fieldus

from Adam Phillips in conversation with Philip Davis in The Reader:

Samuel Johnson said it’s very difficult to be friends with people who hold views directly opposed to your own…

It’s not that I think ‘How fascinating it is that there are other people’. What reassures me or makes me feel better is the fact that I don’t have to respond with violence, as a reflex, to the person with the opposed view. This is not a liberal point – clearly there’s a point at which the
unacceptable is unacceptable. Morality is based on that. But I do thinkthe thing we are likely to be affronted by is the thing with which we have some affinity. And there’s a loss of energy in the repudiation of the opposing view. Because your enemy, so to speak, has something rofoundly in common with you.

The model you don’t like is one of anger and enmity whereas what I think I am talking about is more to do with the feeling of disappointment when people don’t understand your work, and then a sort of indifference that then comes upon one… There may well be another subject matter you can have with that other person, and that usually means giving up on your thing and looking for their thing.

What of the possibility that sadness and indifference is a transformation of violent anger? Unconsciously, your first experience is ‘I want to murder this person’. This is obviously terrible and impossible and you’ll be in prison, so you can’t do that. This anger turns into indifference, boredom, sadness. In other words, you’ve had a resignation and faced the fact that there’s no meeting here. I would want more of the violence to be available for conversation without it being enacted. I do believe in conflict as a form of affinity, rather than conflict being the problem.

There are connections, says Wordsworth, finer than those of contrast. Though I appreciate your argument that the sadness is a version of the anger, I think there is some terrible truth in a shamed and reluctant sense that everything is potentially disappointing. That’s my biggest fear. And that would exactly be in the area of what we were talking in reading Malamud.

Let’s imagine that disappointment is a useful refuge, so that once you feel disappointed you know where you are. This is one version. The other version is that there’s a life organised to avoid the possibility of disappointment. And then the question would be, what’s the big problem
with disappointment? You could think disappointment is integral to being human so you had better start learning about it in order to be able to take risks. I would not want my children not to do things for fear of disappointment. I’d want them to be attentive to the moments when they take flight into disappointment as an avoidance of something else. Because I think disappointment is extremely consoling.

Yes, agreed: I do associate disappointment with those forms of ageing that give up and I do want to resist it.

For some people, it is a real question and one of the things we can do, thank God, is to kill ourselves. That should be a serious option built into our education. Why are you tolerating pain? I would prefer to start from the position of asking the question whether interview life is worth living, whether certain kinds of pain are worth suffering.

Interesting how this relates to the suicides documented in THE BRIDGE (posting above). The reasons for suicide usually aren’t very well founded and in the case of 2 survivors, Ken Baldwin and Jason Hines, evaporated as soon as they let go.