“When I remember as far back as I can, I’d say that there was hardly any separation between inside and outside. When I crawled towards something, it came on wings to meet me; when something important happened, the excitement was not just in us, but the things themselves came to a boil. I won’t claim that we were happier then than we were later on. After all, we hadn’t yet taken charge of ourselves.
In fact, we didn’t really yet exist; our physical condition was not yet separated from the world’s. It sounds strange, but it’s true: our feeling, our desires, our very selves, were not yet quite inside ourselves. What’s even stranger is that I might as easily say: they were not yet quite taken away from us.
If you should sometime happen to ask yourself today, when you think you’re entirely in possession of yourself, who you really are, you will discover that you always see yourself from the outside, as an object. You’ll notice that one time you get angry, another time you get sad, just as your coat will sometimes be wet and sometimes too warm.
No matter how intensely you try to look at yourself, you may at most find something about the outside, but you’ll never get inside yourself. Whatever you do you remain outside yourself, with the possible exception of those rare moments when a friend might say that you’re beside yourself.
It’s true that as adults we’ve made up for this by being able to think at any time that ‘I am’- if you think that’s fun. You see a car and somehow in a shadowy way you also see ‘I am seeing a car’. You’re in love, or sad, and see that it’s you. But neither the car, nor your sadness, nor your love, nor even yourself, is quite fully there.
Nothing is as completely there as it once was in childhood; everything you touch, including your inmost self, is more or less congealed from the moment you have achieved your ‘personality’ and what’s left is a ghostly hanging thread of self awareness and murky self regard, wrapped up in a wholly external existence.
What goes wrong? There’s a feeling that something might still be salvaged. Surely you can’t claim that a child’s experience is all that different from a man’s? I don’t know any real answer, even if there may be this or that idea about it. But for a long time I’ve responded by having lost my love for this kind of ‘being myself’ and for this kind of world.”
Isn’t that the most incredible description of growing up you’ve ever read?
From Robert Musil’s “The Man Without Qualities” which still captivates me like no other work of art. Maybe I should make this blog entirely about Musil.
