I have been listening studiously to the aforementioned Berkeley podcasts and one of the many gems I have discovered from its analysis of Dostoevsky’s ‘Brothers Karamazov’ is that many of the characters come predisposed with their own defining childhood memory that shapes the manner in which they relate to the world. For example, Alyosha has the memory of his mother carrying him over to the crucifix while slanted sunlight shone through the window; Dmitry has the memory of the stranger buying him a bag of peanuts; for Father Zosima it is obviously his last conversation with his dying brother. While it is typical of clinical psychology to seek out the negative influences of childhood memories and then interpret symptomatic adult behavior, Dostoevsky’s characterization in ‘The Brothers’ is notable for its tendency to emphasize the positive influence of such memories.
As I have said before I do not share Freud’s pessimism for mankind, which is not to say that I am an optimist. There is a common view – a derivative of Hobbes perhaps – which presupposes that dark selfish ambitions lurk in the heart of every man and if not restrained through force these ambitions would inevitably manifest into unspeakable evils. Undoubtedly man is selfish but I hardly believe that selfishness is a purely dark and destructive attribute. It would seem from ‘The Brothers Karamazov’ that Dostoevsky shares my appreciation for the positive aspects of self-involvement, that being a Karamazov is not a bad thing afterall, but necessary for the real spiritual experiences to happen.
Some point to the state of what passes as entertainment in modern society as evidence that we want suffering and share in a sadistic pleasure of watching others suffer. At nineteen I would have heartily agreed with that sentiment, and probably most people at nineteen would have also, but this pessimism no longer feels accurate to me. Yes, there is fascination in the suffering of others, but that seems to be a natural curiosity considering we are all going to undergo some profound suffering due to our mortality. When fascination becomes pleasure, that is, extending beyond the merely curious aspect of witnessing suffering than it becomes something altogether different and sadistic. I like to think I have a grasp of my thought processes and if I am to be absolutely honest with myself, insofar as I can be, I feel no particular titillation from the thought of people suffering. And outside of the sexual context of wanting to dominate another person that seems encoded in my biology I feel no impulse towards violence. Am I the exception to the rule, deluded, or one of many misrepresented individuals that make their way through life too dull to be defined?
I fear the fault of so many theorists is they define the world in their own image and seldom appreciate the effects of their psychosis in their universalizing principles. The sadistic or perverse or Aryan sentiments that may occupy their thoughts at some point in the evaluation process get mistakenly carried over as universal, and it is up to each of us to stand firm against these distorted generalizations in order to qualify our real humanity.
Hence it is strange to think of defining childhood moments in a positive light when confronted with the murk of pessimism that derives from pop psychology. Of course the notion of a defining childhood memory is largely itself another fiction, but at least it is a more attractive fiction, one we each have a role in creating. I appreciate the aesthetic choices Dostoevsky made to have his characters follow clearly defined arcs which serve a larger picture of his moral ambitions for the book, however, the same simplicity of design cannot be expected in the real world, although it may be closely approximated by way of self-configuration out of some conscious of unconscious defining relationship, be it to a religion, an ethnicity, a person or even an inanimate object (i.e. money).
I thought about this for a while, perhaps too long as this should have been a spontaneous response were it to have any semblance of authenticity. My childhood is largely a blur for me, I equate memories now mostly with ideas, as a long genealogical chart of my philosophical views, but what is there in my childhood but a treasure trove of sensations. Should I be so down on base sensations, have I become so jaded in my adult life? So I thought about this deeper, quick flashes passed by, and I found them strange with respects to their lack of profundity, it was scraps of life, waiting on the bench during a little league baseball game, walking through swampy fields and reveling in the insect life, petty thefts, petty insults. Eventually I honed in on my defining moment, and in a way it surprised me. It is something I have written about before on this blog, and maybe this very act has influenced me, but the more I think about the memory the more it takes on significance in my life. It is the night all the children in the small town I grew up in played manhunt, and I was selected as one of the hunted. The sun was just going down and the town was eerily quiet except for the scramble of hiding children and the scavenging of the hunters. My moment is hiding in front of the post office behind a shrub, staring at the shrub, the grass, the way those sorts of things look as the last rays of sunlight are dissipating. It was not so much the shrub, but the sense of involvement in that moment, being a part of a larger game, a larger community, a larger purpose. I look back and think there was no fear in that moment, no hardships, I felt the oceanic experience of the world in ways I am nostalgic for now. This is my defining moment and I seem to relate to it inversely at present, as one at odds with this lost Eden. All of my philosophies, my pursuits of the mind, they feel small in comparison with this lost gift of youth. Not to say I am depressed in my present state, but I do feel the absence of something, and maybe that is the point, like Anne Sexton wrote:
Today is made of yesterday, each time I steal
towards rites I do not know, waiting for the lost
ingredient, as if salt or money or even lust
would keep us calm and prove us whole at last.
so what is your defining moment?
