mills

Walker Percy, Lost in the Cosmos, in which he proposes a thought experiment involving aliens interacting with humans from which the above comes: an alien’s description of human consciousness.

I adore Lost in the Cosmos, but what struck me about this passage was that it echoes something Hemingway wrote in a Nick Adams short story called “Fathers and Sons,” which I posted some time ago:

“…he was sentimental, and, like most sentimental people, he was both cruel and abused.”

This consensus association of sentimentality and cruelty is precisely the sort of insight for which one must rely on literature, and it reminds me of many in my life, and indeed of myself, and I wonder: why should this be so? What determines this connection? Of what coin are sentimentality and cruelty the two sides? Excessive regard for the feelings of the self? Is it that both reflect the abandonment of social protocols in favor of the freely-expressed emotions of the petulant, volatile inner self, now fawning and now frothing, now extolling and now excoriating, now sweet and now savage?

Our society tends towards easy sentimentality; does it also tend towards emotional cruelty?

François de La Rochefoucauld. I don’t actually care for this quote, which I think is incomplete if not totally incorrect. But it reminded me of how most of us respond powerfully to aphorisms which seem to justify who we are or perform the feat of inverting what is ordinarily shameful into something about which we’re proud.

For example, in the past year I’ve seen “Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know,” said by the brilliant and alcoholic suicide Ernest Hemingway, posted dozens of times. Each time, I wonder what it is that attracts us to these words: Hemingway’s genius was literary, not psychological or philosophical, and he offers no explanation of why his argument should be true (the usual ones are banal and false). It is a self-congratulatory statement, of course, coming from him, miserable as he was, and it suggests two things:

1. That if you’re unhappy it’s not because you’re shallow, selfish, materialistic, vain, prideful, phony, neurotic, psychotic, immature, delusional, addicted, conflicted, or otherwise damaged, but because you’re just too damn smart!
2. That happy people, like your grating cousins in their happy marriage or those obnoxious coworkers who never cry at their desks, are probably idiots (or liars: movies like American Beauty ensure that we see all contented souls as repressed lunatics).

I happen to disagree with Hemingway, and think it should be noted that true happiness is rare among all people; and that happiness is also a prerequisite for ethical decency in most people; and that therefore if happiness were precluded by intelligence, our wish for a better world might require that we admit that intelligence really isn’t all that valuable. I think, by the way, that this is the case, and I admire the happy.

Similar quotes abound on our Dashboards, and I don’t intend to criticize anyone who likes or posts them: I have done so myself, of course, and in any event they do occasionally contain valuable insights.

But it interests me how purely you can sometimes see the lengths to which we go to perform what Nietzsche described as the fundamental act of resentment: taking positive values and declaring them negative. Happiness is for morons, and if I have tremendous faults it must be because I’m so damn great!

On the other hand: when dying, I hope not to console myself for a life of unhappiness by saying, “Well, but I was so smart and right about everything!” Much better to look back on happy memories, kindness and joy, and not still waste time with pride about mind or body or anything else.