6 - Unruly Emotion
from PART ONE - Intimacy Through Four Lenses
Summary
Our emotions show us to ourselves. While our verbal accounts are filled with generalizing conventions (I'm a Capricorn, an extrovert, a mother, something in the city), our emotional expressions support a more textured self-knowledge. When I feel indignant, or envious, or excited, or disgusted, or proud, I get a richer insight into my character, my aesthetic and moral preoccupations, than when I just hear what I say to people about myself. Sometimes my emotional reactions will show me things about myself that I like, such as being moved by an unprovoked act of kindness between strangers. And sometimes I discover things about myself that I don't like, as did Eva Katchadourian in We Need to Talk About Kevin when she first encountered her newborn son:
Dr Rhinestein dangled the infant over my breast and rested the tiny creature down with … painstaking gentleness. Kevin was damp, and blood creased his neck, the crooks of his limbs. I put my hands diffidently around him. The expression on his twisted face was disgruntled. His body was inert; I could only interpret his lassitude as a lack of enthusiasm …
And all the while I was waiting. My breath shallow, I was waiting. And I kept waiting. But everybody says–, I thought. And then distinctly: Beware of what “everybody says”
Franklin [her husband], I felt – absent. I kept scrabbling around in myself for this new indescribable emotion, like stirring a crowded silverware drawer for the potato peeler, but no matter how I rattled around, no matter what I moved out of the way, it wasn't there.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- IntimacyUnderstanding the Subtle Power of Human Connection, pp. 81 - 102Publisher: Acumen PublishingPrint publication year: 2012