sulker's fantasy

excerpt from kiss and tell by alain de botton:

biographies are traditionally written without hesitation in crossing lines of age, class, profession and gender. an urban aristocrat captures the life of a rural pauper, a fifty-year-old follows the experience of youthful rimbaud, a timorous academic allies himself to lawrence of arabia. an enviable faith lies behind these enterprises, the idea that men and women remain essentially comprehensible to each other despite a ripple of surface difference.

dr. johnson thought so: 'we are all prompted by the same motives, all deceived by the same fallacies, all animated by hope, obstructed by danger, entangled by desire and seduced by pleasure.' people belonged to the same disparate but unitary family, suggested johnson, and could therefore understand one another on the basis of their passport to the human community. i could understand your motive, because i would find much the same if i looked under my pillow. i could understand a fragment of your experience by finding the same experience within myself. i would know how love had made you suffer, because i had also endured evenings by a phone which had not rung. i would recognize your envy, because i too had known the pain engendered by my insufficiencies.

but there were darker implications to this pillow model of understanding. what if little lay beneath the pillow? adam smith had unwittingly articulated the dilemma in his theory of moral sentiments. 'as we have no immediate experience of what other men feel, we can form no idea of the manner in which they are affected but by conceiving what we ourselves should feel in the like situation. though our brother is upon the rack, as long as we ourselves are at our ease, our senses will never inform us of what he suffers. it is by the imagination only that we can form any conception of what are his sensations. by the imagination we place ourselves in his situation and conceive ourselves enduring all the same torments.'

despite the virtue of suffering with others, the sombre consequence of the pillow theory lies in the need for a sufficient stock of experience genuinely to imagine the experience of others - depressing because our stock can never adequately answer the emotions we encounter beyond ourselves.

what if i had never been on a rack before? what would i then feel for my brother condemned to this fate of unimaginable agony? would i imagine the last time i had been on a crowded underground train and then extend the experience a hundredfold, perhaps mixing it with the recollection of a painful tooth extraction or lanced boil? in other words, how can we understand experiences of which we have no experience?

we may suppose that no experience is so unique as to be incomparable. there are always adjacent experiences to which we can appeal to inform us of the original, we proceed with metaphors when our images run dry. i had never eaten shark, but when isabel informed me that it tasted half like cod and half like tuna, both of which i had bought on occasion, the mystery of the fish receded. when we say that a book has transported us to a foreign land we have never travelled to, we are paradoxically also saying that it has succeeded in reminding us of places that we knew, but had never yet combined.

but there are situations in which we may be granted neither cod nor tuna. others may resist suggesting the nature of their experience out of an assumption that we should know what these are without requiring to have them spelt out. the sulker's fantasy is to be understood without needing to speak, metaphorize or explain, because words embody a defeat of a prior and more intimate level of communication. it is when intuition breaks down that we have to clear our throat, and our voice risks reminding us of our loneliness. we research only what we have not felt.