Life in the Fishbowl - II

"But the effects I describe here are far from exhausting the matter: oddly enough, my imprisonment is present as well in something apparently removed from all external factors, that is, in my inner life: what I think about and what gives that inner life sustenance.  Regardless of what I reflect upon, traces of the fact of my imprisonment can always be found in the perspective of those reflections and in the shading of my emotions; it is always there, a particular dimension or aspect of them, trapped inside them as if by a spell.  I can't escape it even in my sleep: bizarre resonances of it filter into almost all my dreams.  Nor can I escape it when I am carried away by some cultural experience, a good movie or a book; a subtle analysis of these experiences would be conclusive."

Vaclav Havel
Letters to Olga

Life in the Fishbowl - I

The biblical phrase "perfect in his generation" has often struck me.  It seems to me that it means that a person has lived as justly and well as his historical situation warranted.  Each of us is bounded by the cultural and intellectual horizon's that surround us.  Such boundaries are not impossible to breach, or change could never occur, but such a feat is highly unusual. 

Such an insight might teach us to avoid the common modern error of judging historical figures by the mores and standards of our century instead of carefully placing them in their own context and understanding how much that context informed their range of choices and the breadth of their vision.

The following passage from Havel's prison letters is a thoughtful appraisal of "the question of what my imprisonment means to me, and what role it plays in my life."  I think a careful examination of our own lives would reveal similar, if more subtle, constraints.

"...the fact of my imprisonment...affects my life far more than I would have assumed at first sight.  To begin, it permeates every aspect of my everyday life: it establishes my daily schedule with great exactness, and from morning till evening influences to a greater or lesser extent all my activities, their intentions, the conditions under which they take place, their scope; it affects my demeanor and behavior, it shapes my habits and routines, the conduct of my life, how I obtain what I need, do my personal chores - in short, it penetrates into everything....Nor is that all: it more or less determines the character, the motifs, the circumstances and the expression of all my moods; it establishes my perspective on space and time; it gives a concrete aspect to my joys, hopes, aims, fears and afflictions, and to all the complications I have to contend with each day; it colors the criteria I apply in judging the many different phenomena and events that surround me; it gives concrete form to a large part of what sociologists call one's "value system."  This ubiquitous, pervasive influence penetrates to the minutest details of what I do..."

Vaclav Havel
Letters to Olga

Facing the Crisis

“Tut! tut!” cried Sherlock Holmes. “You must act, man, or you are lost. Nothing but energy can save you. This is no time for despair.”

Arthur Conan Doyle
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

Nature Makes Itself Felt in the City

"It was in the latter days of September, and the equinoctial gales had set in with exceptional violence. All day the wind had screamed and the rain had beaten against the windows, so that even here in the heart of great, hand-made London we were forced to raise our minds for the instant from the routine of life and to recognise the presence of those great elemental forces which shriek at mankind through the bars of his civilisation, like untamed beasts in a cage. As evening drew in, the storm grew higher and louder, and the wind cried and sobbed like a child in the chimney. Sherlock Holmes sat moodily at one side of the fireplace cross-indexing his records of crime, while I at the other was deep in one of Clark Russell’s fine sea-stories until the howl of the gale from without seemed to blend with the text, and the splash of the rain to lengthen out into the long swash of the sea waves."

Arthur Conan Doyle
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

The Oddness of the Ordinary

“My dear fellow,” said Sherlock Holmes as we sat on either side of the fire in his lodgings at Baker Street, “life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent. We would not dare to conceive the things which are really mere commonplaces of existence. If we could fly out of that window hand in hand, hover over this great city, gently remove the roofs, and peep in at the queer things which are going on, the strange coincidences, the plannings, the cross-purposes, the wonderful chains of events, working through generations, and leading to the most outré results, it would make all fiction with its conventionalities and foreseen conclusions most stale and unprofitable.”

Arthur Conan Doyle
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

The Course of a Another Kind of Love Affair?

"We are not afraid of telling over and over again how a man comes to fall in love with a woman and be wedded to her, or else be fatally parted from her.  Is it due to excess of poetry or of stupidity that we are never weary of describing what King James called a woman's "makdom and her fairnesse," never weary of listening to the twanging of the old Troubadour strings and are comparatively uninterested in that other kind of "makdom and fairnesse" which must be wooed with industrious thought and patient renunciation of small desires?  In the story of this passion, too, the development varies: sometimes it is the glorious marriage, sometimes frustration and final parting.  And not seldom the catastrophe is bound up with the other passion, sung by the Troubadours.  For in the multitude of middle-aged men who go about their vocations in a daily course determined for them much in the same way as the tie of their cravats, there is always a good number who once meant to shape their own deeds and alter the world a little.  The story of their coming to be shapen after the average and fit to be packed by the gross, is hardly ever told even in their consciousness; for perhaps their ardor in generous unpaid toil cooled as imperceptibly as the ardor of other youthful loves, till one day their earlier self walked like a ghost in its old home and made the new furniture ghastly.  Nothing in the world more subtle than the process of their gradual change!  In the beginning they inhaled it unknowingly: you and I may have sent some of our breath towards infecting them, when we uttered our comforting falsities or drew our silly conclusions..."

George Eliot
Middlemarch

An Early Decided Bent

"He was one of the rarer lads who early get a decided bent and make up their minds that there is something particular in life which they would like to do for its own sake, and not because their fathers did it.  Most of us who turn to any subject with love remember some morning or evening hour when we got on a high stool to reach down an untried volume, or sat with parted lips listening to a new talker, or for very lack of books began to listen to the voices within, as the first traceable beginning of our love."

George Eliot
Middlemarch