Montaigne’s Heiress

So Stef asked me this morning why I found it such a slog to get through the first section of his new book. I told him that the symptoms were my reading a couple of pages, then getting up and walking around… reading a couple of pages, then getting up to get a cup of tea… reading a couple of pages… etc. When he asked what feeling the symptoms expressed, I wasn’t sure. And I’m still not sure. Hence this navel-gazing post.

The closest I got to pinning down the feeling was introducing a Monty Python metaphor – from the end of Holy Grail when the main action keeps cutting to a shot of Arthur’s army standing on a hill and shouting “Get on with it!” in unison. Stef didn’t seem to pick up the metaphor as part of my explaining my feelings (I think he thought that it was just a random thought) and I didn’t press the issue because I guess it didn’t reveal much more than I was able to say to him before. I don’t know if the conversation was frustrating to him or not. On my end it felt like 18 minutes of him trying to pin down a fog. That’s not his fault, god knows, but mine.

So… he asked me my feelings about the RTR book. The blank, unholy surprise of it is that I really don’t. Have feelings about it, that is. As I told him, none of his books have ever moved me to great emotion. (Very few books do – this certainly isn’t an attack on or denigration of his writing.) The book made a good deal of sense, but then again I had some knowledge of the theory, having seen it in action in and around the FDR boards, and – to a much lesser extent – in chat.  There were even a couple of things I will implement myself, starting with an ex-friend who constantly prates of his “honor” and won’t pay back the money he owes me or even talk about it with me. So I found myself reading with anxious impatience through the first part of the book, and nodding in a sort of “Ok, this makes sense. Good on him. Maybe I can use this stuff” sort of way. I even imagined a couple of possible emails to send to the dishonorable C – one before the book said not to present emotional conclusions as things to be shot down by the person you’re talking to, and one after. And yeah… oh, well, there were a couple of times in reading his tables of “what they say vs. what they mean” when my cynical amusement shot to the top as I recognized something I’d heard or seen from mother. That was pretty much the extent of it.

The problem is, though… what if you don’t actually feel anything when you’re talking with someone? RTR is about providing real-time emotional feedback. So… what if you can’t? I see people on the boards providing feedback like “I feel scared and anxious when you say things like that” to other people. (I certainly hope I haven’t made anyone feel scared or anxious, but I don’t know whether I have or haven’t – hence the utility of RTR for people like me who are horrifically bad at reading tone and body language – something you don’t get online anyway.) But the problem is, I’m not exactly what you’d call “in touch with my feminine side,” if any. I simply cannot imagine myself saying “I feel scared and anxious when you say things like that” to anyone!! This isn’t because I don’t have emotions. I certainly do. They just seem to be a little bit weaker and a little bit slower in coming than everyone else’s. I don’t tend to get scared in talking to anyone. My most common feelings are either anxious impatience (as exemplified in my mother’s favorite phrase – “Don’t jerk me around!” – except she only says it when she’s trying to manipulate people (projection, much?) and I only think it when I’m standing on top of a metaphorical hill shouting “Get on with it!”) or grudging indifference when speaking with “normal” people, and a sort of faintly pleased, milky happiness when talking with the few folks I would consider my “friends” and most of the people on FDR. I have the emotional range of Al Gore’s face.

So I don’t know. Was my impatience and then my lack of later emotionality just because this book was largely confirming things about which I’d already had some thoughts, or does it signal something deeper? Considering Stef’s normal audience, I think they’re going to find that it completely rocks their world (in all senses of that metaphor) and… yeah. Considering my normal reactions to Stef’s stuff, this is definitely on par with his other books.

There’s that whole feeling of anxiousness in the beginning, though. Something’s built up around that, and that’s why I had a hard time initially getting into the editing of it, and why I kept leaving little marginal comments that threw me out (so to speak) of the work. It’s kinda the same feeling I had when editing another one of my friend’s articles. I’d already seen it three times, and wasn’t necessarily keen on seeing it a fourth, and that sort of feeling of tension and “Aw, c’mon here… why do I have to slog through this shit again!” that was completely not a reaction to the work itself (don’t think it was, either of y’all – it wasn’t) but to something else. Not because I felt it was an imposition – or, ok… because I felt it was an imposition, even though I’d cheerfully agreed initially to do the editing on both pieces – but… eh.

So now I’m just trying to pin down the fog of my own impatience, which has never really worked out for me at all. If I think of something, I’ll post it. Now… I have to decide whether this is useful enough to send to Stef. I don’t think that it explains much… but maybe he can use it.