This passage, from André Gide’s novel, The Countefeiters, struck me when I encountered it as a Northwestern undergrad, and has stayed with me all these years. Of course I recognized this comical, poignant form of dissembling from real life, but I suspect this passage, on the fourth page of the book, was my first encounter with a lucid prose description of it. The ways we defend against the exposure of our strongest and most authentic passions intrigued and intrigue me; forms of emotional self-defense intrigued and intrigue me.
And why do we defend? Because precisely the places we feel the most are the places we can be hurt the most.
And also – see Adam Phillips – it disturbs us to think of ourselves as capable of volcanic affect; most of us cultivate what Stephen Dedalus called “the refrigerating apparatus,” and Isaac Rosenfeld “formo-frigidism.” We be cool.
We are too much for ourselves – in our hungers and our desires, in our griefs and our commitments, in our loves and our hates – because we are unable to include so much of what we feel in the picture we have of ourselves. The whole idea of ourselves as excessive exposes how determined we are to have the wrong picture of what we are like, of how fanatically ignorant we are about ourselves.