Your chance to step into my shoes... one post at a time.
October 11, 2010
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Hell is others
…“hell is other people” has always been misunderstood. It has been thought that what I meant by that was that our relations with other people are always poisoned, that they are invariably hellish relations. But what I really mean is something totally different. I mean that if relations with someone else are twisted, vitiated, then that other person can only be hell. Why? Because…when we think about ourselves, when we try to know ourselves, … we use the knowledge of us which other people already have. We judge ourselves with the means other people have and have given us for judging ourselves. Into whatever I say about myself someone else’s judgment always enters. Into whatever I feel within myself someone else’s judgment enters. … But that does not at all mean that one cannot have relations with other people. It simply brings out the capital importance of all other people for each one of us.”
—Jean-Paul Sartre on what his (in)famous quote “Hell is others” meant. (From the Imago Playbill)
Then why didn’t he just say so? Wasn’t he a writer or something? Now introverts are forever merrily bandying this (well, as merrily as introverts can be, anyway) adage around, kept sane by the delusion that someone understands them, that someone agrees that “every interaction… is invariably hellish,” that this person was and still is critically lauded.
Sad and happy are choices. If everyone were a little bit more rational they’d see the paths to happiness are awfully clear-cut and that all you REALLY have to do is CHOOSE (rationally).
On a related note, have recently had cause to ponder the following highly important question:
Are we purely products of our circumstances?
I’d hate to think so (and really, so would you) but I love-cream. And Barbra Streisand. Clearly this shows I have grown up in the great US of A in the front half of my life, followed by a lifetime in a small, cold East European monarchy with a penchant for frozen diary products.
