Little Hells

Certain memories have the power to arrest me in my tracks and leave me suddenly stricken. I will be going about my day when some stray occurrence in the surroundings or odd thought in my brain reminds me of, say, the time—a few weeks into attempting to learn Spanish—I introduced myself to a perfect stranger with a phrase I thought meant something like "pleased to meet you," but which turned out to mean something much closer to "I love you." There are others I don't even want to talk about that occurred while trying to learn Spanish (if a person is socially maladroit enough in their primary language, just imagine the opportunities for gaffes in a tongue they barely know!). These are the reminders that stop me cold. Oh God, get out, you obtrusive, horrible memories!

Many of my most humiliating life episodes—the time I was called into the high school principal's office for an anonymous email I'd sent; the time I mistakenly thought I could bike forty miles as part of a DACA protest and ended by throwing up a mountain of half-digested bibimbap on the top of the first hill we climbed—I have subsequently incorporated into sermons as self-deprecating anecdotes. The idea is to employ the alchemy of humor to transmute something intolerably embarrassing and shameful into a source of joy. I wrote about this in a poem on this blog eight years ago, in which I tried to convey something as well about the nature of painful memories: "you know how humor/Sometimes shakes you in shower and snowbank/With gasps of self-delight and shame." 

(I was picturing, when I wrote this, a literal occasion when I had been walking to campus, and was physically stopped in a snowbank at the memory of one or other of these awful recollections.)

Some episodes, however, are still so deeply cringe-inducing to me that they have resisted such treatment to this day. Try as I might, I just can't make them funny, at least not to myself. They still hurt too bad. The dirty secret of self-deprecating anecdotes, after all, is that they nearly always turn out to be humblebrags in disguise. They begin as an apparent confession, but they also artfully reveal some touching or admirable quality in oneself that puts the audience on one's side. We relate! We see your humanity! We would do just the same in your shoes! 

But the worst personal memories are the ones that cannot be transmuted in this manner, because they reveal qualities which one fears no one listening will see in themselves. They are so deeply, privately embarrassing because one fears they are unique to oneself. Surely no one else has ever done something so god-awful! Frequently, therefore, they have an element of moral injury, as well as of social humiliation. They are the times when we unintentionally hurt someone, or came across in a way we would never have wished. We were forced as a result to confront the possibility that we were not the person we always thought we were. We thought that our standing as a member of the moral community was suddenly in jeopardy. And we can't bring ourselves to tell anyone about it, because we fear that instead of crying out: "We relate!" they will instead say: "What in god's name is the matter with you?"

These, and not the "funny" personal stories, are the ones that truly stop one in one's tracks. They are the ones Klaus Mann had in mind, when a character in his Mephisto remarks: "Such memories are like little hells into which we must descend from time to time." (Smyth trans.) They are the ones that Dostoevsky must have been talking about too, when—in a passage from The Idiot—he recounts: "A new, unbearable surge of shame, almost despair, riveted him to the spot [....] This sometimes happens with people: unbearable, unexpected memories, especially in connection with shame, ordinarily stop one on the spot for a moment." (Pevear/Volokhonsky trans.) It makes me picture myself suddenly halted by the snowbank, in the image from my poem above.

Why are these memories so powerful? Why do they have the capacity to halt one in mid-stride? Perhaps the shame speaks for itself. But I believe that mixed in with the shame—and perhaps this is the combination that makes up the slightly distinct emotion of guilt—is a fear. A fear of punishment. Is society not going to some day take its vengeance? When has enough time passed that we can safely trust that a sort of moral or spiritual statute of limitations must have expired? When, by contrast, do we need to fear that this past will come back to punish us? 

Some people deal with these "little hells" by trying to write them all down, seek out the people who were wronged, and apologize. There was Wittgenstein's "apology tour" which he made in adult life, for instance, which I've written about before. 

Most of the philosopher's "sins," which he felt the need to confess, were so minor and innocuous that most of us would never have even thought they needed an apology. No doubt mine and everyone else's torturing memories look the same from the outside—only we experience them as so deeply morally humiliating (indeed, when I told my Spanish tutor the ghastly anecdote about saying "I love you" to a monolingual Honduran Spanish-speaker whom I'd only just met, she just thought it was funny). There was, for instance, the time a friend of mine received an email from someone he barely remembered from divinity school, asking his forgiveness for an episode that happened years before which she was suddenly worried might have been racially offensive. He told her he couldn't even remember it happening. 

What really induces these memories, therefore, is plainly not that society actually judges us so harshly. It is that we condemn ourselves. It is because we hate our own sins so much that we believe that they must be deserving of some ultimate, if delayed, punishment. And so, if we can forgive ourselves our own gaffes, and believe that they do not merit such pain, then we can let them go. We will no longer halt by the snowbank, but continue walking. How, though, to achieve such self-forgiveness? Perhaps to trust that we are not the only ones in the world after all to have such "little hells." Indeed, that no one can live long enough on Earth to reach adulthood without accumulating their share of private moral humiliations. 

To reach self-forgiveness by this route, though, also requires that we abandon the idea of ourselves as exceptionally moral. This is the stumbling block. The insight that we are not so different from others cuts both ways. If we can hold ourselves to the same standards we hold others, we realize that we do not wish such punishment on ourselves. If we view our own mistakes as equivalent to those of Wittgenstein, which we think could never possibly require apologies, then we can relieve ourselves of the hatred we feel for our own actions. But here's the rub: we need to realize that no higher standard applies to us, precisely because we are no higher than others. We pass through this world accumulating the same number of faults and regrets as they do. Therein lies both our condemnation and our redemption.