15 Comments
Wonderful post (liking the closing Sexton… am a sucker for Sexton, who constantly revised and twisted her wifely kitchen knives in her own gut, I think to enhance her suffering and thereby her art a wee bit)...
I’ve decided (as of this morning) that the Bros K lectures will accompany my on my commute in to work – but I’m still quite early in the series.
I’m fascinated that your personal history seems to be composed mainly of ideas – and I’m thinking this is the difference in life-trajectory between philosophers and mere writers. I’m trying to move into my idea-system, and just now beginning to really collect my ideas about the nature of life and bundle them together into some prescriptive type system for living in an orderly, more calculated way.
Because I’m one of those heavy reflectors, who spent all of high school understanding and trying to apply meaning to experiences in middle school, and then all of undergrad revising high school’s little moments, and so on until now, when I think I’m finally caught up in the present, and ready to come up with fresh ideas, instead of mere reactions to the stimuli from my environment.
All my defining childhood moments (and I think the defining ones are the most acutely embarrassing or shameful) somehow involve my ridiculous temper combined with a ridiculous need to please and entertain… my Daffy Duck-ness.
But, the defining positive one is when I my 5th grade teacher said she enjoyed a short story I’d written so much (this was back when Edward Gorey would do an annual story writing contest at the end of the year to one of his illustrations), that she submitted it as an entry to the NYTimes (even though the contest was over). I got a letter back from the Times praising my efforts, and I think I’d made the teacher proud. I remember her sparkly eyes, the crispness of the Times’ stationary, the fact that both the teacher and then I sniffed the letter… and my little friend Kevin, always smarter and already a pretty sophisticated little writer, totally eating crow because his story (which was admittedly better) did not get the same royal treatment.
It imbued in me this notion that there are people out there who will show that level of support for another’s ideas or expression. I’ve tried to be a fan, like my teacher was to me, to others.
(And it’s a more upbeat moment than the one involving a local Church and my mom dragging me up with her to the altar during a service along with three other god-filled goons, to confess and repent and cry at the front of the church, this totally sham-ass cult church, in front of hundreds of other divinely-possessed onlookers. I think this moment, occurring when I was 12, made me steer away from life-purpose contemplating, to a more reactive means of getting from day to day.)
Heee. Pardon the length of the comment!
I am now wary of being called a philosopher. I often use the term to describe my self and ambitions but ever since I discovered Dostoevsvky there has been a palapable shift in my relation to philosophy… it comes with conditions that had not previously existed.
In a very real way Ivan from Bros K is my persona, but I am an Ivan trying really hard to be a Zosima. I appreciate the fallacy of detached rationalism the likes that is associated with people who make their’s life’s work and purpose thinking out theories.
Hence I am an existential philosopher which is distinct from most philosophy because it is very much anti-philosophy, or at least anti-philosophical tradition.
So I am surprised that so much of my memories are locked up in ideas, theories, philoviews. That scares me a bit, and I hope I am moving towards something more embracing of… instinct.
and you cheated, there can only be one defining moment, and it needs to be very early on, because it becomes the paradigm for all future experiences. It is very interesting this, because those examples you described really do seem to capture your personality.
even my self-implosion of nihlism at twenty could plausibly be linked to my defining moment, a clash of the limits of my reasoning skills with what I really wanted. At twenty I truly was Ivan. I could not not think, and thinking overwhelmed me. I have cooled much since then.
It is pretty bloody tragic that Dostoe never finished the series of books of which Brothers was to be the first. What a loss for humanity. Perhaps I should pen the next installment myself and pass it off as his. “the light sheened off the windows of the cobbler shop all violet glow, as Ivan passed the place he shirked his chance at salvation”
On my drive home, I decided I wanted to refine my ‘philosopher’ label to ‘person with philosphical trajectory,’ because you are an Ivan (I thought moving in an Alyosha direction… but I guess Zosima is Alyosha’s goal anyway).
Regards,
Dmitri.
When I first pondered this question my thoughts unconsciously filtered to moments of loneliness and alienation early in life. But as you document in detail, there is something unsettling in conforming to such a grim Freudian vision.
Therefore I choose as my defining moment one that still has echoes of these negative qualities but is without question enshrouded in a warm halo even after all these years. My parents divorced when I was young and I spent a lot of time in daycare when they were at work. Daycare always had naptime in the afternoon in which we would toss these plastic mats onto the carpet and lay down for an hour or so. While others seemed to do well with this ritual, I could never fall asleep would just lay there thinking and fantasizing about things. I wouldn’t say it was an unpleasant experience, but there was certainly something amiss in being the only one awake, the only one not sleeping in a sea of somnolence.
