Have been forced to somewhat rethink the whole “cloak of insanity” scorn in the past few days, as we read two very good scary stories (Edith Wharton’s “All Souls” and Elizabeth Gaskell’s “The Old Nurse’s Story”) for Tuesday that both relied rather heavily on the idea of snow itself being frightening. The key, I suppose, is that snow is potentially isolating. It surrounds a person with death, in a way – the threat of death by exposure, to be literal, and the idea of being cut off from the world of the living, to be more figurative. And yes, I can definitely see the way in which that might be frightening.
And snow erases boundaries – both of these stories are set at ritualistically liminal times: one on All Soul’s (i.e., Nov. 1st after the night of Oct. 31st), one on New Year’s Eve. And we all know that the liminal, the boundary-time, is both potentially frightening and potentially powerful. It makes sense to imagine the boundary between the living and the dead becoming permeable as the boundary between one year and another does. (And am I wrong, or is All Soul’s the old New Year? It’s definitely one of those pagan-ritual times. Samhein, right?)
And so I guess I kinda see the point. About snow being uncanny/eerie/frightening.
It still does not, however, excuse saying “like a cloak of insanity, the snow dropped.”
We were also talking about solitude in class. Some of the members of the class were trying to say that solitude could be good – therapeutic is what I think they were thinking. Thoreau-type communing with the self. And certainly, I spend a lot of time in what passes, in our society, for solitude. I get upset if I can’t have some time alone pretty frequently. I’m alone right now: there’s no one in the house (except the cats), and I’m wandering around doing whatever I want to do without having to talk to anyone (except myself. or the cats.) And I really welcome that.
But if this continues too long, I’ll become unhappy. I’ll want someone else to give my free motion some push to one side or another, or I’ll simply stop altogether, which isn’t good.
Moreover, I’m not really alone. The neighbors are all outside in their yard – they’re having some kind of play group and there are at least eight toddlers out there. I can hear them playing. If I stand up I can watch them through the window. The UPS man came a while ago, and while I didn’t speak to him, I knew he was there because he knocked and left a package. Cars are driving by constantly on 250. I am conscious of being surrounded by people, when I want to be. That wouldn’t stop me from feeling lonely, if I got to feeling that way, but it’s quite different from the kind of solitude that is pretty much universally bad in the fictional world.
And it isn’t scary the way true solitude is. What I got interested in about these stories and about stories of being alone is why, precisely, the solitude all by itself is frightening. And I got to thinking that, especially for a nineteenth century imagination, I think the key is that it’s in some way unimaginable. What happens to these people when they go somewhere all-alone is that they start imagining (and often they’re right) that they aren’t. That there’s someone else in the house.
And we still have that fear, even if it might have been modified somaewhat. When you get spooked by being all by yourself, you aren’t really spooked by the idea of emptiness, you’re spooked by the idea that the emptiness isn’t really empty. Apparently, a space without an Other – even, or perhaps especially – a phantom Other, is almost inconceivable. [An exception: alone-in-the-wilderness. Wild beasts would be the scary unseen Other, but more frightening, I think, is the fear that comes of the “what if I broke my leg and no one could find me” scenario. Which is different.]
Ken brought up hermits, and I think we can add Unabomber-style recluses to that too – people who seek out and are apparently un-frightened by complete isolation. But I suspect that what makes a human really seek that is an even stronger impossibility to conceive of it: hermits and recluses are kept company by incorporeal Others that are so tangible as to ward off the frightening intangible Other that drives the rest of us to fear. For hermits it’s presumably God. For the Unabomber, I don’t really think I want to know who kept him company.
And snow erases boundaries – both of these stories are set at ritualistically liminal times: one on All Soul’s (i.e., Nov. 1st after the night of Oct. 31st), one on New Year’s Eve. And we all know that the liminal, the boundary-time, is both potentially frightening and potentially powerful. It makes sense to imagine the boundary between the living and the dead becoming permeable as the boundary between one year and another does. (And am I wrong, or is All Soul’s the old New Year? It’s definitely one of those pagan-ritual times. Samhein, right?)
And so I guess I kinda see the point. About snow being uncanny/eerie/frightening.
It still does not, however, excuse saying “like a cloak of insanity, the snow dropped.”
We were also talking about solitude in class. Some of the members of the class were trying to say that solitude could be good – therapeutic is what I think they were thinking. Thoreau-type communing with the self. And certainly, I spend a lot of time in what passes, in our society, for solitude. I get upset if I can’t have some time alone pretty frequently. I’m alone right now: there’s no one in the house (except the cats), and I’m wandering around doing whatever I want to do without having to talk to anyone (except myself. or the cats.) And I really welcome that.
But if this continues too long, I’ll become unhappy. I’ll want someone else to give my free motion some push to one side or another, or I’ll simply stop altogether, which isn’t good.
Moreover, I’m not really alone. The neighbors are all outside in their yard – they’re having some kind of play group and there are at least eight toddlers out there. I can hear them playing. If I stand up I can watch them through the window. The UPS man came a while ago, and while I didn’t speak to him, I knew he was there because he knocked and left a package. Cars are driving by constantly on 250. I am conscious of being surrounded by people, when I want to be. That wouldn’t stop me from feeling lonely, if I got to feeling that way, but it’s quite different from the kind of solitude that is pretty much universally bad in the fictional world.
And it isn’t scary the way true solitude is. What I got interested in about these stories and about stories of being alone is why, precisely, the solitude all by itself is frightening. And I got to thinking that, especially for a nineteenth century imagination, I think the key is that it’s in some way unimaginable. What happens to these people when they go somewhere all-alone is that they start imagining (and often they’re right) that they aren’t. That there’s someone else in the house.
And we still have that fear, even if it might have been modified somaewhat. When you get spooked by being all by yourself, you aren’t really spooked by the idea of emptiness, you’re spooked by the idea that the emptiness isn’t really empty. Apparently, a space without an Other – even, or perhaps especially – a phantom Other, is almost inconceivable. [An exception: alone-in-the-wilderness. Wild beasts would be the scary unseen Other, but more frightening, I think, is the fear that comes of the “what if I broke my leg and no one could find me” scenario. Which is different.]
Ken brought up hermits, and I think we can add Unabomber-style recluses to that too – people who seek out and are apparently un-frightened by complete isolation. But I suspect that what makes a human really seek that is an even stronger impossibility to conceive of it: hermits and recluses are kept company by incorporeal Others that are so tangible as to ward off the frightening intangible Other that drives the rest of us to fear. For hermits it’s presumably God. For the Unabomber, I don’t really think I want to know who kept him company.
Labels: lonliness, spirit of the age
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