Perhaps it is really that simple. All the characters I have been thinking about in this way: Ralph Nickleby in Nicholas Nickleby, Nick Tooley in Tam Lin, Kett in my first book, Rolf in the one I'm working on now, Gordon Gecko in Wall Street, (remember: "Greed is good"? Remember "Why are you wrecking this company?" "Because it's wreckable!"), Jaybush in Dinner at Deviant's Palace, yeah all of them. Maybe it boils down, in the end, to selfishness.
Why use the heart of flesh/heart of stone metaphor then? I think it gives a feeling for how emotions are involved. As I said, it doesn't have to do with the demonstration of emotions. "When I speak of "opening the self up" to emotion, it may be my fumbling way to trying to explain empathy, the ability to sympathetically understand how another person feels. If you strangle that ability in yourself, perhaps I've been implying, the price you pay is that eventually you fail to be able to feel anything at all. I have to think about that a bit, but isn't that generally said of psycopaths and sociopaths? They cannot imagine other people's points of view, their hurts--and eventually, it is said, they don't seem to have a sense of "feeling" at all.
I think the first time I ran across the metaphor of the heart of stone was when I was a child and read the story of Exodus in my Bible story book for the first time. The Pharoah was afraid and promised to release the Israelites with each plague, but when each plague passed, his "heart would be hardened" and he would refuse to release them. I was fascinated by that metaphor at that age. Note, here, how it's the same thing: selfishness. As long as the "price" to the Pharoah of keeping the Israelites is expensive (it involves gnats, frogs, boils, blood in the water), selfishness leads the Pharoah to calculate it makes more (economic) sense to let them go. But when the plague passes, the selfish need to exploit the Israelites' labor outweighs the pain that is now in the past. At no time does the justice or injustice of enslaving the Israelites enter into the Pharoah's reasoning. He simply is incapable of think that way at all. "Hardening" of the heart is a useful metaphoric way to describe that deadening effect on emotions and reasoning.
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Date: 2004-07-23 09:03 am (UTC)Why use the heart of flesh/heart of stone metaphor then? I think it gives a feeling for how emotions are involved. As I said, it doesn't have to do with the demonstration of emotions. "When I speak of "opening the self up" to emotion, it may be my fumbling way to trying to explain empathy, the ability to sympathetically understand how another person feels. If you strangle that ability in yourself, perhaps I've been implying, the price you pay is that eventually you fail to be able to feel anything at all. I have to think about that a bit, but isn't that generally said of psycopaths and sociopaths? They cannot imagine other people's points of view, their hurts--and eventually, it is said, they don't seem to have a sense of "feeling" at all.
I think the first time I ran across the metaphor of the heart of stone was when I was a child and read the story of Exodus in my Bible story book for the first time. The Pharoah was afraid and promised to release the Israelites with each plague, but when each plague passed, his "heart would be hardened" and he would refuse to release them. I was fascinated by that metaphor at that age. Note, here, how it's the same thing: selfishness. As long as the "price" to the Pharoah of keeping the Israelites is expensive (it involves gnats, frogs, boils, blood in the water), selfishness leads the Pharoah to calculate it makes more (economic) sense to let them go. But when the plague passes, the selfish need to exploit the Israelites' labor outweighs the pain that is now in the past. At no time does the justice or injustice of enslaving the Israelites enter into the Pharoah's reasoning. He simply is incapable of think that way at all. "Hardening" of the heart is a useful metaphoric way to describe that deadening effect on emotions and reasoning.