One day I must have been tossing and turning conspicuously, because one of the teachers came over to read my a story. She was a tall, thin black woman probably in her late twenties, a very kind and friendly woman. That day she read me a story whose title and events I can’t remember. I only remember one page in which some little animals were trying to get away from the police and sprayed pepper into the police horses to throw them off the trail.
The events and pictures in the storybook are actually irrelevant, because the moment she started reading I slipped into an peaceful daze, a sort of blissful state of detachment in which the the entire world existed right in this tiny interaction. She was reading in a soft voice, just above a whisper but soft enough not to wake the surrounding kids sleeping. I wasn’t even following the plot of the story, I just listened to her voice. I’ll give up trying to articulate this feeling now, except to say it was like being numb and being completely alive at the same time.
Sometimes when I’m at the library in the present day two people will sit down at a nearby table and whisper together, and it sends chills down my spine, and I want them to keep whispering forever. I don’t want to be a part of the conversation, I just want to hear and watch them interact in this hushed manner. I usually stop reading my book or whatever I’m doing and just succumb to the sensuous takeover that my body and mind go through hearing these sounds. It’s like I’m overtaken by goodness and softness, even though my current experiences are more like an echo of the original edenic state of bliss.
I think the passive nature of this act makes it defining for me, since even though I’ve had more pronounced moments of athletic and academic success, along with countless other personal milestones, nothing really compares to the benevolent, dreamy comfort of that initial whispered story. An attraction to similiar experiences of sustained passive observation mark my adult life far more than decisive moments of action.
What is intriguing is when a defining moment has, quite like you say Nate, no obvious reason for being, i.e. it is not a pronounced moment that is indicative of biographical detail, but something of an undercurrent that is nearly incomprehensible save for your own attachment to it. I think even in our sharing of these moments here we embellish them a bit to make them intelligible, but probably they are far less pronounced then even this.
memory is an incredible thing when think about it. Is there truly an object of a memory, like say my manhunt event, that is quintessentially there, wherein no matter how my act of remembering employs this object, under what immediate conditions and context, there is still something kept… almost as in platonic terms, the form of the event in distinction from its appearances? I would think not. If anything what links memories together is what Nietzsche called ‘ressentiment’... so a shared purpose of which one event may become inextricably bound as an example. The object is the feeling, and a particular event is merely an example made of the feeling.
thoughts?
er, maybe that is not ‘ressentiment’ as Nietzsche coined it… there is a lot of contention on the point of what that term means apparently… so let me say instead that the habitual tendency of thought may be the impetus for associating a remembered event with a meaning.
I’m thinking, too, there is an inescapable personal mediation of the eventness. Like, the event iteself is inevitable – it becomes defining only in deep retrospect. So it’s bound to suffer from embellishment.
I’m wagering that most of us don’t really know our true, defining event. Or that what we now consider a defining event is later some mere interpretation of our present desire to cultivate or explain certain aspects of our personality. Basically, we all need our own little Dostoe to follow us around taking notes and steering us in some trajectory.
I think every instance of suffering is what best defines us because I think my official definition of suffering is going to be ‘experience with an undeniable trajectory.’
I forgot to mention that I thought Nate’s recounting of his moment was gorgeous. I’m glad I read it.
Thanks Perc, and fascinating posts all around. I don’t know if embellishment is the correct word for the attempt to articulate the defined moment. This is truly a case of the tools of language being inadequate to the task at hand, for in my own case, even inserting the words “dreamy, bliss, softness, goodness, somnolence, numb”- these are just my crude attempts to capture a glimmer of the feeling that rests in my memory. I guess I’m thinking the process is less of a painter improving a non-descript landscape with additional color and detail than a painter experimenting with particular strokes and colors to recreate a vague, intangible vision of color and form in his head.
Part of what makes the moment defining for me is that by ordinary standards it is completely unremarkable- there is nothing that can explain why I felt the way I did, and how I have been able to retain such a memory over time. I’ve never even mentioned it to anyone until now. The very fact that I remember such an insignificant moment is testament to its magic.
But I’m remembering the feeling primarily, and fleshing it out with probably less and less accuracy as the years go by. Certainly over the years my memory took on a life of its own, and my need to relive this feeling gave this particular memory a Darwinian boost over all the others. But I can’t help thinking that there is something transendental about this experience that, er, transcends the needs of my present self to take solace in the moment. Something happened there, and I’m partial to believing there is some platonic element that rings true in each and every recollection.
I’ve had Proust’s Swann’s Way by my bed for a few months, my bookmark stalled in the opening chapter. I found the prose a bit ponderous when I started it, but he supposedly has quite a lot to say concerning the realm of memory.
experience with an undeniable trajectory… hmmm you make it sound like something outside of us is determining the trajectory, is that what you mean? maybe there is no higher purpose at all to our suffering, we suffer because of accidents in life, that we only later add the cloak of meaning to. I would agree with that statement if the ‘undeniable trajectory’ was like the id’s influence over the conscious self maybe, but that is the ceiling of my higher meaning faith in suffering. we may be withholding information from ourselves and stealthily giving it to us piecemeal in order to play out a meaning that has a undeniable trajectory. if that makes sense.
another post forthcoming trying to extrapolate the salient positions on how to live as described in the existentialism course (of which I am now a graduate from). that is a dream course, talking philosophy watching great films and reading great literature. I really missed out, the philosophy courses I took were not nearly as interesting… i took philosophy of science and marxism of all things.
Sorry about that Nate, somehow your post got put in with the spam but now it is back.
yeah that is weird, I have this inner dialogue with myself all the time but I don’t think I have ever said it aloud to another person, how there are these seemingly inconsequential moments that reoccur in my memory but reoccur with such frequency that they seem like the paradigms for certain ideas, or relationships, or identity.
now that we are in the confessing mood, and this will mean very little to anyone but myself: one of the most frequent is a memory as a kid watching the Dark Crystal with my nephew, and I was bored of watching it, but my nephew wanted to continue watching it so I had a tantrum… that is it… out of all the times I probably had a tantrum as a kid, somehow that one sticks permanently encoded in my memory and very often when I am feeling agitated by the disagreement with someone over what we should do, the dark crystal moment pops into my consciousness. but why?
I wrote a post previously about my personal mythology and these memories are the foundations of this mythology. I find it very intriguing to think of these memories as, in Jungian terms, something very important, but I wonder if that is true.
maybe it is a fluke that i remember the dark crystal and not any other tantrum, or i remember hiding in front of the post office and not any other time i played within a community. Like I said before maybe what is eternal or important is the feelings of which these memories are merely symbols of… a self-coded understanding of the world which I resond to.
Is there such thing as objective morality? Is it not more likely that we fashion a morality through the symbols of our memories which affect the context of what moral means, and then for the sake of convenience in communicating with another person we pretend this morality is the same as the spoken one.
Kierkegaard talks of the telelogy of the ethical, instances where we can believe in something in direct contradiction with the established ethical (this meant more in 19th century society than modern day perhaps). for example someone who believes his homosexual urges are right despite it being in direct contrast with the established ethical. This ability to transgress the established ethical and be faithful to this conviction would suggest to me that objective morality is unfounded, though there is a lot of arguments to make to get to that conclusion first.
>>Is there such thing as objective morality? Is it not more likely that we fashion a morality through the symbols of our memories which affect the context of what moral means, and then for the sake of convenience in communicating with another person we pretend this morality is the same as the spoken one.
Right. I’m so happy I rescued the other half of that comment, which disappeared. it was –
This question prompts me to do one of my ‘special moves’ in which I say something like there is a lim that can be taken of human behavior, and that the objective morality comes out of standardized responses to like the conflict between individual freedom and its limitations when it pushed against the individual limitations of others.
It doens’t start out objective… but it takes on objectivity the more people adopt certain responses. Individually, I don’t know if it can be characterized as a morality, you know? To me, its more like the ratification of instinct. Like I was sad when X hit me, which is why I don’t hit others (without provocation).
Swanns Way! I remember attempting to read it in 7th grade, and some kid named Johnny wrote a big “THE” in non-erasable pen on the cover. I hit him really hard with the book when I found out he’d done it, and then we both started giggling about my reaction. I want to have been with Moncreiff’s translation, but I think the long paragraph-sentences really convey the sinking out of the present reality and committing to live in a series of loosely connected memories. Specifically, I remember the quest to get the kiss from Mama, and the servant desperately flipping through medical books looking for details about ‘confinement,’ which, at the time, I thought was a great word for pregnancy. Waggish.com has a pretty comprehensive Proust commentary if you’re looking to chat it out. Reading sentences of such a structure really improved my vocabulary and creative use.
objective morality would be like charting a graph according to intersecting agreements between individual impressions and say this graph identifies objective morality… a consensus of the subjective experiences… but is it fundamentally a concept or an essence? I would say a concept, something we use as a guide within social contracts, but it is as artificial as the social contract, an imposed idea. It would be very difficult to show in any convincing way that morality is objective and by that, possess an essential quality.
Schopenhauer writes:
“The reason the impressions we receive in youth are so significant, the reason why in the dawn of life everything appears to us in so ideal and transfigured a light, is that we then first become acquainted with the genus, which is still new to us, through the individual, so that every individual thing stands as a representative of its genus: we grasp therein the (Platonic) idea of this genus, which is essentially what constitutes beauty”.