#enquote

100 days of languages - Day 3

To get a crystal clear view of the solipsism of muddled romance, I invite the listener to turn with me to the protagonist of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s ‘Notes from Underground.’ The Underground Man is a dreamer: he can sit alone in his room for months and be a hero—inside his own head. But his actual life leaves a great deal to be desired, to put it as gently as possible; and when it comes to the praxis of making his dreams incarnate, this guy can barely function. . . . This is what happens when the romantic imagination, completely frustrated by a world which couldn’t care less about it, turns in on itself like a cancer. The doors of intimacy are closed to the Underground Man: even when he has a golden opportunity with a sincere and compassionate girl right in front of him, he screws it up in no uncertain terms. Near the end of the novella, the Underground Man wrenchingly cries that the people in his life won’t let him be good, despite his best intentions. But I would ask in response: whoever said anyone’s permission was needed in order to be good? On the contrary, to be good is nothing other than to wager a pure heart against an utterly indifferent or even outright hostile world—and win. . . . In my eyes, the issue isn’t that the world wouldn’t ‘allow’ him to be good; rather, it’s that he lacked the lucidity and simple courage needed for deserving his dreams. He never cared—or dared—to ask the crucial question of what kind of man he would need to become, in order to attain the life he had always wanted. . . .

It’s to do with knowing and being known. I remember how it stopped seeming odd that in biblical Greek, knowing was used for making love. Whosit knew so-and-so. Carnal knowledge. Knowledge of each other, not of the flesh but through the flesh, knowledge of self, the real him, the real her, in extremis, the mask slipped from the face. Every other version of oneself is on offer to the public. We share our vivacity, grief, sulks, anger, joy… we hand it out to anybody who happens to be standing around, to friends and family with a momentary sense of indecency perhaps, to strangers without hesitation. But in pairs we insist that we give ourselves to each other. What selves? What’s left? What else is there that hasn’t been dealt out like a deck of cards? Carnal knowledge. Personal, final, uncompromised. Knowing, being known. I revere that. Having that is being rich, you can be generous about what’s shared — she walks, she talks, she laughs, she lends a sympathetic ear, she kicks off her shoes and dances on the tables, she’s everybody’s and it don’t mean a thing, let them eat cake; knowledge is something else, the undealt card, and while it’s held it makes you free-and-easy and nice to know, and when it’s gone everything is pain. Every single thing. Every object that meets the eye, a pencil, a tangerine, a travel poster. As if the physical world has been wired up to pass a current back to the part of your brain where imagination glows like a filament in a lobe no bigger than a torch bulb. Pain.

Apparently I have: