A couple of days ago I just couldn't take it any more, so I whipped out my copy of Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility and reread it.
Every time I reread Jane Austen I seem to penetrate to a new depth.
For instance, it seems to me that all the characters, for all that they are Regency era swells, are no different that humans today.
All the women in Sense and Sensibility are prone to "hysterics" except our heroine Elinor.
OK. We are not allowed to use that word today. Sexism, dontcha know. But today almost all women jump at the chance to have a Satisfying Emotional Experience. So what's the difference? Both emotional experiences are predicated on the presumption that someone will show up and pat the little dear and tell her how helpless and innocent she is.
So, in those days we had "hysterical" females. Today we have females that get totally bent out of shape by a "microagression."
The exception, our heroine Elinor Dashwood, has all the emotional responses that all the other women are having. Only she keeps it bottled up, because someone has to keep on carrying on.
Eventually, her sister Marianne realizes what a heavy load Elinor has been carrying, and begs her forgiveness. But only in the novel, not in real life.
The men, except for the peerless Colonel Brandon, are moral cretins. They flop around engaging the affections of all the unattached young women, without a thought for what they are doing. And only in retrospect do they realize what bounders they are. Or, like John Dashwood, they are analyzing the world purely in monetary terms, of pounds a year in income, and assuming that everyone else sees the world that way.
Of course the women, whoever they are, spend the whole novel judging the other women and their behavior. So nothing has changed there.
But here is a puzzler. It raises the question of just how satirical Austen was. For instance, in Volume III, Chapter VIII, Elinor ruminates on the dastardly Willoughby, and judges his "extravagance and vanity," his every "faulty propensity," as though she were God.
I suppose the genius of Jane Austen is that we can never really be sure when the character is speaking, when Austen is speaking, or indeed when Austen's Muse is speaking.
Maybe if I took the time to read Austen's letters with her sister Cassandra in Jane Austen's Letters to her Sister Cassandra and Others I might find out.
In any age, of course, people are busily judging others with complete confidence in their authority to do so. Ben Stein reports on a 78-year-old liberal lady castigating him for a comment on China.
But what if our obsession with suffering is just a human conceit? That suffering is nobody's fault, least of all racist-sexist-homophobes and Satans and Old Scratches. That life, the universe, and everything is uncertain, with a quantum theory roll of the dice every moment.
Surely it cannot be so. Because what would all the moral arbiters and bullies do then, poor things?
Every time I reread Jane Austen I seem to penetrate to a new depth.
For instance, it seems to me that all the characters, for all that they are Regency era swells, are no different that humans today.
All the women in Sense and Sensibility are prone to "hysterics" except our heroine Elinor.
OK. We are not allowed to use that word today. Sexism, dontcha know. But today almost all women jump at the chance to have a Satisfying Emotional Experience. So what's the difference? Both emotional experiences are predicated on the presumption that someone will show up and pat the little dear and tell her how helpless and innocent she is.
So, in those days we had "hysterical" females. Today we have females that get totally bent out of shape by a "microagression."
The exception, our heroine Elinor Dashwood, has all the emotional responses that all the other women are having. Only she keeps it bottled up, because someone has to keep on carrying on.
Eventually, her sister Marianne realizes what a heavy load Elinor has been carrying, and begs her forgiveness. But only in the novel, not in real life.
The men, except for the peerless Colonel Brandon, are moral cretins. They flop around engaging the affections of all the unattached young women, without a thought for what they are doing. And only in retrospect do they realize what bounders they are. Or, like John Dashwood, they are analyzing the world purely in monetary terms, of pounds a year in income, and assuming that everyone else sees the world that way.
Of course the women, whoever they are, spend the whole novel judging the other women and their behavior. So nothing has changed there.
But here is a puzzler. It raises the question of just how satirical Austen was. For instance, in Volume III, Chapter VIII, Elinor ruminates on the dastardly Willoughby, and judges his "extravagance and vanity," his every "faulty propensity," as though she were God.
I suppose the genius of Jane Austen is that we can never really be sure when the character is speaking, when Austen is speaking, or indeed when Austen's Muse is speaking.
Maybe if I took the time to read Austen's letters with her sister Cassandra in Jane Austen's Letters to her Sister Cassandra and Others I might find out.
In any age, of course, people are busily judging others with complete confidence in their authority to do so. Ben Stein reports on a 78-year-old liberal lady castigating him for a comment on China.
“I don’t want to hear that,” she said angrily. “It’s not the ‘Chinese virus’ like Trump says. It’s just a virus and to call it the Chinese virus defames all of the wonderful people of Chinese descent in our country. It’s racist and I don’t want to hear it.”Sweetie Pie Ben "didn’t want to argue about it for even a moment." But I rehearsed in my mind the sort of comeback appropriate for the occasion. Maybe this:
I don't know about that, but have you ever thought that pejorative rhetoric like that is what is going to get us more Trumps?I am doing a long think piece right now that is anchored in this thought from Mircea Eliade in The Myth of the Eternal Return.
The primitive... cannot conceive of an unprovoked suffering; it arises from a personal fault... or from his neighbor's malevolence... but there is always a fault at the bottom of it[.]Humans are obsessed with the question of suffering, and I would argue that it is not just "primitives" that are obsessed with it. Axial Age religions are obsessed with Sin and Redemption, where Sin is the consequence of trying to avoid suffering, and post Death of God secular ideologies are likewise all in unison that the sufferings of the marginalized and oppressed are all the fault of someone, a someone that is probably white and probably male and certainly privileged.
But what if our obsession with suffering is just a human conceit? That suffering is nobody's fault, least of all racist-sexist-homophobes and Satans and Old Scratches. That life, the universe, and everything is uncertain, with a quantum theory roll of the dice every moment.
Surely it cannot be so. Because what would all the moral arbiters and bullies do then, poor things?
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