Book contents
9 - Solipsism and Imaginative Failures
from PART TWO - Barriers to Intimacy
Summary
If a transcription of our day's speech would make uncomfortable reading, how much more dismaying, perhaps, would be a record of our thoughts. For a moment she imagined how it would look. A mixture of memories, fleeting and prolonged, what-if speculations, idle observations, regrets – that would be its shape for most of us, and for most of us too, the leitmotiv would be … Isabel paused, unwilling to reach a conclusion so solipsistic, but unable to avoid it; the leitmotiv would be me. It was that simple. Most of us, most of the time, were thinking about ourselves.
Isabel Dalhousie, portrayed here in Alexander McCall Smith's novel The Lost Art of Gratitude draws on the demanding conscience of a fictional moral philosopher to eke out this unflattering self-image. Normally we lack such self-knowledge. That is to say, we are solipsistic without realizing that we are. We are strangers to ourselves to a large extent. While much self-help literature suggests that self-knowledge is the first step to human connection, I'm not so sure. Our conscious self-image is the tip of an iceberg of unconscious work that maintains the self-deluding illusion that we are nicer and more in control than we think. Isabel, after all, had the omniscient help of a novelist, who was in a position to create a trick of the light.
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- Information
- IntimacyUnderstanding the Subtle Power of Human Connection, pp. 135 - 148Publisher: Acumen PublishingPrint publication year: 2012