The contemplation of his reflection does not turn Narcissus into Priapus: the spell in which he is trapped is not a desire for himself but the satisfaction of not desiring the nymphs.
"I prefer my pistol to my p . . . ," said Narcissus; "it cannot take aim without my permission"—and took a pot shot at Echo.
Narcissus (drunk): "I shouldn't look at me like that, if I were you. I suppose you think you know who I am. Well, let me tell you, my dear, that one of these days you are going to get a very big surprise indeed)."
A vain woman comes to realize that vanity is a sin and in order not to succumb to temptation, has all the mirrors removed from her house. Consequendy, in a short while she cannot remember how she looks. She remembers that vanity is sinful but she forgets that she is vain.
He -who despises himself, nevertheless esteems himself as a self-despiser. (nietzsche.) A vain person is always vain about something. He overestimates the importance of some quality or exaggerates the degree to which he possesses it, but the quality has some real importance and he does possess it to some degree. The fantasy of overestimation or exaggeration makes the vain person comic, but the fact that he cannot be vain about nothing makes his vanity a venial sin, because it is always open to correction by appeal to objective fact.
A proud person, on the other hand, is not proud of anything, he is proud, he exists proudly. Pride is neither comic nor venial, but the most mortal of all sins because, lacking any basis in concrete particulars, it is both incorrigible and absolute: one cannot be more or less proud, only proud or humble.
Thus, if a painter tries to portray the Seven Deadly Sins, his experience will furnish him readily enough with images symbolic of Gluttony, Lust, Sloth, Anger, Avarice, and Envy, for all these are qualities of a person's relations to others and the world, but no experience can provide an image of Pride, for the relation it qualifies is the subjective relation of a person to himself. In the seventh frame, therefore, the painter can only place, in lieu of a canvas, a mirror.
he Moi est toujours halssable. (pascal.) True enough, but it is equally true that only le Moi is lovable in itself, not merely as an object of desire.
B
The absolutely banal—my sense of my own uniqueness. How strange that one should treasure this more than any of the exciting and interesting experiences, emotions, ideas that come and go, leaving it unchanged and unmoved.
The ego which recalls a previous condition of a now changed Self cannot believe that it, too, has changed. The Ego fancies that it is like Zeus who could assume one bodily appearance after another, now a swan, now a bull, while all the time remaining Zeus. Remembering some wrong or foolish action of the past, the Ego feels shame, as one feels ashamed of having been seen in bad company, at having been associated with a Self whom it regards as responsible for the act. Shame, not guilt: guilt, it fancies, is what the Self should feel.
Every autobiography is concerned with two characters, a Don Quixote, the Ego, and a Sancho Panza, the Self. In one kind of autobiography the Self occupies the stage and narrates, like a Greek Messenger, what the Ego is doing off stage. In another kind it is the Ego who is narrator and the Self who is described without being able to answer back. If the same person were to write his autobiography twice, first in one mode and then in the other, the two accounts would be so different that it would be hard to believe that they referred to the same person. In one he would appear as an obsessed creature, a passionate Knight forever serenading Faith or Beauty, humorless and over-life-size: in the other as coolly detached, full of humor and self-mockery, lacking in a capacity for affection, easily bored and smaller than life-size. As Don Quixote seen by Sancho Panza, he never prays; as Sancho Panza seen by Don Quixote, he never giggles.
An honest self-portrait is extremely rare because a man who has reached the degree of self-consciousness presupposed by the desire to paint his own portrait has almost always also developed an ego-consciousness which paints himself painting himself, and introduces artificial highlights and dramatic shadows.
As an autobiographer, Boswell is almost alone in his honesty.
I determined, if the Cyprian Fury should seize me, to
participate my amorous flame with a genteel girl.
Stendhal would never have dared write such a sentence. He would have said to himself: "Phrases like Cyprian Fury and amorous flame are cliches; I must put down in plain words exactly what I mean." But he would have been wrong, for the Self thinks in cliches and euphemisms, not in the style of the Code Napoleon.
History is, strictly speaking, the study of questions; the study of answers belongs to anthropology and sociology. To ask a question is to declare war, to make some issue a casus belli-, history proper is the history of batdes, physical, intellectual or spiritual and, the more revolutionary the outcome, the greater the historical interest. Culture is history which has become dormant or extinct, a second nature. A good historian is, of course, both a historian in the strict sense and a sociologist. So far as the life of an individual is concerned, an autobiography probably gives a truer picture of a man's history than even the best biography could have done. But a biographer can perceive what an autobiographer cannot, a man's culture, the influence upon his life of the presuppositions which he takes for granted.
It is possible to imagine oneself as rich when one is poor, as beautiful when ugly, as generous when stingy, etc., but it is impossible to imagine oneself as either more or less imaginative than, in fact, one is. A man whose every thought was commonplace could never know this to be the case.
I cannot help believing that my thoughts and acts are my own, not inherited reflexes and prejudices. The most I can say is: "Father taught me such-and-such and I agree with him." My prejudices must be right because, if I knew them to be wrong, I could no longer hold them.
Subjectively, my experience of life is one of having to make a series of choices between given alternatives and it is this experience of doubt, indecision, temptation, that seems more important and memorable than the actions I take. Further, if I make a choice which I consider the wrong one, I can never believe, however strong the temptation to make it, that it was inevitable, that I could not and should not have made the opposite choice. But when I look at others, I cannot see them making choices; I can only see what they actually do and, if I know them well, it is rarely that I am surprised, that I could not have predicted, given his character and upbringing, how so-and-so would behave.
Compared with myself, that is, other people seem at once less free and stronger in character. No man, however tough he appears to his friends, can help portraying himself in his autobiography as a sensitive plant.
To peek is always an unfriendly act, a theft of knowledge; we all know this and cannot peek without feeling guilty. As compensation we demand that what we discover by peeking shall be surprising. If I peer through the keyhole of a bishop's study and find him saying his prayers, the "idleness" of my curiosity is at once rebuked, but if I catch him making love to the parlor-maid I can persuade myself that my curiosity has really achieved something.
In the same way, the private papers of an author must, if they are to satisfy the public, be twice as unexpected and shocking as his published books.
Private letters, entries in journals, etc., fall into two classes, those in which the writer is in control of his situation—what he writes about is what he chooses to write—and those in which the situation dictates what he writes. The terms personal and impersonal are here ambiguous: the first class is impersonal in so far as the writer is looking at himself in the world as if at a third person, but personal in so far as it is his personal act so to look—the signature to the letter is really his and he is responsible for its contents. Vice versa, the second class is personal in that the writer is identical with what he writes, but impersonal in that it is the situation, not he, which enforces that identity.