I Never Speak of You Again Proximity
"In a strange room, you must empty yourself for sleep. And before you are emptied for sleep, what are yous. And when you are emptied for sleep, you are not. And when you lot are filled with slumber, you never were." I am not in a foreign room, but my familiar room is in a strange world, and this passage from a novel by William Faulkner haunts me. Having lived abroad for all of my developed life, I have been thinking about the effects of altitude for years. My family, several friends and I live on dissimilar continents, and near of the time we encounter online, and in person but in the summer. So whenever nosotros see each other in the flesh, we take in quietly the subtle differences between who we are and the versions of each other we've lived with in our heads, a fiddling abstract for lack of contact: a tighter or more relaxed smile, a few more white hairs, children who look a little more grown-up, a pale complexion that might propose disease, a deeper quality to someone's silence, an averted gaze when a item topic is mentioned… All point to the thick aggregating of days, of every twenty-four hour period we have non been together. Now I have to pretend that my friends here, my colleagues and students also live away, and that my neighbors are glass-shielded in an intangible dimension. It feels odd to live in exile from nigh everybody, as if we had each been sucked through a portal to a remote island, or a afar planet. When you empty yourself for sleep, at the end of a twenty-four hour period populated so sparsely by actual persons, just overflowing with abstracted silhouettes—of people who accept lost their jobs or who couldn't bid a terminal farewell to their loved ones, of friends who wave from a screen and requite you lot news yous can't do much about, of family unit far away who volition remain and then far in this long present—what are you? There is hardly a reason, and oft no fourth dimension, to think about our everyday life when we are in it. The rituals we engage in without thinking, the distracted habits of thought; they are unfamiliar through excess of familiarity, like the shape of our shoes molded onto our feet, or the intimate space of the night table where we attain without looking. At that place is something of that taken-for-granted interest with the world in the sphere of social relations also: non only the family and friends we usually choose to hang out with, or the colleagues we piece of work with, but all those people nosotros might run into on a daily footing in the improvised sociability of ordinary life—people we come across only from the corner of the eye, or fifty-fifty not at all, but whose presence gives us a sense of life unfolding. Such presence is felt in the electrifying energy of a crowd that dissolves you—in a stadium where hundreds or thousands of gazes are tethered to a basketball, or in a concert hall, tuned with hundreds of people to the rhythm of a performance. I both know and ignore what I'm missing these days. I suspect my unease has something to do with not existence able to interact with my students in person. The energy they requite me in the classroom is hard to call up from pixelated smiles, the terminate of each session slightly disconcerting, given everyone's sharp disappearance at the button of a button. I miss the carefree exuberance of the playgrounds where I have my girl to play alongside other children, and the cozy cinema in my neighborhood where I used to go every now and and so just to watch a movie in the quiet company of other people. Information technology's every bit if all these venues were hosting a version of John Muzzle'south four'33", rendered meaningless by the lack of closure. A few years agone I finished working on a volume chosen The Art of Distances, which became my baseline for trying to understand the meaning of this episode nosotros're all writing together, through our collective experiment in social distancing. What value can ane ascribe to distance? What insights practise we gain by staying away from others, and at such close quarters with ourselves? * The question of the correct distance between oneself and others has especially preoccupied philosophers and writers during and subsequently moments of social disruption, when life every bit they knew it seemed to morph under their own optics. Less than a century ago, Eric Blair was returning to England, disgusted by the "dirty work of Empire" he had washed as a colonial administrator in Burma. Determined to "get right downwards amongst the oppressed," he turned his back on his middle-class family, donned the garb of a tramp and lived for a few months with the homeless; and so he crossed the Channel and worked as a dishwasher in Parisian hotels. The record of these experiences, Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), was Blair's outset book, published under the pen name we now know him by, George Orwell. Down and Out inaugurated Orwell's literary career with an experiment in reducing distance. With the relentless sincerity that became his signature, in his next journalistic work he denounced his ain experiment as "a masquerade," having learned that social distance was no trivial thing, and that abolishing form distinctions demanded nothing less than a complete transformation ofi's "attitude to life." Effectually the same time, his contemporary Elias Canetti began the anatomy of man modes of separation that became his life's work. A High german-language writer born in Bulgaria into a family of Sephardic Jews, Canetti spent the last decades of his life in England, "where social life consists of futile efforts of proximity." He was obsessed with crowds, convinced that the ideologies that shaped the 20th century—communism and fascism—and the human disasters that ensued could be explained past people'due south overwhelming want to be part of a crowd and thus cancel the distances of everyday life. When he finished his ambitious tome Crowds and Power (1960), which took 30 years to complete, he sighed with relief that he had "succeeded in grabbing the century by the pharynx," having understood it meliorate than anyone else. The philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch, with whom Canetti had a cursory affair, was also a thinker preoccupied with how people alive together, and much of her fiction can exist read as an extended meditation on platonic distance. In her view, one of the greatest challenges of moral life was to take the full reality of other people seriously—and that means understanding the other as non simply an extension of oneself. One of the most exquisite episodes in her 1958 novel The Bong features a immature adult female visiting the National Gallery in London and discovering in the contemplation of paintings an