Mental Mirror Image: We Write What We Are Not — by Adam Gopnik скачать в хорошем качестве

Mental Mirror Image: We Write What We Are Not — by Adam Gopnik

‘The contradiction between what he thought and what he was, I now think, after a quarter-century’s reflection, is a perversity of human nature so deep that it is almost a law—the Law of the Mental Mirror Image. We write what we are not. It is not merely that we fail to live up to our best ideas but that our best ideas, and the tone that goes with them, tend to be the opposite of our natural temperament. Rousseau wrote of the feelings of the heart and the beauties of nature while stewing and seething in a little room. Dr. Johnson pleaded for Christian stoicism in desperate fear of damnation. The masters of the wry middle style, Lionel Trilling and Randall Jarrell, were mired in sadness and confusion. The angry and competitive man (James Thurber) writes tender and rueful humor because his own condition is what he seeks to escape. The apostles of calm reason are hypersensitive and neurotic; William James arrived at a pose of genial universal cheerfulness in the face of constant panic. Art critics are often visually insensitive—look at their living rooms!—and literary critics are often slow and puzzled readers, searching for the meaning, and cooks are seldom trenchermen, being more fascinated by recipes than greedy for food. It is not so much that we are drawn to things that frighten us as that we are drawn to things that we can think of as things—as subjects that exist outside the boundaries of all that is just the way we are. It is not merely that we do not live up to our ideals but that we cannot, since our ideals are exactly the part of us that we do not instantly identify as just part of life. An original thought is like a death mask of a man, with the solids made hollow and the nose a cavity, a portrait pulled inside out. We are our ideas (Popper, with his long, slightly overformal sentences, lucid but unornamented by wit, sounded like Popper, and no one else), for they include everything we are—but turned right around to face us, and looking back at us in surprise. — Adam Gopnik, The Porcupine (New Yorker) [Art: René Magritte]