V-2nd: Grasping and not...

[Ian Livingston]

Good point, Emma. The capacity to imaginatively enter another person's
perspective is not available to someone at a self-centric stage of
development. One of the things that marks Benny is his experience of
the world as a bifurcated phenomenon composed of his subjective
experience and the otherness of everything else. That alienation is
irremediable until the subject discovers that others actually
experience the world from very different perspectives every bit as
real as one's own. I'm trying to think if there is any point in the
novel where Benny actually moves into that capacity. Will have to
watch as we go. Or be corrected by someone who sees something I
don't....

On Sat, Jun 19, 2010 at 1:58 PM, Emma Wrigley <ecwrigley at excite.co.uk> wrote:
>
>>p. 13 perennial edition: He had no impulse to bring her closer. "Whatever
>> you
>>decide".
>>
>>Madonna, he thought, I have a dependent now.
>>
>>Fear of commitment, as the contemporary cliche goes
>>but..........................
>>differently expressed?............I could riff on it and might but, for now
>>
>>Thoughts from anyone else?
>>
>>"Some of us are afraid of dying; others of human loneliness..."
>
> For sure a fear of commitment, maybe a fear of not being able to see 'beyond
> himself' in order to commit. If he is always a stranger in a strange land
> then his eyes will always be inward (protectively). Commitment necessitates
> becoming one with this alien environment and yet his greatest fear is being
> alone there, where 'nothing lives but himself'. An easy way to get sick of
> yourself is an inability to stop analysing...and being driven to be alone.
>
> (or atleast somesuch that I scrawled in my margin an age ago...
>>
>>.
>>



-- 
"liber enim librum aperit."