But we had once been much like them. Once, we had taken our lumps, silently; once, we had ritualized external display. And this was decency. You (anyone) will never be able to see inside a marriage that is not your own; or inside a family death. Words don’t go there.
I want to take his idea a different direction.
IIRC, actors as a group have often been, if not despised, at least considered low class. Since I live in a culture that reveres the famous, I've had to project what the reason might have been--and to me it seemed very possible that one doesn't find it easy to trust people who specialize in lying about who they are and what they think.
But this makes sense--the actors, by wildly showing emotion, would have been acting in ways decent people didn't. And so decent people disdain them. Even when they patronize them.
How did we get from there to here? Catharsis for therapy? We get to blame Freud. Somehow or another the notion arose that the stronger your emotion, and the less able to control it you therefore were, the more powerful and majestic your character must be. Maybe we can blame the artists. Or perhaps is isn't a matter of lack of control--you do the world a favor when you illustrate your glorious and sensitive nature by inflicting your spleen on the rest of us. Hmm. Or perhaps the rest of the world doesn't really exist? We get to blame the philosophers.
There are undoubtedly positives and negatives each way. You'd think we'd be more alive to the negatives in a culture we live in than one we only know from stories, but maybe not when the differences are so great that we don't understand the stories.
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