse. For feeling at home in a way I never will. Most of all perhaps I have hated them for making a world to which I can never wholly conform and then expecting me to do just that, to become like them, to want to be like them. And in my worst moments I have hated myself for so wanting.
—————
“Verily, my friends, I walk among men as among the fragments and limbs of men. This is what is terrible for my eyes, that I find man in ruins and scattered as over a battlefield or a butcher-field.” Thus speaks Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, in one of the bleakest statements on the human condition I know. Upon this gruesome field, Madame de Guermantes (to return finally to Proust) likes to act when she has the means as a kind of Valkyrie, doing good deeds, giving to charity, showering her inferiors with a thousand kindnesses while never forgetting her own superiority nor ceasing to bar from her door 99.99 percent of humanity. But her largesse has a bitter precondition: only when the unfaithful Duke has a new mistress is he magnanimous toward his wife, permitting her the funds to distribute as she chooses.
The retreat of Christian virtue from the upper class leaves a residue like the slime trail of a slug. Without believing in God’s democracy of souls—indeed, few of us truly believe, or behave as if, or can make ourselves deeply feel, that everyone is equally precious—the Duchess is still under the sway of a Christian ethic, wherein compassion for the less fortunate is prized. Zarathustra shuns the misshapen; nothing could be more terrible to the ancient Greek or pagan than a world of cripples. The extraordinary break with ancient ways of seeing that takes place in Christianity was simply this: that it sees the very same butcher-field and declares it a mission field. That amid the broken and dying its adherents set out to seek and save. Post-Christian modernity gives us the spectacle of charity without sacrifice, philanthropy without humility. Its paragons have dispensed with Providence without losing an ounce of messianic zeal.
Today the Duchess’s spiritual sisters are all around us—the fabulously rich widows and divorcées of Silicon Valley giants, grown tall themselves atop their erstwhile husbands’ money; determined to move the needle in any number of social causes, beholden to no one: Guermantes unbound. In rooms and tabloid rags they come and go, talking not of Michelangelo but of the Current Thing. Holding the right, the informed opinions, they are the handmaidens of history—the arc of which, when it goes off-course, needs their nudging to correct. The arts too are full of them: of Susan Sontag, Gary Indiana reports that her warm feelings were reserved “for people in distress at least six thousand miles away from her usual surroundings. She played the role of neighbor much less charitably than that of world citizen.” For such bien-pensants, for whom the grand, the symbolic gesture is more important than the everyday substance of their lives (or indeed the substance of what their gesture achieves), other people serve chiefly as sites of self-gratification—on a global scale. Theirs is an “aristocratic affability . . . happy to shed balm upon the sense of inferiority of those towards whom it is directed, though not to the point of dispelling that inferiority, for in that case it would no longer have any raison d’être.” (Thus wrote Proust.)
—————
“There will be time, there will be time / To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet,” Eliot assures us. In the movies that run through other people’s minds, we are masked actors. Personae, not ourselves. Ann Quin’s Passages gives us the following clipped exchange:
I asked him to take off his mask, but this is all I have, he replied. Take it off I commanded. He did so. It’s no use I still cannot recognise you—put the mask back on—there that’s better now that I know I don’t know you we can talk more easily.
Odysseus tricks the Cyclops by giving his name as Nobody. Unknowability may strike us the same as absence, even nonexistence, so that if we can’t penetrate another’s psyche we cease to regard it at all, as though it were formless and void. “Never had he thought of his mother as a person, a separate individual,” writes Toni Morrison of Milkman in Song of Solomon, “with a life apart from allowing or interfering with his own.” Acknowledgement is always the first step. The teenage daughters in Housekeeping are quite literally unconscious of their mother, who remains “constant as daylight [and] unremarked as daylight.” The serene surface of their relationship, like a pond before the flung pebble skips and sinks, like the lake before a grown daughter’s car dives into it, is as yet untroubled. Awareness must precede true communion.
“Now that I know I don’t know you”: always there is the fraught journey out of ourselves in the hope of making contact with someone we know nothing of, like an astronaut who no matter how many times he makes a spacewalk can never find it routine, never forget the fragile umbilicus that tethers him to shuttle or orbiting station—relatively speaking, his comfort zone. There is something awful about those who lack not only the power but the desire to make this journey, frightening though it is. Having just learned of Swann’s terminal illness, the Duc de Guermantes talks of other things: “The Duke felt no compunction in speaking thus of his wife’s ailments and his own to a dying man, for the former interested him more and therefore appeared to him more important.” In the mind of such a thoughtless, egocentric friend, what pale survivance can Swann hope for?
