I was having a silent, imaginary conversation a few days ago, which happens on occasion. In it, I was ardently defending myself as “not one of ‘those guys’” or “not like most guys” or some other banality that convinces only the speaker, when suddenly, the cliché failed in its only task! I realized that I am one of those guys, and in many senses, I am like every other guy. In the interest of increasing the sincerity and (mutually?) cathartic value of this blog, I’m introducing a new segment entitled “That Guy”, in which I’ll discuss a particular action or personality trait of mine that captures a “that guy” quality. In order for my pride to stay intact, I’ll try to balance each segment by mentioning something kind or un-“that guy” that I’ve done. We’ll see how it goes.

That Guy

You know that guy who misses the bathroom garbage can with his dirty paper towel and then doesn’t pick it up? I am that guy. Here is the exact argument that goes through my head: “Gross. Now it’s touched the ground, and if I pick it up, I’ll have to wash my hands all over again. Plus, it’s someone’s job to clean the floor, and they probably want more work to do, anyway.” I am not exaggerating.

Alright, I started out pretty tame. But still, I’m feeling vulnerable to your harshly judging eyes, so I need to redeem myself: In Austria there was a woman struggling to get a stroller on a bus, but the doors kept slamming shut. I helped her out.

Moving on.

I mentioned last time, when I was trying to make you jealous, that I was experiencing litost. What is litost?

“Litost is a state of torment created by the sudden sight of our own misery....Torment is followed by the desire for revenge”. As you probably guessed, I am not the first person to write those words. They were originally penned in Czech, sometime between 1976 and 1978, in the book The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera. It was translated to English (with skill that delighted Kundera) by Aaron Asher in 1996. There’s a reason I’m being so exact, which I might come to later, but probably not, since this is already getting to be a long entry.

I could rack my brain to find my own litost-explaining example, but it would necessarily be a poor reflection of the original which I will now summarize. It was also published in the book mentioned above:

A student and his girlfriend are swimming in a river. Though an athletic and talented swimmer, the girl politely stays with her boyfriend, who had grown up a sickly child to an overbearing mother, and lacked physical prowess. As the date draws to a close, the girl takes a few self-indulgent moments to exercise her abilities and swims ahead with a handful of powerful strokes. Immediately, the boy’s youth, filled with memories of feebleness and “physical inferiority” rushes back to him in a surge of painful embarrassment. Returning from the swim, the boy’s humiliation and anger, to which the girl is understandably unaware, builds and finally explodes as he slaps her in the face. He immediately takes pity on her, consoles her, and the litost “melt[s] away”.

Before I wrote this entry, I asked a widely-respected and close of friend of mine to read the original passage in order to ensure that my undeniable identification with this feeling (though happily slap-free) was not sick and/or twisted. I was not disappointed, as they too confessed to poignantly experiencing it in very similar contexts. I feel a certain power over it now, like it’s a fist-sized wad of clay that I can’t destroy, but can at least manage.

Hungry again,

Lee