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Austen scholar Deresiewicz turns to the author's novels to reveal the remarkable life lessons hidden within. With humor and candor, Deresiewicz employs his own experiences to demonstrate the enduring power of Austen's teachings.
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To Jill,
and to the memory of Karl Kroeber
Incipit
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I was twenty-six, and about as dumb, in all human things, as any twenty-six-year-old has a right to be, when I met the woman who would change my life.
Citazioni
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And that was when I finally understood what Austen had been up to all along. Emma's cruelty, which I was so quick to criticize, was nothing, I saw, but the mirror image of my own. The boredom and contempt that the book aroused were not signs of Austen's ineptitude; they were the exact responses she wanted me to have. She had incited them, in order to expose them. By creating a heroine who felt exactly as I did, and who behaved precisely as I would have in her situation, she was showing me my own ugly face. I couldn't deplore Emma's disdain for Miss Bates, or her boredom with the whole commonplace Highbury world, without simultaneously condemning my own.
Austen, I realized, had not been writing about everyday things because she couldn't think of anything else to talk about. She had been writing about them because she wanted to show how important they really are. All that trivia hadn't been marking time until she got to the point. It was the point. Austen wasn't silly and superficial; she was much, much smarter—and much wiser—than I could ever have imagined.
Those small, "trivial," everyday things, the things that happen hour by hour to the people in our lives: what your nephew said, what your friend heard, what your neighbor did. That, she was telling us, is what the fabric of our years really consists of. That is what life is really about.
To pay attention to "minute particulars" is to notice your life as it passes, before it passes.
Austen taught me a new kind of moral seriousness—taught me what moral seriousness really means. It means taking responsibility for the little world, not the big one. It means taking responsibility for yourself.
Emma refuted the notion that great literature must be difficult, and it also rebuked the human attitudes that that idea was designed to justify.
Above all, I started paying attention to what the people around me might be feeling and experiencing in relation to me—how the things I said and did affected them. Surprise, surprise, a lot of those things really pissed them off. If you're oblivious to other people, chances are pretty good that you're going to hurt them. I knew now that if I was ever going to have any real friends—or I should say, any real friendships with my friends—I'd have to do something about it. I'd have to somehow learn to stop being a defensive, reactive, self-enclosed jerk.
Simple things, like buying a bottle of shampoo, would make me catatonic with confusion. I'd stand there in the store with the bottle in my hand like a sleepwalker who had just woken up, wondering how I had gotten there and what I was supposed to do next.
Austen's heroines, I discovered that summer, had their mistakes pointed out to them over and over again, only it never did them any good. They didn't grow up until something terrible finally happened. When maturity came to them, it came through suffering: through loss, through pain, above all, through humiliation.
Because my father was wrong: you can't learn from other people's mistakes; you can only learn from your own. Austen was making her beloved Elizabeth miserable because she knew that that's what growing up requires. For it is never enough to know that you have done wrong: you also have to feel it.
Our egos, Austen was telling me, prevent us from owning up to our errors and flaws, and so our egos must be broken down—exactly what humiliation does, and why it makes us feel so worthless. "Humiliation," after all, comes from "humility." It humbles us, makes us properly humble. So just as Pride and Prejudice taught me that it's okay to make mistakes, it also told me that growing up hurts—that it has to hurt, because otherwise it won't happen.
No suffering, no growth—and no recollection, no suffering. We have to see what we've done, we have to feel it, and finally, we have to remember it.
Growing up, for her creator, means coming to see yourself from the outside, as one very limited person.
For Austen, reason is liberation, and growing up is the truest freedom of all.
"Answers are easy," he would later say. "You can go out to the street and any fool will give you answers. The trick is to ask the right questions."
Once you begin taking it too seriously, you're only a step away from taking yourself too seriously, and before you know it, you start to sound like Mr. Collins, "lecturing" and "instructing" instead of laughing and surprising.
"Well," he went on, "Austen is saying that we need to learn to love things, that it doesn't just happen by itself. That's not an obvious idea."
"'Who can tell,'" he quoted, "'the sentiment once raised, but you may in time come to love a rose?... The mere habit of learning to love is the thing.'" The habit of learning: if Catherine could learn to love a hyacinth when she was seventeen, my professor was telling me—or rather, Austen was telling me, through my professor—I could keep learning to love new things my whole life.
But I was starting to get it now: the wonderful thing about life, if you live it right, is that it keeps taking you by surprise.
True imagination, he went on, means the ability to envision new possibilities, for life as well as art.
"Austen is saying that it's important to spend time with extraordinary people," he said with a twinkle in his eye. "So that's what I advise you to do: spend time with extraordinary people."
Loving your friends and family is great, but what does it mean if you aren't actually willing to do anything for them when they really need you, put yourself out in any way? Love, I saw, is a verb, not just a noun—an effort, not just another precious feeling.
Austen was not a novelist for nothing: she knew that our stories are what make us human, and that listening to someone else's stories—entering into their feelings, validating their experiences—is the highest way of acknowledging their humanity, the sweetest form of usefulness.
People's stories are the most personal thing they have, and paying attention to those stories is just about the most important thing you can do for them.
Putting your friend's welfare before your own: that was Austen's idea of true friendship. That means admitting when you're wrong, but even more importantly, it means being willing to tell your friend when they are.
For Austen, before you can fall in love with someone else, you have to come to know yourself. In other words, you have to grow up.
And it is a person's character, not their body, with which we fall in love.
Austen did not want to tell the kind of story about young women that everyone else was telling. Her heroines weren't passive, weren't piteous, weren't victims, weren't playthings. They controlled their destinies; they stood as equals.
True love takes you by surprise, Austen was telling us, and if it's really worth something, it continues to take you by surprise. The last thing that lovers should do, despite what Marianne and I imagined, is agree about everything and share all of each other's tastes. True love, for Austen, means a never-ending clash of opinions and perspectives. If your lover's already just like you, then neither one of you has anywhere to go. Their character matters not only because you're going to have to live with it, but because it's going to shape the person you become.
The disposition to love is the thing. If you have it, someone will come along to satisfy it. If you don't, it doesn't matter what happens. People can grow, Austen thought, but they can't fundamentally change.
Ultime parole
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Austen scholar Deresiewicz turns to the author's novels to reveal the remarkable life lessons hidden within. With humor and candor, Deresiewicz employs his own experiences to demonstrate the enduring power of Austen's teachings.
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A Jane Austen Education
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