Hard Feelings – Daniel Smith (1)

In each of my emotional communities I am, in ways I typically don’t even notice, a different emotional creature. Sometimes the codes governing different communities clash with one another, causing strain. When I was in college, I was for a time a member of a comedy improvisation troupe. This community, which was filled with skilled performers, valued courage, spontaneity, flamboyance, speed of reaction, and emotional volubility.

My closest friend in the troupe possessed all of these attributes at levels that were at times almost too much to bear. He was, I think, something of a comedic genius, and one weekend I brought him home to meet my family. I did not anticipate how uncomfortable I would feel, how caught in the middle between two emotional modes—one in which high expressiveness was held up as a virtue and one in which there existed expressive boundaries that were real but invisible, and that you knew you had crossed only when you caught a skeptical, appraising glance from one of your brothers that seemed to say: “Tone it down, Dan.

You’re embarrassing yourself.” Rosenwein’s concept of emotional communities helps us to see the sheer variety of emotional contexts in which each of us live, and between which we shuttle not only in a lifetime but often in a single day. Home, work, school, church, gym, bar, family gathering, community meeting, self-help group: Each sphere is its own emotional universe, with its own unspoken protocols.

But there is a related concept that takes a much wider view of the situation, one that emphasizes not difference but commonality: The “emotional regime,” as the anthropologist and historian William Reddy has called it, governs what it is “normal” and “abnormal” to feel and express for an entire society at any one point in time.

An emotional regime is a bit like the old notion of national character—the fatalism of the Russians, the stiff upper lip of the English—except that it focuses more on the power behind the existing rules. Every culture develops rituals, rites, and social practices, political and economic systems, that structure emotional possibilities and convey emotional expectations for everyone who lives within that culture.

It is like a regime because we feel we have to live by it, even if we don’t necessarily notice that it is there. We tend to think of our emotions as private, intimate things, and so we have accustomed ourselves to a more personal apportioning of blame. For example, when a client comes into my office struggling with feelings of anger toward her children, that anger will almost invariably come hitched to a belief in the inappropriateness and shamefulness of that anger.

There is the anger, which is primary, and there is the belief “I shouldn’t be feeling this,” which is secondary.

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Provide your email again so we can register this ebook and send you more of what you like to read. You will continue to receive exclusive offers in your inbox. OceanofPDF.com OceanofPDF.com For Emily Bobrow and for Marilyn Smith OceanofPDF.com Every involuntary repulsion that arises in your mind, give heed unto. It is the surface of a central truth. —EMERSON … emotion is biography. —DONALD NATHANSON, Shame and Pride: Affect, Sex, and the Birth of the Self OceanofPDF.com PART ONE OceanofPDF.com chapter one THE GIFTS Six months before my second child was born, I turned forty, and my wife threw me a party at a local beer garden.

It was one of the great events of my life. The garden, lush and dim, with wrought-iron lampposts along its border, was filled with smiling people I adored. My friend Peter made chocolate chip cookies with sea salt crystals on top. Emily, my wife, made a chocolate layer cake. There were steak fries and warm Bavarian pretzels and dry red wine and pitchers of good beer. My mother tumbled backward off a low fence and was caught just in time by a nimble cousin. Everyone talked to one another; everyone got along.

At midnight, Emily and I carried the gifts home in sturdy shopping bags, breathless and grateful. I couldn’t stop kissing her. We had been married for just three months. The next morning, I woke up and walked downstairs to make coffee. I filled the kettle, set it on the stove, and turned the burner to high.

Then I sat down at the kitchen table and began to unpack my gifts. I had unwrapped the gifts at the party, but only in a ceremonial way, to show my appreciation. Now I looked them over more carefully, and my attention immediately fixed on two in particular. These gifts were books. The first, from Stephen and Franny, two of my dearest friends, was a leather-bound, two-volume set, published in London during the reign of King George III, of Robert Burton’s 1621 treatise, The Anatomy of Melancholy.

The second, from my two older brothers, was an immense coffee-table book, as heavy as a large newborn baby, of the complete paintings and drawings of Hieronymus Bosch.

This is a short excerpt from the opening of “” by Unknown, quoted for review and introduction purposes. All rights belong to the copyright holders.

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