—————
In René Magritte’s L’art de la conversation, the two men conversing with apparent nonchalance are both suspended in midair, their feet planted as if on firm ground many yards above an empty countryside, like Wile E. Coyote in the moment before he apprehends his predicament and drops like a stone. We see from behind how absolutely correct they appear, decked out in dark formal coats and trousers, bowler hats on their heads: men apparently not given to flights of fancy; men of business perhaps. The gentleman on the right is gesticulating to drive home a point which may for all we know be studious or severe. He may be as small of soul as Ebenezer Scrooge haggling over the price of corn, except that like Hopkins’s dapple-dawn-drawn falcon he hovers between heaven and earth. Speaking to each other thus, the men have ascended. This impossible relation, of a pair of figures set above the world of natural strife, a gravity-defying dyad of brotherly love at a great height from the weary road that runs beneath them—this precisely is ideal friendship in its most uplifting aspect. Like leaves in autumn presently the men will be forced to fall, rejoining the common run of humanity, their feet will find once more that highway of life on which they pursue their separate destinies; the mountains lying in a blue haze on the horizon have still to be traversed. The last of which is always traversed alone. Knowing this, Magritte leaves the two amigos to their private chat, their dirigible dialogue: this eternal suspended moment amid the moiling clouds, forever without conclusion.
—————
Driving through small Northeastern towns one sees slide past the windshield in a ceremony of flags and solemn gray stone cemetery after cemetery, small and neat and old, grave markers sometimes canted here and there, rearing back from the road as if in surprise at the rush and roar of life passing by. There they keep their silence, like their secrets, decently—the done thing being done at last even by the most boorish, the least self-controlled. Such is the ultimate fate of other people, and of ourselves too, though we won’t be around to see it. Only at others’ imperfect oblivion can we wonder or grieve, with our own always in the offing.
How much will other people remember of our variegated life? How intense an impression do any of them retain even now, and how much will we remember of theirs? With how many people in our lifetime will we be on terms intimate enough to recall years later more than “a few details, a few preferences, a few inflections,” as Roland Barthes put it, calling such trifles biographemes? Madame de Guermantes quotes a few lines by Victor Hugo:
The dead last so short a time . . .
Alas, in the coffin they crumble into dust,
Less quickly than in our hearts!
For the Duchess and her ilk, this is assuredly true. But not for Proust. His monumental work is a comprehensive refutation of Hugo, built on the opposite principle. Embedded in it like mica in a paving stone is a wrenching portrait of the hero’s grandmother on her deathbed. She and he were once so simpatico that she seemed to hear his thoughts, and could anticipate his wishes. Now she lies insensible, under a doctor’s care. But their dialogue goes on:
The hiss of the oxygen ceased for a few moments. But the happy plaint of her breathing still poured forth, light, troubled, unfinished, ceaselessly recommencing. . . . Who knows whether, without my grandmother’s even being conscious of them, countless happy and tender memories compressed by suffering were not escaping from her now, like those lighter gases which had long been compressed in the cylinders? It was as though everything that she had to tell us was pouring out, that it was us that she was addressing with this prolixity, this eagerness, this effusion.
So we keep them with us, the dead, albeit not as literally as did the New York Irish of the 1880s who, anticipating Weekend at Bernie’s, at one rowdy wake pulled the corpse from his coffin and “propped it against the wall, and stuck a pipe in the dead man’s mouth.” (So said the Times.) Nor would a plan like that of the great architect Christopher Wren to bound London within a graceful border of boneyards find many partisans today. Though I wonder if these weren’t attempts, not to keep the dear departed close, but to maintain their modest dimensions. The dead, says Marilynne Robinson, “grow gigantic and multiple” in dying; hold unaccustomed space in our hearts; gain in being by being gone. Even as their death diminishes us. So that it is not Death (as Poe had it) but those who belong to Death’s kingdom who look gigantically down.
There is no end to other people. They become finally the dead who dance through our poems and plans, who lurk in our data like doorways, who spoil or sharpen with poignance our perfect view of things—whispering of older ways, irreplaceable knowledge extinct or endangered, something of inestimable value being lost; the dead who will never—no matter how we try to lay their ghosts—never not have lived, not have spoken words just as profound or trivial as our own, for ears as delicate in their seashell contours, ears which like those vanished mouths and unstrung larynxes and closed throats have since gone to ground, as if to hear all the better the past and passing years’ deep subterranean bass; the dead who in living mingled their atoms with the air, who in dying are blown into motes of dust . . . the dead whose storied or unstoried substance we cannot escape, who visit us in old diaries and dreams; the dead we cannot, in the last analysis, choose to do without.
***
Brian Patrick Eha is a widely published essayist, journalist, and critic. His novel Remembrance of Later Things is complete in manuscript. In a past life he authored the nonfiction narrative How Money Got Free (which should have been titled simply Free Money). His work has appeared in The Hedgehog Review, First Things, City Journal, Rolling Stone, and others, and online at The New Yorker, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Poetry Foundation, and more. He was repped by CAA until CAA laid off his agent. He writes from New York.