#PhilipRoth19332018
George Orwell, 'Reflections on Gandhi', 1949:
“The essence of being human is that one does not seek
perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of
loyalty, that one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes friendly
intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and
broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one's love upon
other human individuals.”
Philip Roth, "American Pastoral", 1997:
“You fight your superficiality, your
shallowness, so as to try to come at people without unreal expectations,
without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance, as untanklike as you can be,
sans cannon and machine guns and steel plating half a foot thick; you come at
them unmenacingly on your own ten toes instead of tearing up the turf with your
caterpillar treads, take them on with an open mind, as equals, man to man, as
we used to say, and yet you never fail to get them wrong. You might as well
have the brain of a tank. You get them wrong before you meet them, while you’re
anticipating meeting them; you get them wrong while you’re with them; and then
you go home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong
again. Since the same generally goes for them with you, the whole thing is
really a dazzling illusion empty of all perception, an astonishing farce of
misperception. And yet what are we to do about this terribly significant
business of other people, which gets bled of the significance we think it has
and takes on instead a significance that is ludicrous, so ill-equipped are we
all to envision one another’s interior workings and invisible aims? Is everyone
to go off and lock the door and sit secluded like the lonely writers do, in a soundproof
cell, summoning people out of words and then proposing that these word people
are closer to the real thing than the real people that we mangle with our
ignorance every day? The fact remains that getting people right is not what
living is all about anyway. It’s getting them wrong that is living, getting
them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful consideration, getting them
wrong again. That’s how we know we’re alive: we’re wrong. Maybe the best thing
would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the
ride. But if you can do that—well, lucky you.”
If you are fond of perfection, you think the objective of life is to be happy and successful at the end of it and if you spend enormous amount of time and energy in trying to understand another person, the above two quotes are perfect antidotes for you.
These two go against a lot of conventional wisdom dished out by a lot of written word.