One of the most common themes in literature and philosophy is the importance of shedding our preconceived notions. This requires being curious about the world and observing it with the beginner’s mind as the Buddhists like to say. Not sleepwalking through life! It also means questioning the wisdom of conventional external authorities (the prevailing ideas in the larger society around us) and interrogating ourselves, which is much more difficult to do.
This is the main idea of Claire Messaud’s excellent introduction to the new edition of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. It’s also a common theme in Hannah Arendt’s philosophy. In the opening of Arendt’s book The Human Condition she implores us to stop and “think what we are doing.”
Lolita is a story about a man who does not do that. Humbert Humbert is a solipsist who uses other people as objects of manipulation in his own fantasy world. Solipsism is the theory that only oneself exists; everything else out there in the so-called “world” is just a figment of our own imaginations. There is nothing larger than the self. The resulting hell this point of view creates is a particularly painful and tragic one. I have some experience with it.
After my brother died, my father’s grief became so all encompassing that soon his grief was the only thing he could see. He never recovered from the loss of his son and he lived in this hell for the rest of his life. It impacted all his personal relationships and impeded his ability to love and be loved. The only thing that existed for him was his grief. He was unable to see anything else, even the humanity of his own family members. The story of my father is a sad and tragic one.
By chance, I also re-read Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story “Young Goodman Brown” last night and realized this story, too, is another version of the idea that living too much inside your own head is a tragic truncation of human life. In the story, a young man walks out into the woods with this figure the reader comes to recognize as the devil. In the woods the man sees everyone he recognizes from his village, from the local priest to his young new wife, as the most debauched of sinners. He leaves the wood and goes on about his life but what he saw there forever changed him. Whether it was all just a dream doesn’t matter. Young Goodman Brown is forever changed by the experience. He becomes “a stern, sad… distrustful… man” who dies in “gloom” just like what happened to my father. In high school, we learned that this was a story about the cultural zeitgeist of late 17th century New England Puritan society, but reading it alongside Claire Messaud’s introduction to Lolita, I see it now as also a warning to all of us against the dangers of living too much inside our own heads and seeing around us only our own fantasies or worst nightmares.
I think a lot of people go through the world just this way. Whether on the right or the left, one of the effects of political polarization is an inability to see other people as they really are. We only see, and respond to, our own caricatures of other people. Such a solipsistic view of the world leaves us alienated not only from each other but also from ourselves. Is it any wonder then that we are also experiencing an epidemic of loneliness? The social consequences of such a way of living ripple throughout society. It’s easy for someone living in a world of their own making to make the decision to take up a gun and shoot a few other people before taking their own lives. The murder-suicide, I think is, in their eyes, is just suicide. They lost the ability to see other people as other people.
It’s worth it to take Arendt’s advice and stop a minute to “think what we are doing.” Are we sleepwalking through life or are we open to experiencing the world and other people as they really are, not as extensions of ourselves? It’s a hard task to undertake but I think there’s nothing more important than this. It’s the only way to avoid a hell of our own making.