instance of this perfect remove: Here was something which her consciousness could not wretchedly devour, and past making it function of her fantasy brand it worthless. … She looked at the radiant, sombre, tender, powerful canvas of Gainsborough and felt a sudden desire to go down on her knees before information technology, embracing it, shedding tears. These three vignettes—Orwell, Canetti and Murdoch—are grounded in their respective historical moments: colonialism and the Swell Depression, the "world of banished people" left in the wake of Nazism and the atrocities and devastation of World War Ii. Just fifty-fifty in quieter times, there are those who have given much thought to the matter of interpersonal distance. In a parable loved by Arthur Schopenhauer and Sigmund Freud, some porcupines huddle together in freezing weather, trying to stay shut enough to keep warm, withal also far enough then they avoid pricking 1 another. Citing this parable, the French semiologist Roland Barthes formulated his course of lectures, How to Live Together, around a question: "At what distance should I proceed myself from others in gild to build with them a sociability without alienation and a solitude without exile?" In fact, many of the thinkers of the past century have couched their diagnoses of the gimmicky world in a vocabulary of distance and proximity. Under the auspices of Barthes's annunciation that "we need a science, or peradventure an art, of distances," a region of thought opens up where nosotros might notice some bearings, now that what we commonly have for granted as our everyday life has been disrupted. * Barthes confessed in his inaugural lecture that his course originated in a personal phantasm: 8 to ten individuals living togetherin a community small plenty to let personal connections and respect for everyone's singularity, but also large enough for it to exist diverse and interesting. Barthes avoids the term "community," preferring to speak of "living-together" (i .due east. vivre-ensemble), often capitalized; what matters to him This utopia straddles ii intersecting realms of human experience, friendship and customs, where the problem of distance bears on questions of space, values, foundational myths, notions of identity and difference. For the most part, the Western philosophical tradition has placed friendship at the centre of a happy life, a similarity of interests, habits and values existence considered nurturing for those involved. Yet Aristotle's paradoxical apostrophe—O my friends, at that place are no friends!—famously highlights the impossible demands of authentic friendship, and the fact that information technology can mayhap only be as an platonic on the horizon of our social interactions. For Ralph Waldo Emerson, a friend must remain a spirit ensconced in distance, "forever a sort of beautiful enemy, untamable, devoutly revered, and not a footling conveniency to be soon outgrown and cast aside." In other words, at that place is no genuine friendship without separation. My friend shouldn't exist and so close to me that she tin can't bespeak to my failures; and I can't be so fastened to what nosotros have in common (and to the image of myself mirrored in those shared traits) that I can't change my ways and get a better version of myself. Nietzsche, famously a reader of Emerson, pushed this logic even further. In passages that echo the American philosopher'southward portrayal of the platonic friend as a "beautiful enemy," Nietzsche'southward Zarathustra goes and then far as to denounce the love of the neighbor commended by Christian morality as the "bad beloved" of oneself. He advises, rather, "love of the farthest": instead of cultivating bonds with those closest to the states, we should seek connections with those who are different, those who tin can help the states broaden our horizons. Nietzsche thus turns his back on an entire tradition of thinking about community that prized a shared history, myths of origin and common rituals, blaming Judeo-Christian morality for encouraging the cultivation of a "herd mentality" that denied the multifariousness of life forms. Instead of docilely befitting to rules and expectations that debate the states in a community of similar-minded individuals, 1 should seek that region where difficult and surprising encounters are possible. Nietzsche reminds readers that all stiff epochs cultivated a "pathos of distance." This may audio like a recipe for individualism and anarchy. Surely at that place are life forms that are more valuable or pregnant than others—and don't some of usa demand the crutch of moral systems to aid united states resist our worst impulses? Isn't information technology only human to spike stiff affection to those closest to us? Yet much of the philosophy of the past century has followed in Nietzsche'due south path, mounting a relentless critique of the "community of proximity," understood historically as a group of people living together in a bordered space, where they occupy a certain place and role in the social hierarchy. The defining gesture of such a customs is drawing a circumvolve around those who belong (that is, who share certain traits) and its most obvious instance is the nation-country. The paradox is that "communities of proximity" are affected by a troubling kind of altitude, precisely because they are premised on life-scripts that hogtie their members to evaluate themselves through comparison with others. In Being and Time, Martin Heidegger refers to this attribute with the Canetti echoed this thought at the beginning of Crowds and Power with the axiom: "All life … is laid out in distances—the house in which [human being] shuts himself and his holding, the positions he holds, the rank he desires—all these serve to create distances, to confirm and extend them." Defenseless in the busyness of life, such habits might remain unexamined. Only what almost a situation such as ours, when we are at a remove from the sociability of the everyday, its planned and noncommittal encounters: Are we closer to a life of actuality? Or if we were to set aside, as an intellectual exercise, community equally nosotros know it, what would the culling expect like? In the company of Barthes and other thinkers invested in this problem, the question of community becomes: What is an ethical fashion of relating to other people? And what happens when we find ourselves in isolation, contemplating non just our altitude from others, but also distances inside ourselves? __________________________________ Excerpted from The Point : Outcome 22 (Summertime 2020) . Reproduced with permission . Copyright © 2020 by Corina Stan. 
Source: https://lithub.com/philosophies-of-distance-and-proximity-who-are-we-when-were-alone/
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